Shattered Trust (The Girl That Came Back)

Chapter 2

I remember nothing.

I opened my eyes in my childhood bedroom, and the first thing I noticed was that the light coming through the window was different.

Not the color. The quality. It had that specific golden thickness that only happens in late spring or early summer. The kind of light that feels warm on your skin even from across the room.

I stared at the ceiling and tried to remember how I'd gotten here.

The room was smaller than I remembered. The walls were still pale yellow—a color I'd chosen when I was thirteen and had since grown tired of. My books were on the shelves, but there was dust on the spines. My childhood stuffed animals sat on a chair in the corner, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd wanted to touch them.

Something was wrong. Something inside me was broken in a way I didn't have words for yet.

The door opened slowly. A woman appeared—older than I remembered her, with more gray in her dark hair. She was holding a tray with a glass of water and some kind of tea.

"Zara." She said my name like she was checking to see if it still fit. "You're awake."

It took me a moment to understand that this was my mother.

"Mom?" My voice sounded rough, like I hadn't used it in a long time.

She set the tray on my nightstand and sat on the edge of my bed. She looked like she wanted to touch me, but she didn't. There was distance between us, even though we were close enough that I could smell the lavender soap she'd always used.

"Do you remember what happened?" she asked carefully.

I tried. I searched through my mind for the memory, but it was like trying to grab water. The more I reached for it, the more it slipped away.

"The ceremony," I said slowly. "Aaron walked away."

"Yes."

"There was pain."

"Yes."

"How long ago was that?"

My mother closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were wet. "Six years, sweetheart. You've been... you were in a kind of shock. Your mind protected itself by shutting down. The doctors called it a dissociative episode. Your body got older, but your mind was sleeping."

I looked down at my hands. They weren't the hands of a seventeen-year-old. They were bigger, stronger, with calluses that suggested they'd been used for something. I sat up in bed—and my body moved differently than I remembered. Taller. Stronger. Different.

"I'm twenty-three," I said, and it wasn't a question.

"Yes."

Six years gone. Six years of my life that happened without me being inside it.

"Where's Dad?" I asked.

"In his office. He's been there since we got word you were waking up. He'll want to see you." She paused. "Zara, there are things you need to know. Things that have changed while you were... while you were away."

"Alie and Aaron. Are they still..."

"No." My mother's voice was hard. "They broke up three years ago. But that's not—"

"I don't want to talk about them yet," I said. My voice surprised me. It was steady. "I just woke up. I don't remember six years of my life. Let me just... I need a moment."

My mother nodded. She stood up and walked to the door, then stopped. "I'm sorry, Zara. I'm sorry for a lot of things."

Then she left.

I sat alone in my childhood bedroom in a body I didn't recognize, with a mind that had lost six years to time, and I tried to understand what it meant to come back to a life you didn't remember leaving.

The water was cold. I drank it anyway.

The tea was chamomile with honey, the way I'd always liked it when I was younger. I drank that too. The warmth felt good in my throat.

I got out of bed carefully, testing to see if my body would remember how to move. It did. Muscle memory, I guess. My body had been walking around, eating, sleeping, existing for six years without me inside it. That was somehow more terrifying than anything else.

My reflection in the mirror showed me a stranger. I was taller than I remembered wanting to be. My face had lost the softness of adolescence. I had cheekbones now, sharp ones. My dark eyes looked older. There was a scar above my left eyebrow that I didn't remember getting. My black hair was longer than I'd ever kept it, falling to my waist.

I looked like someone who had lived a hard life.

I looked like someone who might have reasons to hurt other people.

That thought surprised me, so I sat back down on the bed and tried to examine it. Did I want to hurt them? Aaron and Alie?

I didn't feel anything specific about them. That was the strange part. I didn't feel rage or sadness or betrayal. I felt empty when I thought about them, like they were characters in a book I'd read a long time ago and had mostly forgotten.

There was something else in me, though. Something that felt like a line drawn in the sand. A place where I'd decided something about myself and hadn't changed my mind, even if I couldn't remember making that decision.

A knock on the door pulled me out of my thoughts.

"Come in," I called.

My father opened the door, and he was nothing like I remembered. My father had always been larger than life—powerful, commanding, sure of everything. This man was the same person, but he looked like he'd been carrying something very heavy for a very long time.

He crossed the room in three strides and pulled me into his arms. He was careful, like he thought I might break.

"My girl," he said into my hair. "My beautiful girl. I'm so sorry."

"For what?" I asked. "I don't even know what happened."

"Then we'll tell you. But not today. Today you just rest. Tomorrow, we'll talk about everything. Tomorrow, you'll understand why I'm going to make sure no one ever hurts you like that again."

He held me while I sat in the body of a stranger and tried to figure out who I was supposed to be now.

That night, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and understood one clear thing: my life before had been a fairy tale with a monster hiding in it.

The question was: what kind of story would the rest of my life be?

The next morning, my father was waiting for me in the kitchen.

He'd prepared breakfast himself—eggs, toast, fruit, the kind of simple things that felt like they meant something when made by someone who loved you. My mother was nowhere to be found, which I understood was intentional. Whatever my father was about to tell me, my mother had already heard and already had feelings about.

"Eat," he said, and it wasn't a request.

I was surprised to find that I was hungry. I was surprised by a lot of things about my body. It wanted things. It existed separately from my mind ,