THE REGRET THAT BOUND HER

CHAPTER 5

Emily's POV

Life after Aunt Rachael’s house felt like learning to breathe at a different altitude.

The air was the same, but it required more effort.I had no money. No job. No plan beyond getting to Kate’s door.

Kate Jacobs, the girl who’d snapped at me on my first day of school, who’d thrown the party I never should have attended,had, somewhere in the months since, become the closest friend I had.

She was the Course Representative for our class. We’d started talking properly one afternoon when I asked her about a missed assignment, and somewhere between that conversation and the next, the friendship had taken root.

By the time things at home became truly dangerous, she was the only person I’d thought to run to.She opened her door without hesitation and pulled me inside.

• • •

Now, standing in Kate’s kitchen with Steve’s eyes on me, I realised I had just told him everything.

The whole story.

Every part I’d kept folded away in the darkest drawer of myself.

He was quiet for a long moment.

Then he closed the distance between us, sat down beside me, and said,“Emily… I’m sorry. I don’t know you well. But the fact that you trusted me with this… you are not alone. I’m right here.”

Three sentences. And they undid every wall I’d built in the last year.I pressed my face into my hands and let myself cry, properly, openly, without trying to keep it quiet.

Steve put his arm around me and didn’t say anything else. He just stayed.

After a while, I lifted my head and took a shaky breath.“I’m feeling sleepy,” I managed.

“Right.” He stood.

“I’ll run the bath for you.” He said it with a slightly furrowed brow, as though he’d meant to say something else and changed his mind.I watched him go.

He’s Kate’s cousin. Remember that.

He’s Kate’s cousin.

But the reminder felt less convincing than it should have.

• • •

Steve’s presence in the weeks that followed was steady in a way I hadn’t expected. He didn’t push. He didn’t ask questions I wasn’t ready to answer. He simply showed up.

With groceries once, with a new lamp for my room another time, with a terrible joke on the days he could tell I needed to laugh.

He helped me navigate university enrollment, walked me through the financial aid process, and once spent an entire Saturday helping me draft an appeal letter that ultimately got my tuition deferred by a semester.

One afternoon at the park, I looked at him mid-conversation and asked the question that had been sitting on my tongue for weeks.

“Why do you do this? You don’t owe me anything.”

He turned to face me fully.

“I don’t owe you anything except my care for you. You deserve better than what you’ve been given, Emily. It’s that simple.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I looked away, and we kept walking.But something had shifted. I felt it, even as I tried not to.

• • •

In the meantime, I found ways to carry my own weight. I told Kate that staying in her apartment for free didn’t sit right with me. She refused payment twice. I stopped asking and started doing the laundry, the cooking, the grocery runs. I kept the place clean. I made myself useful in every way I could.

A few weeks later, I woke up to a brown envelope on my bed. Inside was a small amount of cash and a note in Kate’s handwriting:

“To my favourite person. I know it isn’t much, but you deserve something in return for your hard work.”

I held the envelope for a long time. Then I folded the note carefully, tucked it into the pocket of my jeans, and began to plan.

The next morning, through the kitchen window, I spotted a hiring sign outside the bakery opposite Kate’s building. I’d loved baking as a child. My mother had taught me on rainy Saturdays. I’d lost most things from that life. This, I realised, I could reclaim.I applied that same afternoon.

Two weeks later, I started work.It wasn’t much. But it was mine. And after everything, mine was the only thing that mattered.