I feel like I’m running in a vat of glue. I am stuck and still. I can’t move. Confessions are supposed to set you free, right? Especially when you haven’t done something wrong? Sometimes I wonder how everyone in my life would carry on without me. How easily it would go. My employer would hire someone from the stack of applications on the front counter. My friends would mourn for a while, but eventually, my seat at the bar would be filled. My family would cry to one another. They would keep living. Connor would find someone new to love. Someone who didn’t have ugly things to tell him in the dark of her bedroom. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t keep flinching when he touched me. I couldn’t hide it. He tensed when I tensed. We mirrored each other and the lump in my throat was getting so hard to choke down. I wanted to die. I would have taken that over speaking my truth out loud, making it real.

Life did not care for your plans. I saw that now.

I had a new home. And it felt like a home. A two-story white house. Red shutters. Crown molding. Hardwood floors.

I said goodbye to my trailer, didn't look back. I felt a peace wash over me when I walked into my new home after a long day at work. A slow peace, a fading peace, a peace that could not last.

My life was a paper life, easily crumbled, often ripped.

Connor was rarely home. He worked all day, then went over to the other house he bought, the fixer-upper. He wanted to bring in extra income, turn it into a rental. But he didn't have a lot of extra money to hire someone to do all the work. His family offered, but taking gifts from them hurt his pride. He wanted the life they had, but he wanted to build it for himself. It was one of the things I admired about him. The way he worked.

Now, that trait in him that I admired, was hurting me.

Depression, much like anxiety, was a foreign word to me back then. We didn't talk about those things. My family never did. My friends never did. If you were down, you were just sad. No one spoke of a deeper meaning.

I was falling deeper and deeper into a hole that I feared I would not be able to crawl out of. Only one person knew what my stepfather did to me. Connor. And he was never home, never around.

Maybe he didn't want to see the way I was losing weight, losing the color in my face.

The weight of my secret was eating at me. I was making it all up, I knew, but it was still real.

No one expected me to keep in touch with my stepfather that often. So when I decided to write him out of my life, the world did not shift. No one alerted the press. The alarm was all in my head, eating away.

Then, the call came. It was a Thursday night, and I was lying in bed. Our house still wasn’t fully put together. There was only so much I could do with the bigger pieces without Connor to help. We had just bought a new bed two days before, and it was downstairs in our living room.

I had drawn all the shades, was lying in clean sheets after a shower when I heard the ringing.

“Gwen,” my mother said, as if she didn't know she called me.

I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Yes.” I was on the defense, afraid she would scold me for my silence toward my stepfather. She always had a way of knowing those things. When she told me what Arya said, that he molested her, I didn’t see damnation in her eyes. Despite all he did to my mother, the cheating, the lies, she still supported him. It made me resent her, I could see that now.

“Have you talked to your father?”

It was a question I heard time and time again. I was twenty-nine years old and here she was, still trying to make our relationship more than it was. Always calling my brother and I, urging us to reach out to him. Why did we, the children, have to be the bigger person? It made me rebel, ignore his number on my phone.

“No,” I said, clipped, pissed. I propped myself up on my elbow and reached for the light switch above my head, my hand still when she spoke again.

“He’s sick. He has cancer.”

I did not want to cry when I got the news, but I did. I wasn’t sure who for. For myself? For him? I knew I had to choke on my secret. I couldn’t come out then, accuse him of molesting me if he was dying.

I couldn’t stomach the other hurt there. I hurt in the pits of myself. I didn't want him to die. I wanted him to die. No one tells you how to feel when your monster is melting away.

I didn't want to see him again, but I would have to. I would have to go to the hospital.

I would have to smile at him and hug him and let him put his hands on me, the ones that changed me, the ones that broke me.