Page 192 of This Life of Mine

I rest my forehead against his chest and let myself breathe for a moment. Just one. My body is tired in a way sleep won’t fix—holding a weight it didn’t even know it was carrying.

Learning the truth hurt. More than I expected. Because it was corroborative. Because it took years of confusion and stitched it into something coherent.

There’s relief in that, even if it’s prickly around the edges. Because knowing means I’m no longer trapped inside guesses and self-doubt. It means I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t weak. I wasn’t failing to understand something everyone else seemed to grasp.

I was being manipulated. Conditioned. Groomed to accept what never should’ve been mine to carry. That truth hurts. But it also sets me free.

There’s a part of me—small, reluctant—that still feels something for Cole. It’s not forgiveness or grace. Just…complexity.

I blamed Cole for a long time. For the baby. For the accident. For the loss that hollowed me out and rewrote the shape of my life.

Blame was easier than truth. Because the truth is…I knew better.

I knew the moment my hand touched the car door that night of the accident and getting in was wrong. I felt it in my gut, piercing and insistent, the same instinct that had tried to warn me so many times before. But I told myself it would be fine. And then it wasn’t.

Owning that means admitting I made a choice. One that came with consequences I will carry forever. And that kind of accountability is brutal when you’re already drowning.

But it doesn’t stop there. I didn’t only choose to get into the car. I chose to stay all those years.

Yes, he manipulated me. Groomed me. Bent reality until up seemed like down. He trained me to doubt my instincts, to distrust my own clarity, to believe that leaving would cost more than staying. But somewhere beneath all of that, I still knew.

I knew the way you know a flame will burn you even as you reach toward it. I knew the wrongness that sat in my chest like a held breath. And I stayed anyway—out of fear, out of hope, out of the quiet belief that endurance counted as loyalty.

I can only be a victim for so long before survival asks something harder of me. It’s not blame or punishment. It’s responsibility.

Responsibility for what I accepted. For the periods I experienced the truth and chose to turn away from it.

And living with that knowledge is painful—but it’s also the first honest step toward never betraying myself like that again. Still.

Knowing now that Elinor set everything in motion long before the crash finished the job—gives me a strange, guilty sliver of fucked-up relief.

It doesn’t erase what happened or absolve anyone, including myself.

The relief comes from knowing it wasn’t a situation that was fully ours to prevent. It was out of our control.

That realization doesn’t heal anything. It doesn’t undo the loss. But it loosens something tight in my chest—a knot I’ve been punishing myself with for years. It’s not peace. It’s not closure. It’s permission to stop blaming myself for living.

This is something therapy will have to untangle. Layers of grief stacked on top of guilt, stacked on top of years of manipulation, stacked on top of responsibility to myself. I don’t pretend this moment fixes it. But it cracks the door open.

Part of me wonders—briefly, bitterly—if I’m some kind of real-life version of Murphy’s Law. If disaster just…finds me. If everything that can go wrong, inevitably does.

But even in all of it—in the wreckage, the lies, the loss—I found myself. I found my voice. My work. My truth.

I built something real with my hands and my heart. I learned how to stand upright amid chaos. And against all odds—I found love too.

I tighten my arms around Alex, grounding myself in the solid, steady presence of him.

He doesn’t try to fix me or rush me forward. He holds me like he understands that surviving something doesn’t mean you’re done carrying it.

“I’m still here,” I murmur, more to myself than to him.

His arms tighten a fraction.

And for the first time in a long time, I feel I’m not enduring; I’m living.

The next few days are chaos.

Calls. Emails. Meetings stacked back-to-back with the PR team we hired. Every detail examined, every word weighed. Byday two after being closed, an official statement is released—measured with care, factual.