𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐄𝐆𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐒 ~| 𝘓𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘰 𝘕𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘴

Invisible String

~'~

𝐖𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐞𝐬 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝𝐧'𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞?

𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐢𝐭 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐨 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐤

𝐀𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞

𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠

𝐓𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐞?

‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿︵‿

Cassi

My name is Cassi Holmes, and one month ago to the day, I was in an accident.

At least, that's what they told me. I don't remember the impact.

The crash, the hospital, the long, slow crawl back to something resembling normal, I know these things happened. I have the scars, the bruises fading to ghostly echoes on my skin, the stiffness in my ribs when I move too fast. Proof. And yet, it still doesn't feel real. Like someone else's tragedy I read about in passing. Like a movie I only half-watched.

The memory itself is a jagged thing, all broken glass and muffled sounds. When I try to piece it together, it shifts like smoke. There was rain, I think. Headlights. The feeling of weightlessness, the kind that doesn't mean freedom but falling. Then nothing. Blank space where there should be something. When I woke up, there was only the steady beep of machines and the crushing weight of confusion.

It felt like I lost something.

And them. My family.

At first, I thought it was grief that made them act so strangely. That explained the quiet, the tension thick enough to cut. The looks they exchanged when they thought I wasn't watching. The way Camilla's hands clenched into fists when I spoke, like she had to physically restrain herself from saying something awful. It was easy to blame worry. Easy to believe that my near-death experience had shaken them, made them cold with fear rather than resentment. But then the words started coming, and I realized it wasn't grief at all.

I had run away, they said. I had thrown everything they'd given me back in their faces. Even my sisters, looked at me like I was something broken. Pity.

I didn't remember running away. I could remember why I would.

But I knew that nothing I said mattered. The past had already been rewritten without my permission, and I was the villain of the story. So I stopped asking. Stopped defending myself. Stopped trying.

And then, one week ago, I left.

I packed up, and I got out. I thought it would be terrifying, but mostly it just felt inevitable. Like I was walking a path I'd already walked before, my feet following the steps of someone I didn't remember being. The hardest part wasn't leaving them behind. The hardest part was that I didn't even feel sad about it.

Monaco was never part of the plan.

It was my heart that pulled me here.

It wasn't even on my radar. But the moment I considered it, I couldn't shake the feeling. A pull, insistent and irrational, like the way the ocean calls to the shore. 

No reason. No logic. Just a quiet, unrelenting certainty that I needed to be here.

That nothing would feel right until I was.