I envy them their ignorance. Their ability to love without calculating the collateral damage, to want without weighing the consequences, to choose connection without considering the ways it might destroy everything they've built.
But I'm not normal. I'm someone who kills people and calls it justice, who just fucked a seventeen-year-old girl and called it love, who's walking away from the most honest relationship of his life and calling it protection.
In the parking lot, I get in my truck and start the engine. Drive away from the hotel, from the city, from the life I might have built if I were someone else entirely.
In my rearview mirror, I can see the hotel growing smaller, but I can't see the seventh floor. Can't see the window where she might be standing, watching me leave, understanding finally that some people are too damaged to love without destroying what they touch.
Three hours later, I'm back in my trailer, surrounded by the careful emptiness I've built to keep myself functional. No photographs, no personal items, nothing that might create emotional attachment or complicate necessary decisions.
It's exactly what I deserve. Exactly what someone like me should expect from attempting connection with someone like her.
And if the silence feels heavier than it did before, if the emptiness seems more complete now that I know what the alternative looks like, that's just the cost of doing the right thing.
I tell myself that for months afterward. Every time I think about writing to her, every time I wonder if she's okay, every time I imagine what might have happened if I'd been selfish enough to stay.
Doing the right thing isn't supposed to feel good. It's supposed to feel necessary.
And leaving Delilah Jenkins in that hotel room was the most necessary thing I've ever done.
Chapter 17 - Delilah
MAY – SEPTEMBER 2017
The hotel room door closes with a soft click that echoes like a gunshot in the sudden silence.
I stand frozen in the middle of the room, still wearing my wrinkled prom dress, still feeling the ache between my thighs that reminds me of every moment of last night. The sheets are twisted from our bodies, the carpet bears the impressions where we knelt together, and the air still carries the scent of sex and Kent's cologne.
Evidence everywhere of what we shared. What he just walked away from like it meant nothing.
My reflection stares back at me from the mirror across the room—mascara smudged beneath red-rimmed eyes, hair tangled from his fingers, lips swollen from his kisses. I look exactly like what I am: a seventeen-year-old girl who just got fucked and abandoned by the only person who ever understood her.
The first sob tears out of my throat before I can stop it, followed by another, then another. I collapse onto the bed we shared, burying my face in the pillow that still smells like him, and let the tears come in waves that feel like they might drown me.
Seven months. Seven months of the most honest correspondence of my life, building to last night's perfect understanding, and he throws it all away because of a number. Because society says seventeen is too young to know my own mind, too young to choose what I want, too young to understand the implications of loving someone dangerous.
Fuck society. Fuck their arbitrary rules about age and appropriateness and what kind of relationships are acceptable. They didn't care when my father terrorized me for sixteen years. They didn't notice when he killed my mother and called it an accident. They only care now because my choices don't fit their comfortable narratives about victims and healing and moving on.
But the rage building in my chest isn't just directed at society's hypocritical standards. It's directed at Kent himself, at his paternalistic decision to end this without consulting me. At his assumption that he knows what's best for my future better than I do.
He's just like every other man in my life—making decisions for me, taking control away from me, treating me like a child who can't be trusted with her own choices. The only difference is that he felt guilty about it afterward.
I sit up on the bed, wiping my face with shaking hands. The tears are slowing now, replaced by something colder and infinitely more useful. Fury that crystallizes into understanding: If I want to avoid being abandoned again, I need to become someone who doesn't need saving. Someone who doesn't inspire protective instincts in damaged men who think they know better.
Someone who holds all the power.
Kent walked away because he saw me as young, vulnerable, in need of protection from his darkness. He couldn't conceive of a world where I might be his equal rather than his victim, where I might choose darkness because it suits me rather than because I've been corrupted by trauma.
Fine. If he wants to see me as a child who needs protecting, then I'll become a woman who needs nothing fromanyone. If he can't handle my youth, I'll build an identity that makes age irrelevant. If he's too afraid of what we could become together, I'll become it alone.
I stand up from the bed and start gathering my things with mechanical precision. The hotel key, my purse, the small part of my dignity that survived this morning's devastation. I need to get home, need to process this privately before Janine starts asking questions I can't answer.
But as I move through the room, collecting the pieces of last night's fantasy, something fundamental shifts inside me. The girl who arranged to meet Kent in this hotel room—the one who seduced him with understanding and innocence in equal measure—she dies in this moment. She gets buried under the weight of abandonment and disappointment and the cold realization that even perfect understanding isn't enough to keep someone from walking away.
What rises in her place is something harder. Something that won't make the mistake of needing anyone ever again.
The drive home passes in a blur of traffic and carefully controlled breathing. I park Janine's car in the driveway and sit for a moment, preparing myself for whatever performance will be required. Successful prom night. Fun with friends. Normal teenage experiences that justify the elaborate lies I told to make this meeting possible.
The irony burns in my throat like acid. I'm about to lie about having a normal teenage experience to cover up the most honest relationship of my life. I'm going to pretend everything is fine while processing the systematic destruction of the only connection that ever mattered.
