“Oh, I understand completely. Either way, you’re a liar.” Molly’s breath crackled over the phone. “Do you know why I wanted to get in contact with you? Because I needed to talk to someone who’d been through what I had been through and I thought—” Her voice cracked. “It doesn’t matter what I thought or why I did. You didn’t even take the time to read a single, fucking email. The least you could do is to tell me the truth.”

I closed my eyes, resting my forehead on my palm. My head was still spinning from what happened with Cam and this blew my mind. There had been so many emails from accounts I didn’t recognize. Many with my name as the subject or Blaine’s. And I hadn’t opened them because I hadn’t wanted to deal with it, but I never thought it was her.

Then again, would that really have changed anything? Would I have opened them and reached out to her? Legal aspects of the non-disclosure aside, would I?

I’d be lying if I said I thought I would.

“Are you there?” Molly demanded.

“Yes.” I cleared my throat, lifting my head. The ball in my chest unraveled a little. “I didn’t lie.”

“So it was true?” Her voice sounded closer to the phone. “And you dropped the charges.”

My body tensed like a coiled rope. “Yes, but you—”

“Why would you do that?” Her voice was raw. “How could you? How could stay silent this long?”

“I—”

“You’re a coward. You cling to your silence because you’re a coward! You’re still the same scared, fourteen year old girl pretending to be over it years later!” she shouted, and my ear popped. “This happened to me because you didn’t tell the truth. You can tell yourself whatever you want, but that’s the truth. And we both know it.”

Molly hung on me.

I sat there, staring at my phone. Anger still boiled inside me, but some of what she had said had sunken through the red haze and it made sense.

“You cling to your silence because you’re a coward! You’re still the same scared, fourteen year old girl pretending to be over it years later!”

She was right.

God, she was so right. All these years and I had never uttered the words since that night. I was too scared to tell anyone, to even tell Cam. And that was why he’d walked out of here, because he had also been right. I hadn’t let go of the past and there was no future unless I did so. All I’d been doing this entire time was pretending—pretending to be okay, to be completely happy, to be a survivor.

And I wasn’t a survivor. For too many years, I’d been nothing more than a victim on the road.