029

Noelle

The restaurant was too quiet for my thoughts.

Soft music played somewhere above me, something slow and jazzy meant to calm people down, but all it did was make the silence between notes feel heavier. I sat at the small table near the window, my hands folded around an untouched glass of water, my reflection staring back at me from the polished surface.

Too lazy to handle your own life.

I swallowed.

I’d tried not to think about it. I really had. I told myself I was here to clear my head, to breathe, to feel like a normal person for once instead of a problem everyone needed to fix, or discard.

But Damian’s voice kept threading itself through my skull, cold and precise. No matter how hard I troed to get rid of it, it only came back ten times harder.

This is why people walk all over you.

My chest tightened. I stared out the window, watching people pass by with purpose, with places to go, with lives that weren’t unraveling one insult at a time.

I hadn’t even realized how lon