Charlotte expected embarrassment to slow her down, but it was a relief to tell Reece the truth. He didn’t rush to condemn Ben’s behavior or ask her insensitive questions. There was no why didn’t you listen to her or how could you have been so naïve. Or worse, why didn’t you just leave. His face revealed the occasional flare of outrage or concern, but he didn’t make her story about himself and his feelings. He knew she needed to keep going until she was done.
“Ben told me she didn’t support our relationship, and that she was judgmental and pushy.” Charlotte took a ragged breath, ashamed of her betrayal. “I found myself agreeing with him.”
“Jackie is judgmental and pushy,” Reece granted.
Charlotte nodded. “Yeah, she can be. So I didn’t see it as an isolation tactic, I was just like, sure, my best friend is kind of abrasive. But it wasn’t only her. He would go on about how jealous Nina was of our relationship, and how weird the support group was. He cut me off from everyone.”
“That’s hard to see when you’re in the middle of it.” Reece placed his hand palm up on the towel next to her. She considered it but couldn’t take it, not wanting to be touched right now. To his credit, he didn’t react to her subtle rejection. “How did it end, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I don’t mind,” she said, surprised to find she meant it. The more she spoke, the easier it was to keep going. “We were in this cycle. He would do something shitty, and I would either take it, or go back to my place to get away from him. If he sensed I wasn’t going to let it go, he would start crying about how he didn’t want to turn into his asshole father, and he needed my help to be a better man.”
That line usually worked on her. Who could understand not wanting to become your parents better than her, the only daughter of Booth and Olivia Harrington Thorne? It mattered that he knew he had to change, that he wanted to change. In her heart of hearts, she had desperately wanted her mother to want to change too.
I want to do better, Charlotte. I want to deserve you. Please don’t give up on me. You know how much I love you, right?
She was in too deep to recognize Ben’s pleas for help as another manipulation.
But then the cycle was interrupted.
“One night in the spring, we had this fight.”
It wasn’t even a big fight, just another stupid fight in a long line of stupid fights. Could you even call it a fight when only one person raised their voice? When only one person cried?
She’d tried to get a stain out of his shirt and accidentally made it worse. Charlotte and Jackie had moved into an apartment in Rawls Tower when she got back from Paris, and Ben came over to pick up the shirt before a Sigma Delt formal event.
You idiot, look what you’ve done. Do you know how expensive this is? This is Italian linen.
Charlotte rubbed at her eyes. She wasn’t crying but they itched, that tension headache threatening to return.
“Ben thought we were alone, but Jackie was in her room. She recorded us on her phone through the wall. You remember how thin the walls were in that building?”
Charlotte threw Reece a nervous look, and he nodded at the rhetorical question.
“After he left, she played the fight back for me.”
Thank goodness for her best friend. Charlotte would always feel indebted to her, no matter what distance grew between them, because sometimes she wondered if she would be dead if it weren’t for Jackie. How much would Ben’s abuse have escalated without Jackie’s intervention? How much more of herself would she have lost if she’d stayed with him?
Charlotte trained her focus on the smooth surface of the quarry and the gentle sway of the grass in the breeze.
I’m safe. It’s over. This happened years ago.
Even here, the past had a way of bleeding into the present. Ben’s voice crackled out of Jackie’s iPhone, dangerously tight. Her ex never lost his temper. He wielded it with expert precision.
“She made me listen to him call me an idiot and a bitch and a spoiled brat, all because of a shirt.”
Reece clenched his fist on the towel.
“And I just…kept apologizing.”
The memory caught in her throat like a shard of glass. She sounded terrified on the recording, groveling for forgiveness over a fabric stain. Her biggest fear in that moment was that he would walk out the front door. That Ben would leave and she’d be alone again, forgotten and replaced by some other girl.
That hurt more than anything Ben could ever say. When she saw their relationship from the outside, she didn’t recognize herself. What happened to the girl who repaired Acronym’s roof as a freshman after watching a shingling tutorial on YouTube? Where had the Charlotte gone who found a room-and-board-inclusive internship in Boston so that she wouldn’t spend the summer before junior year with her mother? When did she swap out her combat boots for bougie ballet flats from Ben’s mother?
She used to be so capable. She used to be strong.
Two years at Hein taught Charlotte to value her authentic self. Ben destroyed that progress in just a few months.
“It still took me a while to break up with him after that, and he didn’t take it well. I told him outside the library so he couldn’t make a scene in public, but he still threw a classic Ben Mead tantrum. He sent me batshit text messages until I blocked him. I barely left the apartment, I was so worried I’d bump into him. And even when it was over, it wasn’t over.” She laughed humorlessly. “He told everyone at the paper that he dumped me, and that I was having a nervous breakdown and he just couldn’t help me anymore. When that version of the story didn’t catch on, he tried to convince people I cheated on him with Jackie. It was so fucked up.”
Her chest felt tight, and she realized she was holding her breath as she spoke. She inhaled slowly and then let it out.
Her heart broke twice that spring: once when she understood her boyfriend didn’t really love her, and again when Hein morphed from safe haven to enemy territory. Everywhere felt like Ben’s turf: the newspaper office, the student gym where he played tennis every other day, the dining hall at the heart of campus. Even the library felt dangerous, bearing his last name at the entryway. Charlotte skulked from Rawls Tower to classes and back again. She and Jackie cooked most of their meals at home or walked to Terry’s.
Summer break was a blessing: She focused on her thesis and bartending at the restaurant. But the panic attacks started in the fall.
“There’s so much about senior year that I don’t remember,” Charlotte said. “It’s a blur.”
“Trauma,” Reece recalled.
Charlotte picked at her nails. “Yeah. Trauma.”
She still struggled not to blame herself for falling for Ben. The scar tissue of their relationship would take years to heal, no matter how many books she read about love-bombing and gaslighting. And when she looked back at senior year, she understood why her brain scorched with terror anytime Reece said something too kind. It made no sense to her when he wanted more from her than sex.
How could a man so good want to be with someone like her, someone weak enough to love a monster like Ben? How could Reece want such a disaster? Why would anyone choose her?
Charlotte remembered Reece standing with his family after the commencement ceremony, his arm around his little sister’s shoulders. Reece had asked her weeks before if she would meet them at the picnic, and she agreed. She even looked forward to it. Charlotte wanted to shake the hand of the mother strong enough to carry her family through tragedy while running her own business. She wanted to hug the little sister she had heard so much about in support group.
Then graduation day finally arrived and Charlotte found herself alone. She didn’t have parents to hug her, or doting grandparents to gush over her internship at ChompNews, or aunts and uncles to hustle them all together for a group picture. No one came to celebrate her accomplishments. She felt Ben’s words all over again, a year after their breakup: You’re so pathetic, Charlotte. Christ, what’s wrong with you?
