Page 45 of Bitter Truths

Ezra smiles. “Anna will love that. She’s been looking for someone else to train with.”

I finish eating and head back to my cabin as the sun sets. The place gets quiet after dark—not dead quiet, but peaceful quiet. No traffic, no sirens, no sounds of a world that kept moving while I fell apart.

I sit on my tiny porch and watch stars appear between the trees. Real stars, not the faint ones you can rarely see in town. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, scattered across the sky like someone threw diamonds at black velvet.

When was the last time I looked at stars?

When was the last time I sat somewhere and felt... not happy, but not miserable either? Just present.

My body aches in new ways. My legs throb from the hike. My shoulders are raw from the backpack. My hands are scraped and dirty. But it’s clean pain. Honest pain from living instead of just existing.

I’m too tired to think about alphas or best friends or diagnoses. Too tired to wonder what’s wrong with me or replay videos I wish I’d never seen.

Just tired enough to sleep.

Tonight, I fall asleep without taking pills.

Day two starts at dawn whether I want it to or not. Someone’s chopping wood outside my cabin, the sound cutting through whatever dream I was having.

I roll out of bed feeling a hundred different aches all over. My legs struggle to hold me up. But I’m awake, and not the groggy half-conscious existence I’ve been living for months.

There’s a knock on my door.

“You alive in there?” I recognize Megan’s voice.

“If you could call it that.”

“Good. Time for breakfast.”

I stumble to the main hall, where people are already eating and planning their day. Someone hands me coffee—real coffee, not the instant stuff—and a plate of eggs and toast.

“Anna wants to meet you,” Ezra says, sitting beside me. “She’s excited about having a new student.”

Anna looks to be in her late twenties, built like she could bench-press a car, with scars on her arms that suggest she has had a painful past.

“Ezra says you want to learn archery,” she says without preamble.

“And how to fight… how to use weapons. I want to learn how to protect myself.”

She studies me for a long moment. “All right. Finish eating and meet me at the range.”

The archery range is just a clearing with targets set up at different distances. Anna hands me a bow that feels heavier than expected.

“First lesson,” she says. “Archery isn’t about strength. It’s about focus. You can’t hit what you’re aiming at if your mind’s somewhere else.”

She shows me how to hold the bow, how to nock an arrow, how to draw the string back to my anchor point. My first shot goes wide, hitting a tree ten feet from the target.

“Again.”

The second shot hits the ground in front of the target.

“Again.”

By the tenth shot, my arm shakes from holding the bow. By the twentieth, it’s almost too difficult to draw the string. But I sense a change. The part of my brain that usually cycles through all the ways I’m fucked up goes quiet.

There’s just the target, the bow, the arrow, and the moment between drawing and release.

“Better,” Anna says when I hit the outer ring of the target. “Your form’s shit, but you’re starting to focus.”