Chapter Six
The kitchen was too quiet.
The kind of quiet that didn’t feel peaceful—just hollow, stretched thin across the room like a film she couldn’t tear through.
Catherine stood barefoot on the cold tile, fingers wrapped around a glass of iced tea that had long since lost its chill. Condensation pooled at the base and dripped onto her hand, but she didn’t bother wiping it away.
She couldn’t feel her fingers anyway.
Her eyes drifted to the table, then the counter, then the doorway that still held the echo of a night she tried every day to forget.
It didn’t matter how many times she scrubbed these floors, or reorganized the drawers, or rearranged the spice rack Caleb never touched—none of it could erase the memory of her own knees hitting the tile during their first real fight.
Or the way Caleb’s voice had risen—not shouting, but cold, controlled, slicing through her like a scalpel.
“You always make everything about you, Catherine.”
It replayed in her head, over and over, like a song she couldn’t mute.
Her tea trembled in her hand.
She remembered the sick twist in her stomach when Caleb slammed the bedroom door that night.
She remembered sliding down the cabinets, breathing too fast, too shallow.
She remembered the silence that followed—a silence so sharp it left bruises.
Catherine set the glass down carefully, watching the liquid wobble and settle.
The kitchen light flickered above her.
She didn’t move.
She had tried everything to wash that night off her skin.
A hot shower so long the steam set off the fire alarm.
A cold shower when she ran out of hot water.
Scrubbing her arms until they reddened.
Scrubbing harder when that didn’t work.
Nothing helped.
Her breath hitched, memories creeping up like shadows pooling at her feet. Every inch of this apartment reminded her of what she had lost—and of the pieces she didn’t know how to put back.
She leaned on the counter, gripping the edge until her knuckles whitened.
It was stupid, she knew it was stupid, but a part of her still waited for Caleb to walk in with some impossible explanation. Something that made all the late nights, the strange cologne, the cold stares… make sense.
But the doorway stayed empty.
The silence stayed alive.
And Catherine—left alone with the ghosts she’d been pretending weren’t real—felt something inside her shift.
A slow, burning anger that pushed through the cracks of her heartbreak like weeds through concrete.
For the first time in weeks, the memory didn’t drown her.
It pushed her forward.
Out of the kitchen.
Out of the past.
Toward whatever truth Caleb thought she wasn’t strong enough to find.
He didn’t know her at all.