Copyright 2018 by Colleen Hoover

wonder if Jeremy will tell her what happened.
I haven’t seen him this morning. I assume he’s upstairs, where he usually
remains until April arrives. I don’t want to be in the kitchen when April walks
in, so I turn to head toward my office. I unexpectedly bump into Jeremy, but he
cushions the blow by taking a step back and grabbing my shoulders. Thank
goodness because it saves my precious coffee from spilling.
He looks tired, but I can’t judge him for that since it’s my fault. “Good
morning,” he says it like it’s anything but.
“Morning.” I’m whispering. I don’t know why.
He moves so that he’s right next to me, leaning in as if to shield anyone from
hearing what he’s about to say. “How would you feel if I put a lock on your
bedroom door?”
His question confuses me. “You already did.”
“On the outside of the door,” he clarifies.
Oh.
“I can lock it after you go to sleep. Open it before you wake up. If you ever
need out, you can text me, call me, and I’ll open it in two seconds. But I think
you’ll sleep better, knowing you can’t leave the room.”
I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t know why it feels more drastic
than a lock on the inside of the door, when they’d both be used for the same
purpose: to keep me in my room. Even though the thought of it makes me
uncomfortable, I’d be more uncomfortable knowing I could possibly get out of
the room again. “I’d like that. Thank you.”
April enters the house, pausing when she passes the kitchen. Jeremy is still

---

looking at me, ignoring her presence. “I feel like you need to take a break
today.”
I look away from April, back to Jeremy. “I’d rather stay busy.”
He regards me for a silent moment before nodding in understanding.
“Good morning,” April says, kicking her muddy shoes off at the door.
“Morning, April.” Jeremy says it so casually, as if he has nothing to hide. He
walks past her, toward the back door. She doesn’t move. She stares at me with
her glasses at the tip of her nose.
“Morning, April.” I don’t look as innocent as Jeremy. I head back to Verity’s
office and start my day, despite not being able to get over what happened last
night.
I spend the morning online, catching up on emails. Corey has forwarded a
few interviews, something that’s never been requested of me. A lot of the
questions are similar, wanting to know why Verity hired me, what I plan to bring
to the table, how my past experience has put me in the position to write for her. I
copy and paste a lot of the answers.
After lunch, I focus on developing an outline for the seventh book. I’ve
given up on finding one, so I work on building the novel from scratch. It’s hard
because I’m exhausted from last night. I’m unsettled. But I try not to think about
last night.
It’s afternoon when I smell tacos. It makes me smile, knowing he’s making
them because I requested them. I’m sure he’ll save me a plate like he always
does. I’m just not in a position where I feel comfortable eating dinner with them
when April has Verity at the table.
I spend the next several minutes thinking about Verity, wondering why I’m
so scared of her. I stare down at the drawer that contains her manuscript. One
more chapter and I’ll stop. That’s it.

---

So Be It
It had been six months since they were born, and I still wished they didn’t exist.
But they did, and Jeremy loved them. So I tried. Sometimes I wondered if it
was worth it. Sometimes I wanted to pack my bags and leave and never look
back. He was the only thing stopping me from going through with it. I knew a
life without Jeremy was not a life I wanted to live. I had two options:
Live with him and the two girls he loved more than me.
Live without him.
They were a package deal at that point. I hate myself for not using birth
control. For thinking I could do this and everything would be alright. Everything
was not alright. Not with me anyway. It was like my family existed in a snow
globe. Inside, everything was cozy and perfect, but I wasn’t a part of them; I was
just an outsider looking in.
It was snowing outside that night, but the apartment was warm. Even still, I
woke up with chills. Or tremors, really. I couldn’t stop shaking. The nightmare
I’d had was so vivid, I felt the effects of it for hours after I woke up. A
nightmare hangover.
I dreamt of the future, of the girls and Jeremy and me. They were eight or
nine years old. I wasn’t sure because I didn’t know a lot about kids and what
they look like at each stage. I just remember waking up and feeling like they
were eight or nine.
In the dream, I was walking by their bedroom. I peeked inside and couldn’t
understand what I was seeing. Harper was on top of Chastin, covering her head
with a pillow. I rushed over to the bed, terrified that it was too late. I pushed
Harper off her sister and pulled the pillow away. I looked down at Chastin and
then slapped my hand over my mouth with a gasp.
There was nothing there. The front of Chastin’s face was smooth, like the
back of a bald head. No scar. No eyes, no mouth. Nothing to smother.
I glanced at Harper, taking in her sinister expression. “What did you do?”
And then I woke up.
My reaction wasn’t to the dream. It was to how much it felt like a
premonition. And how much it gutted me.

---

I hugged my knees, rocking back and forth on the bed, wondering what this
feeling was. Pain. It was pain. And…heartache.
I had felt heartache in my dream? When I thought Chastin was dead, I
wanted to fall to my knees and weep. It’s exactly how I felt when I thought of
the possibility of Jeremy dying. I would lose all function.
I sat there and cried, the feeling was so overwhelming. Had I finally
connected to them? To Chastin, at least? Was this what it felt like to be a
mother? To love something so much, the thought of it being ripped away from
you causes physical pain?
It was the most I had ever felt since the girls had been conceived. Even if I
only felt it for one of them, it still counted for something.
Jeremy rolled over in the bed. He opened his eyes and saw me sitting up,
hugging my knees. “You okay?”
I didn’t want him to ask me that because Jeremy was good at getting my
thoughts out. Most of them, anyway. I didn’t want him to know this one. How
could I admit that I’d finally fallen in love with one of our daughters without
also admitting I had never loved either of them to begin with?
I had to do something. Preoccupy him so he wouldn’t ask too many
questions. I knew from experience that Jeremy couldn’t get the truth out of me if
I had his dick in my mouth.
I crawled down him, and by the time I was positioned over him, my mouth
ready to work, he was already hard. I took as much of him as I could take.
I loved it when he moaned. He was a quiet lover, but sometimes, when I
really caught him off guard, he wasn’t so quiet. In that moment, he was
euphoric. And I wondered, before I came along, how many other women had
coaxed noises out of him? How many other pairs of lips had been wrapped
around his dick?
I let him slide out of my mouth. “How many women have sucked your
dick?”
He lifted up onto his elbows and looked down at me, perplexed. “Are you
serious?”
“More like curious.”
He laughed, dropping his head back to the pillow. “I don’t know. I’ve never
counted.”
“That many?” I teased. I climbed up his body and straddled him. I liked it
when he jerked beneath me and gripped my thighs. “If it’s not an immediate
answer, that means it’s more than five.”
“Definitely more than five,” he said.
“More than ten?”

---

“Maybe. Possibly. Yes.”
It’s odd how that didn’t make me jealous, but two infants could leave me
seething. Maybe it was because the girls were currently in his life, but all his
past whores were just that…in the past.
“More than twenty?”
He raised his hands to my breasts and cupped them. Squeezed them. He was
getting that look on his face that was my cue I was about to be fucked. Hard.
“That’s probably a good estimate,” he whispered, pulling me to him. He brought
his lips close to mine and stuck a hand between us, rubbing me. “How many
guys have licked your pussy?”
“Two. I’m not a whore like you.”
He laughed against my lips and then rolled me onto my back. “But you’re in