Page 1 of The Lies Always Told (Baker Oaks #4)

Nellie

My dad always said that tragedy comes in threes.

I never understood what he meant by that until now.

I didn’t understand it until I was the one drowning, with the first taste of salt creeping into my mouth and my lungs filling with the cold, sharp sting of ocean water.

Except it wasn’t water taking me under—it was the entire world that crashed around me, pulling me under and twisting me until there was barely anything left.

He used to talk about the harmful trifecta, and I always thought he meant the painful things children fear—getting lost, hunger, loss, death—but I was wrong.

I never knew the hunger I should have feared had nothing to do with food.

I didn’t know loss and pain could be so deep, it would leave a wound that would never close, that death doesn’t only come when a life is lost. Sometimes, it takes a soul as it slowly slips away.

You can be alive but not living, and that was part of it all too.

I didn’t know tragedy wasn’t only something that struck you from the outside.

Sometimes, it’s something buried deep inside you, waiting, holding you down until you can barely breathe.

I didn’t know that when that wave hit, it would feel like a rush, a storm of adrenaline, confusing my brain and making my heart feel excitement as opposed to the panic I should’ve felt instead.

The first wave came, and I was swept up in the force of it all. I didn’t notice the warning signs until it was too late. The second wave came too fast. It was too cold, too powerful. I was drowning with no way back.

Then came the silence, an eerie calm that followed the chaos, an uncanny quiet that mimicked peace.

It mimicked a reprieve, but it wasn’t. It was hollow, suffocating.

It didn’t heal, it wounded. It drew from the pain I didn’t know was still there.

It took from old wounds until I was caught in the undertow.

From that pain came the third wave, mixed with somebody else’s pain, making me feel more than I knew I could.

I was sucked under again. I lost everything.

Everything I thought I had, everything I thought I was.

Everything I thought I deserved. If all I could have carried was pain, if all I could give was pain, then I must have deserved it all.

I didn’t know tragedy was this close. I didn’t know it was this intimate.

I didn’t know it could hit me.

Until, one day…it did.