I picked up the card. Simple white stock, clean font. A name. A number. A promise.
"A trauma therapist," she explained. "Discreet, airtight. Noleaks. You talk to her, it stays in the room. That's what you need now."
My throat tightened. The card was just paper, but it pressed into my palm like it weighed a ton.
She slid another slip across the desk, this one with an address scrawled in neat handwriting.ASA — Abuse Survivors Anonymous.The wordsurvivorsmade my stomach twist. It promised safety, but it also demanded I admit something I had spent years denying.
"For men and women both," she said quietly. "They meet twice a week. No cameras. Just people who know what it feels like. I can text you the details, if you're ready."
I swallowed hard and slipped the cards into my pocket like contraband. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Just use it. Survive this year, Ryder. That's the only war left. Everything else is falling into place. Now it's on you to take care of yourself."
I nodded, but inside, doubt gnawed. Surviving Mira had been brutal. Surviving myself might be worse.
Three days later, I got in my car. The drive to the ASA meeting felt longer than it was. My palms kept slipping on the steering wheel, and twice I almost turned back. By the time I pulled into the small church lot, my heart was hammering loud enough to drown out my thoughts.
The building was nothing—plain brick, white door, no sign. But from inside came the faint sound of voices, low and steady. I satin the car for ten minutes, staring at that door. The urge to flee gnawed at me, whispering that I didn't belong, that walking in meant branding myself forever as damaged, broken, weak. But the alternative, staying silent and staying alone, felt worse.
So I opened the door and walked in.
The room was small, folding chairs arranged in a loose circle. Coffee percolated in the corner, the kind of stale bitterness that reminded me of high school gyms and midnight diners. A stack of cheap paper cups sat beside it. People were scattered around the circle—men, women, old, young. Some with scars visible, others with wounds hidden deeper. They looked up when I entered, but no one stared too long. One man offered me a nod, another slid a chair out from the circle like it had been waiting for me all along.
"Welcome," said the facilitator, a woman with silver-streaked hair and kind eyes that didn't flinch. "We're glad you're here. No pressure. Share if you want, listen if you don't. This is a safe room."
The meeting began. People spoke. Stories unfolded—different abusers, different weapons, but the same thread running through all of them: shame, fear, survival. I sat silent, my throat too tight to form words, but every story carved open a space in me I hadn't known existed. For once, I didn't feel like a freak. I felt like part of a scarred, stubborn family.
When the circle came back around, my pulse spiked. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. The facilitator's gaze rested on me—not pushing, just waiting. For the first time, I let the words out.
"My name is Ryder." The sound broke in my throat, half-whisper, half-confession. I swallowed hard, my tongue thick, my mouth dry. For a moment I thought I couldn't go on, that the words would lock themselves inside me like they always had.
The silence in the room waited, patient, not pressing or demanding. My chest burned. My nails dug into my palms. Finally, I forced it out, ragged and shaking:
"I'm... a survivor of domestic abuse."
The words came slowly, heavy with years of silence, but I was ready. They didn't tear this time—they burned, steady and searing, like a truth too long buried clawing its way into light. My voice shook with the gravity of release. I spoke, and with every word, the lie I'd lived unraveled. I was no longer hiding. No longer pretending. The pain didn't vanish, it bloomed, wild and aching but it wasminenow, and for the first time, so was the power to name it.
Chapter 16: Scars and Sparkle
(Ryder)
December—
I have written this letter a dozen times in my head and torn it up in my hands more times than I can count. I am terrible at beginning things that matter; maybe that is why I hid so muchof the rest of my life from you. I am terrible at admitting I'm broken. But I have to be honest with you now, because silence has been its own cruelty.
For years I swallowed someone else's version of me until I could barely hear my own voice. I learned to make myself small — smaller than the things that hurt me, smaller than the shame I carried. When I met you, you felt like a room with sunlight in it after a lifetime of basements.You were warmth where I only ever knew cold. You were laughter where I had learned to measure every breath. I fell toward you because you seemed impossible to break.
I thought keeping us secret was protection. I told myself I was shielding you from the wreckage I carried. I told myself I was sparing you from the headlines, the names, the explanations that never fit. The truth is uglier: I hid you because I was ashamed. I hid you because I was afraid that if you saw me — bruised, messy, less than the man I pretended to be — you would leave. I told myself I was protecting you, but in doing so I stole from you the choice to stay or go. That is on me. That is my failing.
You deserved better than secrecy. You deserved to be held up in the light, not folded into my dark corners. I told myself I was saving you from my past; instead I built a wall between us. I see now how that wall became a lie between you and me. For that, every small cruelty of omission, every withheld truth, I am sorry with a kind of remorse that burns slow.
Please know this, above all: none of what I did to you was because of you. Everything I said, everything I withheld, was about my own fear and my own failure to be brave enough to bring my whole self into the light. If I treated you with distance,if I let you feel unneeded or unvalued, that was my cowardice, not your fault. You are not the sum of my silence.
I would give anything to come to you now and beg , poorly and brokenly, for forgiveness and a chance to begin again. I would beg to show you the parts of me I was too ashamed to show before, to let you choose with full knowledge what you want from me. But I will not ask you to carry my repair. You deserve someone steady from the start, someone whose history is not a landmine for your future. You deserve laughter that is easy and honesty that is habit. You deserve better than a man still learning how to be whole.
If there is any small mercy in my failure, it is this: I am beginning to do the work. I am learning to say the words I used to hide. I am sitting in rooms with other survivors and listening to them name things I could not name alone. I am learning that surviving is not the same as being healed, and that healing will take more than courtroom victories or news cycles. It will take days that feel like nothing and then, sometimes, days that feel like progress.
You are beautiful in ways that do not depend on me to prove true. You are brave and bright and you will make someone very lucky. I do not expect you to wait for me. I do not expect you to forgive me. I only want, selfishly and humbly, for you to know the truth — that I am sorry, that I was afraid, and that my failure to protect you was a failure of my own courage.
