Chapter 125 I forgive you
Cassie
The knock was sharp, an intrusion on the fragile quiet of the house. Through the monitor, Meagan O'Malley's face was a pale, strained oval in the darkness—the last person I wanted to see, the person who, besides Greyson, was most tangled in the roots of my deepest pain.
Every instinct screamed to turn away, to pretend I wasn't home, to let her knock until her knuckles bled,something in her expression stopped me,a rawness I'd never seen before, a vulnerability that seemed to strip away all her usual armor. It was simply the crushing weight of loneliness, the way isolation had worn down my defenses until even unwelcome company felt better than the silence.
I turned the knob.
"We need to talk," she said, her voice stripped of its usual authority, of the casual entitlement that had always made my teeth clench. It was just raw now, scraped bare. "Please, Cassie. Can I come in?"
I stepped back without a word, letting her into the space that had become my sanctuary and my prison. The ghost of our last argument filled the hallway—not about business or Vivian or any of the surface wounds that usually drew blood between us. It had been about the one thing we never spoke of, the loss that lived in the spaces between words, in the careful way people avoided my eyes on what should have been my due date.
She didn't pretend to admire the renovations I'd made or comment on the warm colors I'd chosen to replace the stark whites Greyson had preferred. She stood in the center of the living room like a shipwreck survivor, looking as lost and hollow as I felt most days.
Her eyes, so achingly like her brother's—darted to the framed photograph on the bookshelf. It was one of my favorites: me and Greyson on a hiking trail in the mountains behind the city, my face tipped toward the sun, his arm tight around my waist, both of us laughing at something he'd just whispered in my ear. We looked invincible in that photo. Untouchable.
A lifetime ago. A different universe entirely.
"I was a terrible friend," Meagan began, her gaze still fixed on that frozen moment of happiness. "But that's not even the beginning of it. What I did... what my family did..." Her voice cracked like ice under pressure, and when she finally looked at me, the tears in her eyes weren't the calculated welling of someone who'd learned to weaponize emotion. These were real. Raw. The kind of tears that left you empty afterward. "I'm here to tell you the truth. All of it."
A cold dread, different from the familiar ache of Greyson's absence, trickled down my spine like ice water. I said nothing, just waited. I'd learned the value of silence these past months, how it could draw truth from people like a magnet draws metal.
"When you lost the baby..." She forced the words out, and they hung in the air between us like a sacred, terrible thing. The words we never said. The loss that had hollowed me out and driven the first real wedge between Greyson and me, creating a chasm that seemed to widen every day despite our desperate attempts to bridge it.
My breath hitched involuntarily. Even now, even after all this time, hearing someone say it out loud felt like being punched in the chest.
"My parents..." Meagan wrapped her arms around herself as if she could hold back the confession, as if she could swallow the words and let them poison her from the inside instead of releasing them into the world. "They saw it as an opportunity."
The room seemed to tilt sideways. "An opportunity?"
"To get Greyson back. To untangle him from you." Each word came out like she was pulling thorns from her throat. "They thought your relationship was a distraction from the family business, from his responsibilities. They said you came from a different world, that you'd pull him away when we needed him most. When you miscarried, my mother..." She paused, swallowing hard. "She said it was a sign. She said it proved it wasn't meant to be."
The memory hit me like a physical blow—Georgia O'Malley's cool, cold embrace at the hospital, the way she'd held herself apart from my grief as if it might be contagious. "These things happen for a reason, dear," she'd said, her voice carrying no warmth, no genuine comfort. "Perhaps it's for the best." I had thought she was just awkward, terrible at providing comfort in the face of such raw loss. I never imagined it was calculated cruelty, a precision strike designed to isolate me in my most vulnerable moment.
"And you?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. "What did you say?"
Meagan flinched as if I'd struck her, her whole body recoiling from the question. "I agreed with her." The admission came out as a ragged whisper, each syllable weighted with self-loathing. "I was grieving Dad, I was terrified of losing my brother to anyone who might take him away from us, and I was weak. So goddamn weak. I told Greyson that maybe it was better this way. That the stress of our family dynamics, the pressure of trying to balance you and us—that it would be too much for a child. I implied that losing the baby was... merciful."
The air left my lungs in a rush, leaving me gasping like a landed fish. I remembered those bleak weeks after the miscarriage, how Greyson had retreated into himself, how he'd grown distant and careful around me. I'd thought it was his own way of grieving, his inability to process loss the way I needed him to. I'd blamed him for not being present, for not holding space for our shared sorrow. I never knew his family was whispering poison in his ear, twisting our tragedy into evidence of incompatibility.
"He never told me," I breathed, sinking onto the arm of the sofa because my legs wouldn't hold me anymore.
"He didn't know how." Meagan swiped angrily at her tears, leaving mascara tracks down her cheeks that made her look younger, more vulnerable. "He was drowning. In grief for Dad, in grief for the baby, in the guilt we made him carry for daring to want you when his family needed him. I made him feel that guilt, Cassie. I weaponized his love for you against him. I am so... so desperately, pathetically sorry. Not just for being a bad friend, but for being an active participant in destroying you both when you were at your most broken."
The truth was a physical blow, but a strange one. It wasn't a new wound—it was the lancing of an old, festering one that had been poisoning me for months. The unexplained coldness I'd felt from the O'Malley family, the way conversations would stop when I entered a room, the subtle but persistent message that I didn't belong. Greyson's confusion and guilt, the way he'd seemed to be fighting some internal battle I couldn't understand. It all clicked into place with horrible clarity.
I thought of the baby we'd lost barely eight weeks along, but already so real to us, already loved and planned for and dreamed about. I thought of the names we'd whispered to each other in the dark, the way I thought of the future that had been stolen from us twice first by cruel chance, then by deliberate malice.
Looking at Meagan now, truly broken before me, I felt the anger I'd been nursing begin to transform into something else. Something that felt almost like pity. She had been caught in the same web that had trapped Greyson, manipulated by the same people who had used our grief as a weapon.
"I forgive you, Meagan."