Page 111 of Mystic's Sunrise

“He should’ve told me,” I whispered, the words rasping up my throat like something that had been waiting too long to be spoken.

Brenda sighed, her shoulders lowering slightly. “You’re right,” she said, and there was no fight in it. “He should have. But I don’t think he lied to hurt you.”

That broke something loose in me.

I turned to her, angry and shaking, voice cracking from the sudden rise of heat in my chest.

“Stop.”

It came out like a snap, and she froze.

“Stop making excuses for him.”

Brenda didn’t move. Her gaze didn’t flinch. She just let me speak.

“I am so tired,” I said, my hands beginning to tremble, “of everyone treating him like he’s the only one allowed to be broken. Like his pain somehow makes everything he does forgivable. Like I’m supposed to just take it, be understanding, be quiet—becausehe’sthe one carrying the weight.”

I stood suddenly, breath shallow, chest tight.

“I am not a footnote in someone else’s tragic story.”

Brenda opened her mouth, but whatever she meant to say disappeared when I kept going.

“He looked me in the eyes. He kissed me like I was his. Held me like I was safe. Like I wasn’t still flinching from every memory I couldn’t outrun.” My voice trembled harder now. “He gave me hope. And all that time—he was married, already spoken for.”

The words hung there like smoke.

“He made me believe I could start over. That I could have something real. That maybe I wasn’t broken after all. That maybe I was someone worth loving—keeping.”

My legs weakened, and I sank back onto the bed, the movement sudden, like the weight of everything had finally become too much. My hands clutched the edge of the sheets, knuckles white, breaths shaky.

“You want to know what hurts the most?” I said, quieter now, the words barely above a whisper. “I almost believed him. I almost believedthis—whatever we had—was real.”

I let my head drop.

“But it’s always the same story, Brenda. Always. Men who tell you pretty lies right before they twist a knife in your chest.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

Then, gently, her voice softened. “He didn’t mean to hurt you, sweetheart.”

My jaw clenched, and my voice cracked when I answered.

“No?”

I looked up at her, raw and unraveling.

“Then why does it feel like every time I breathe, my chest caves in?”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It pulsed with grief. With anger. With everything I couldn’t say out loud. I buried my face in my hands, hating how fragile I sounded, how shattered I felt. “I can’t forgive that,” I whispered into the dark behind my palms. “I won’t.”

Brenda didn’t try to argue. Didn’t tell me to calm down or move on. She just knelt in front of me, her hands finding mine, her grip firm but gentle.

“Then don’t,” she said softly. “You don’t have to forgive him. But don’t lose yourself in the wreckage. Don’t let what he did take you with it.”

I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure I could.

But somewhere beneath the numbness, beneath the ache and betrayal and the hollowness carved out by disappointment—something stirred.