ALEX.
I stared at my phone like it might bite me. The screen glowed softly in the dimness of my room, Derek’s ID hovering there like a ghost I had never fully exorcised. Missed calls. Voicemails I hadn’t listened to. Messages I had pretended didn’t exist.
I told myself not to call him back.
I reminded myself of the nights I cried myself to sleep, of the way he twisted my words until I doubted my own memory, of how small I had felt beside him. I reminded myself of the fear curling in my stomach now, the way my shoulders stayed tense even when nothing was happening.
And still, my thumb hovered. Because as toxic as it had been, I had loved him deeply and desperately, with the kind of blind devotion that doesn’t disappear just because logic demands it should. Some emotional strings, once t
