Page 121 of Lovesick

I nod against him, not needing words.

His hand settles over my waist, thumb brushing the place where our son had once kicked from beneath the skin.

“I hate this place,” he whispers. “But I love what’s in it.”

My breath catches.

Every time he says something like that, every time he lets the truth slip through the cracks, it undoes pieces of me I didn’t know were still breakable.

“I don’t think we can change everything,” I tell him quietly. “But maybe we can change something.”

Billy’s grip tightens just slightly. A vow made without sound, just pressure.

“We already are,” he says.

And he’s right.

There are fewer children trained with cruelty.

More voices daring to question.

The elders bristle, but they’re beginning to realise the ground under them is shifting. There’s a new generation of men who don’t want their sons to be used the same way they were.

And I, I came into this place a trembling thing, a broken, dependent, unsure woman with nothing and no one, but I’m not trembling anymore.

Not because I’m free.

But because I know the shape of my cage now, I’ve learned how to press myself against its bars without breaking.

My son stirs, letting out a small sigh that pulls both our attention. Billy smiles with a softness I had never witnessed before August.

But it’s still a softness carved out of violence, carved out of devotion, carved out of me.

“My whole world is right there,” he says.

And I realise… mine is too.

Not the cult.

Not its rules.

Not the old, rotting ideology that has tried so hard to own us.

But the three of us, bound together by more than blood, by survival, by a love that grew in a place where love was never meant to flourish.

“I’m not afraid anymore,” I whisper, sounding surprised even to myself.

Billy kisses the top of my head, “You don’t have to be.” He says it like a promise.

I curl myself into him.

He curves himself around me.

And in the moonlit quiet, I finally understand, peace doesn’t always look like freedom.

Sometimes it looks like choosing the people worth enduring captivity for.

Sometimes it looks like surviving long enough to change the shape of the cage.