Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 8 — Melody

He found me in the storage room, counting inventory that didn’t need to be counted.

I had been finding reasons to keep myself busy ever since he left before I woke up two days earlier.

I told myself that was normal. Men sometimes left in the morning. It didn’t have to mean anything.

I had repeated that so many times over the past two days that the words had stopped meaning anything at all.

Then I saw his face, and I knew it meant something.

He looked different from the way he had in the empty dining room two nights before. I couldn’t identify what had changed until I understood what I was seeing.

He had already made a decision.

He had come to carry it out rather than discuss it with me.

“We need to talk,” he said.

I set down the clipboard.

My hands were steady. I would remember that later—how steady they remained right up until they weren’t.

“Okay.”

I kept my voice even, the way I had learned to keep everything even around men who controlled the paychecks.

“What happened between us was a mistake.”

He spoke flatly, the way he had said almost everything since the day I met him. This time, though, the flatness felt deliberate.

As though he had rehearsed it.

“I let things get out of hand. It won’t happen again.”

“A mistake.”

I heard myself repeat the word as though saying it back to him would somehow make it make sense.

“I’m engaged, Melody. I have been for eighteen months. That doesn’t change because of one night.”

“You didn’t tell me you were—”

“You knew.” His voice sharpened. “Everyone in this building knew. If you didn’t ask, that’s not my failure to disclose. That’s yours, for not wanting to know the answer.”

The words struck somewhere I wasn’t prepared for.

A sting bloomed beneath my collarbone, sudden and sharp, like a struck nerve. I pressed my hand against it without thinking, too stunned by what he had said to register what my skin was doing in response.

“I don’t know what you thought this was,” he continued.

An almost bored note had entered his voice, as though he were explaining something obvious to someone slow.

“But whatever fantasy you built out of one conversation and one night, it was never going to be real. Girls like you don’t end up with men like me. That’s not cruelty. That’s just how the world works.”

Another flare spread along my collarbone, moving out from the first spot like a crack running through glass.

“Girls like me.”

My voice sounded smaller than I wanted it to.

“Your father sold out three packs to save his own skin. You scrub dishes for a living. I own the building you scrub them in.”

He allowed the words to sit between us for a second, making sure they landed.

“I was curious. That’s all it was. You were curious too—don’t pretend you weren’t flattered that someone like me looked at someone like you twice.”

That one struck hardest.

A burn sharp enough to steal my breath tore outward just above my collar, where my hand had remained pressed the entire time.

My fingers moved before I could tell them to stop. I pulled my collar aside on instinct, and for half a second, before I managed to cover it again, I saw his eyes drop to the same spot.

To the mark already rising red and raw against my skin.

His expression shifted.

Not with concern. It was closer to confusion, quickly buried in the same way he buried everything that didn’t fit whatever he had decided to feel about this.

“I think you should go,” he said.

He was already turning toward the door, already halfway to somewhere I clearly wasn’t invited to follow.

“And I’d appreciate it if you kept this to yourself. For your own sake, not mine.”

He said the last part as though he truly believed it. As though walking away clean was a favor he was allowing me.

Then he left.

I remained in the storage room, surrounded by cans of tomatoes and bags of flour. The pain didn’t fade the way pain caused by words was supposed to fade.

I opened my shirt enough to look and found three separate points of heat: one low on my collarbone, one just below it, and one higher, near my throat.

Each one was already sending thin red lines beneath my skin, branching outward like roots searching for somewhere to grow.

They weren’t clean marks.

They looked more like veins that had caught fire.

I didn’t understand what was happening.

Not then.

I understood only that the marks hurt exactly as much as the words that had created them. Kane had seen the first one forming before I managed to hide it, and somehow, impossibly, my body had decided to remember all of this whether I wanted it to or not.

I sat on an overturned crate and cried until Priya found me twenty minutes later.

Even then, I didn’t tell her about the marks.

She didn’t ask what had happened. She simply crouched beside the crate and placed a hand on my back, steady and quiet, the way you sat beside someone at a funeral when there was nothing useful left to say.

Some things had to be carried alone, at least until you understood what they meant.

I understood one thing clearly as I sat there with my hand pressed over three raw, burning points on my own skin.

Whatever I had allowed myself to believe for four days—that I mattered, that I had been chosen, that the universe had finally decided to give me something instead of taking it away—I had been wrong about all of it.

Somehow, unfairly, I blamed myself.

I blamed myself for believing him in the first place, even though he was the one who had made sure I would.

Eventually, I stood and walked out of that building for the last time.

I still didn’t understand how wrong I had been or how long any of it would remain written on my skin.