Okay-ish, anyway.
But alive. Safe. Not lost anymore.
He blamed himself. Of course he did.
For the kidnapping. For not protecting me. For not seeing Francine for what she really was.
But that was pointless.
Francine had been evil. Vicious, manipulative, and smarter than any of us had realized. No one could’ve seen it coming. Not really. And beating ourselves up over the past wouldn’t undo it.
She was gone.
Dead. Out of this world, out of our lives.
And I was still here.
Alive.
I owed that to a lot of people—Killian most of all—but also to myself.
And to therapy. As brutal and messy and intimate as it was, therapy had pulled things out of me that I didn’t know were still buried. It gave me space to grieve things I hadn’t let myself mourn. To name the hurts I’d buried under rage an
