Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 19

“See you tomorrow, B.”

I met his gaze. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t sure there would be a tomorrow I could show up for. But I nodded instead. It was easier than telling the truth.

I turned and walked up the short path to the door.

It opened before I could reach for the knob. My dad.

“Betts,” he said, smiling. Relief painted across his face like sunshine after rain. But the moment he really saw me, the smile faded. “Hey… you okay?”

I didn’t answer.

Just walked past him, like a ghost slipping through the cracks of a too-big house. I heard him shut the door gently behind me, heard him pause. Maybe wondering what broke this time.

My bag slipped from my shoulder and landed somewhere in the hallway with a soft thud. I didn’t look back.

My room was dark. The curtains were still drawn from the night before we left. It smelled like stale perfume and old memories. I stepped inside, shut the door behind me.

Locked it.

I sat on my bed for a moment. Just sat. Breathing. Or trying to.

Then I laid down, curled into myself like I had in the van. I stared at the wall until my eyes stopped blinking.

I should’ve felt something.

Gratitude, maybe. That I was alive. That they all cared enough to bring me back. But all I felt was tired.

So tired.

The bracelet was gone.

And with it, the last thing I had left that felt like her.

The silence of my room wrapped around me like a second skin.

I didn’t bother turning on the lights.

I just stood there for a moment, staring into the nothing, listening to the weight of my own breathing. The house was still. My dad had greeted me, gentle and unsure, but I had walked right past him like a ghost. I think he knew not to follow.

I dropped my bag to the floor.

Then I sank—slowly, soundlessly—onto the edge of my bed, and let gravity do the rest. My body curled in on itself, knees to chest, arms wrapped tight, like I was trying to become smaller than the pain.

But it found me anyway.

At first, it came as silence. Then the ache arrived, and the silence turned to shaking. A quiet sob. Then a louder one. Then I was crying, and it was ugly—the kind that makes your throat raw, your eyes swell, your chest feel like it’s caving in from the inside.

I clutched the wrist where the bracelet should have been.

The skin felt bare, exposed. Wrong.

The bracelet was gone.

She’s gone.

I whispered it. Over and over. “She’s gone. She’s gone. She’s gone.”

The storm may have spared me, but it stole what little I had left. And in that moment, something broke inside me. Not a clean break. A slow, cruel one—like a crack spreading through glass, unseen until the whole thing shatters.

And the truth clawed its way to the surface:

I’m tired.

Tired of pretending.

Tired of smiling when it hurts.

Tired of being the one who helps everyone else when I can’t even help myself.