Page 99 of This Life of Mine

She folds her hands together on the table, anxious fingers fidgeting, deciding how far back she’s willing to go.

“It wasn’t how I thought it would be,” she says.

I don’t speak. I don’t move. I give her space.

She tells me she had planned to wait. Finish high school. Let her life stabilize before giving that part of herself to anyone. She says it plainly, without nostalgia, without bitterness.

She tells me about Cole. How he listened or at least did at first. She understands now that he mirrored what she wanted. He seemed safe at a time when safety was everything—after her mother left and passed, after the ground beneath her life shifted and never quite settled again.

As she talks, something rigid begins to form behind my ribs. She didn’t say he forced her. She explains that it wasn’t tender, but it wasn’t violent—only rushed. All raw teenage hunger and urgency. As if slowing down might give her time to reconsider.

My jaw tightens.

She tells me she didn’t see that she was handing him all the details of the love she wanted. That she’d unknowingly taught him how to become what she’d fall for—at least long enough to secure her.

That’s when I recognize it fully. Manipulation dressed up as romance.

She told herself it was normal. That love was intended to be intense. That wanting someone meant surrendering to them.

My pulse seems to decelerate. That familiar, threatening calm creeping in.

She directs her gaze towards me, meeting my eyes without flinching.

“I don’t regret loving,” she says. “But I regret believing someone else got to decide what that love was supposed to look like.”

I meet her eyes. Let her see that I hear her. That I understand more than she realizes.

She explains how he was different when they were first together. Kind, funny, attentive. How he wanted to take care of her. How she needed that after she swiftly became responsible for herself and her siblings.

I keep my face neutral. My hands stay flat on the table. Inside, something begins to stir.

She tells me about the pregnancy at seventeen. My jaw locks.

She talks about the abortion. About the guilt, the way he used it against her. How he told her the baby was his too, how he framed her pain as something she owed him for. How that guilt became leverage.

I don’t interrupt. But my pulse slackens in that perilous way it does when anger softens instead of flares.

This wasn’t love. This was conditioning.

She says the wordnarcissist, and I agree silently. I recognize the pattern instantly. The isolation, the destruction of self-worth, the carefully altered reality until the victim believes staying is safer than leaving.

My fingers curl against the wood of the table.

He told her no one else would want her after everything she’d been through. After what he convinced her she’d done wrong.

I swallow the lump sitting in my throat.

She stayed because she believed him.

She tells me about the second pregnancy. Thirteen years later. This time choosing to keep the baby and how she made it to eight months pregnant.

Then the accident. I’m already aware of the specifics, yet hearing it directly from her imparts a distinct awareness. More personal.

Something twists deep inside me at the sight of tears gathering in her eyes. I don’t trust myself to speak. If I do, I’ll say what I shouldn’t.

I want to fucking destroy him. In a slow, deliberate way that ensures he never gets close to her again. I breathe through it.

Lina finishes, her gaze steady despite everything she shared. She’s not broken. She’s not fragile. She’s forged.