I jerk awake with a scream dying on my throat and my body covered in sweat. Taking a few deep, calming breaths, I stare up at the slowly turning ceiling fan above my bed, wondering if I’ll ever get a good night’s sleep again. I haven’t been sleeping well since the night I fainted, making up a lie about low blood sugar so Landry wouldn’t know my mind and my heart had shattered into a thousand pieces as soon as I heard that name. In the three months since the story broke, I can count on one hand how many hours I’ve been able to close my eyes and not see him, feel him, or hear his voice.

Knowing I’ll never be able to get back to sleep, I slide out of bed, wrapping a short, silk robe around my body as I open the door to the guest house where I live, and head out for a walk across the grounds.

Sitting down on a bench under a particularly large oak tree on the front lawn, I stare up at my family home with the moon shining bright above it and a chorus of cicadas chirping all around me. Located on sixty acres in South Charleston, it was once a cotton plantation before the Civil War. The 10,500-square-foot historical home is your typical updated Southern plantation home. It’s a two-story white wood-framed house with black shutters, a sprawling front porch, and an expansive terrace on the second floor that extends the length of the house. With a pecan grove, saltwater marshes, two ponds, orchards, a 35,000-square-foot horse stable, and numerous live oaks draped with Spanish moss around the property, it really is one of the most beautiful places to live.

If only the beauty on the outside could make up for the ugliness on the inside.

Checking the face of my silver watch, which I haven’t taken off since Meredith gave it to me for my birthday a few months ago, the perfect gift to hide the markings on the inside of my left wrist from prying eyes, I realize I’ve been sitting out here for two hours. Ever since I woke up from a dream and couldn’t fall back to sleep. In the daylight hours, I can put on a brave face, don a happy smile, and push away the thoughts that have been plaguing me since that night in my room a few months ago when I listened to the news report and collapsed to the floor in front of a completely shocked Landry. At night, when the sun goes down and darkness fills my room…that’s when I forget how to shut everything off. That’s when my mind and my memories take over and refuse to let me forget, and it’s only gotten worse in the last few weeks. My best friend, Meredith, has been checking on me nonstop ever since the news broke. She’s the only person in my life who knows everything about Eli. Well, everything that happened before, at least. No one knows about after, especially not Meredith. I’d never be able to handle her disappointment and anger about what I’ve done and the choices I’ve made.

For three months I reassured Meredith I was fine, happy with Landry, and couldn’t care less about what was happening on the news, but Meredith knew me better than that. It was easy to pretend my life hadn’t changed when I didn’t know where he was. When I’d only caught one grainy glimpse of him on the news and didn’t even recognize the man they claimed was him. He was too skinny, had too much hair, and didn’t smile. It wasn’t the Eli I remembered. Maybe they were wrong. Maybe they misidentified him and it was all one big joke. They screwed up once before, claiming he’d been killed in action, what’s to say they couldn’t do it again?

When I found out he’d come home, when I heard he was living with his sister, a few miles away, breathing the same Southern air as me, walking the same streets I frequented, I couldn’t pretend anymore. In the midst of a panic attack the other night, curled up into a ball on my bedroom floor, I called Meredith and begged her to come for a visit. I needed my friend. I needed my rock to get me through this.

He’s alive and he’s home.

Every time I go into town, I’m afraid I’ll run into him. Every time I turn around, I’m afraid I’ll see his face, once a face I knew like the back of my own hand. A face I used to love to touch and kiss and hold in the palms of my hands, now a face that I’ll never be able to look at without being reminded of all the things I’ve done. It won’t matter that those things were all for him. It won’t matter how much I’ve died a thousand times over the years, all for him. Nothing will matter to him but the fact that I’m still here, still where he left me, following in my mother’s footsteps, unable to move forward. While unspeakable things were being done to him, every day for five years, I had good things, wonderful things right at my fingertips, and I let them slip away. It won’t matter how or why; it will only matter that I let them go.

Pushing myself up from the bench, I walk with determined steps through the wet grass, to the one place I can still escape and forget the world around me until Meredith gets here tomorrow and talks some sense into me. It cuts me like a knife each time I walk in there and see the floor and the mirrors covered in dust, unused and forgotten, but it’s still my place, my sanctuary and the one thing that is still one hundred percent all mine, that no one, not even my mother, can take from me.

She’s taken it all, and still, it’s not enough. She’ll continue to take and demand and I’ll continue to fold, because it’s the only thing I know how to do. Over the years, we developed a quiet understanding that has served us well. I did as she said without complaint, and she continued to make sure Eli’s sister and the rest of the world would always remember him as a hero. Now that he’s alive, now that old rumors resurfaced, that quiet understanding has been destroyed. I’ve had to beg and plead with her every day, I’ve had to show weakness and bite back my anger because, once again, I needed her popularity with all the heavy hitters in the town and government that carried over from my father, and the power that reputation brings to fix things. And once again, she named her price and I paid in full to make sure Eli and his sister were protected.

I rub the tips of my fingers against the band of the watch on the inside of my wrist, as I make the two-acre walk across our land to the stables. I can see a few lights streaming from the windows in the distance, guiding me through the dark cover of night. My mother and the household staff are fast asleep in the main house, and the stable workers went home to their families hours ago. Just like I’ve done every night for the last three and half months, I quietly walk through the open archway into the stables, letting the soft whinny of one of the horses and the stomping of hooves against the dirt calm my racing heart.

I head past the stalls and turn down the hallway that leads to the very back of the stable, pausing in front of the locked door. Closing my eyes, I try and stop the memories, but it’s pointless. I continue coming to this room, night after night, because I need the pain. I need the sharp stab of agony in my heart and the overwhelming ache of sadness, because even though it hurts, underneath all that pain is a reminder that I used to be happy. I used to be a different person, a stronger person, a confident person.

Slowly opening my eyes, I unlock the door, and walk down another dark hallway, my hands shaking with nervous energy as I flip the switch on the inside of the room. My room. The place I love and hate equally. Leaning my back against the wall right inside, I slide to the ground and let the memories consume me, slicing my heart open to leave me bleeding on the floor.