Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 107

Caleb’s POV

Winning is supposed to feel like the end of a war, but nobody warns you about the silence that follows the last shot.

Catherine sits in the passenger seat with her fingers laced through William’s, and the tension that has lived in her shoulders for weeks has finally begun to drain.

“I think I’m going to make pasta tonight,” she says, and the normalcy of it almost breaks me. “The good kind, with the homemade sauce. William, do we have basil?”

“I’ll stop and get some.” He glances at her with a tenderness that used to make me uncomfortable. Tonight it just makes my chest ache.

“Get the San Marzano tomatoes too. Not the store brand, the ones from that Italian place on Fifth.”

“Catherine, we just won a legal battle against my ex-husband backed by one of the most powerful law firms in the state, and your first priority is tomato provenance?”

“A woman has to have standards, William. You married me for my standards.”

“I married you for your tiramisu,” he says. “The standards were a bonus.”

Serena catches my gaze in the rearview mirror. Her hand rests between us, close enough to touch.

“You’re quiet,” she says.

“Just tired.”

“Caleb.” Her voice carries the gentle warning of a woman who knows which of my silences mean tired and which ones mean drowning.

“I’m fine, Serena. I promise.”

The lie tastes familiar. I’ve been swallowing versions of it since I was twelve years old.

At the house, Catherine moves through the kitchen with renewed purpose while William uncorks a bottle of red wine.

“Caleb, get the colander from the top shelf. Your stepfather thinks he’s tall enough to reach it, but we both know the truth.”

“I heard that,” William says. “I’m five-eleven.”

“You’re five-ten on a generous day, Dad,” Serena says, stealing an olive from the cutting board. “Mom measured you at Christmas.”

“Elizabeth used a faulty tape measure and I stand by that claim.”

“Darling, the tape measure wasn’t the problem,” Catherine says, pouring herself a glass. “Your posture is.”

“My posture is excellent. Tell them, Caleb.”

“I’m not getting involved,” I say, setting the colander down.

“Coward,” Serena murmurs.

“Survivor,” I correct.

The laughter that fills the kitchen is real but careful, like everyone is testing whether the floor will hold. Catherine leans against the counter, and the exhale she releases carries years of held breath.

“It’s over,” she says quietly. “He can’t touch us anymore.”

“No,” William says, wrapping an arm around her waist. “He can’t.”

“The divorce will be finalized within weeks.” Her voice wavers. “After everything he did, the papers he stole, the threats. Can you believe it’s actually going to be over?”

“You’re free, Catherine,” William says. “Finally, truly free.”

“We’re free,” she corrects, pressing her face into his shoulder. “All of us.”

‘I was sick. I’ve gotten help. I’m a different man now.’

The worst part is that a fragment of me wanted to believe him. Not the man I am now. The boy I used to be. The kid who hid in his closet and prayed his father would wake up different, that the monster downstairs would disappear and leave behind the dad who taught him to ride a bike.

That boy watched Simon on the courthouse steps—alone, diminished—and felt grief so sharp it stole the air from his lungs.

That’s the thing about fathers who hurt you. You don’t stop loving them when they stop deserving it. You just learn to carry the love and the damage in the same hands.

My eyes burn. I told a courtroom full of strangers about the worst nights of my childhood. I described the scar behind my ear while my mother wept three rows back. I held myself together because the people I love needed me steady.

But nobody is here now.

The first sob tears loose from a place I’ve kept locked for years. It doesn’t sound like me. It sounds like the boy in the closet, the one who counted ceiling cracks until the screaming stopped.

I bend forward on the swing, elbows on my knees, and let it take me. Tears streak down my face and I don’t wipe them away, don’t reach for the composure that has kept me upright for as long as I can remember.

For the first time in years, I let myself shatter without scrambling to collect the pieces.

The clearing holds me the way it always has. Patient, indifferent, ancient. The night asks nothing except that I exist in it, and the permission drags the sobs out harder, from a depth I didn’t know I carried.

Minutes pass. Maybe more. Time loses its edges in the dark.

The tears slow eventually. Not because the grief is finished, but because my body has run out of the fuel to sustain it. I sit up, drag the back of my hand across my face, and breathe.

Then headlights cut through the trees.

The beams sweep across the clearing, catching the oak trunk, the moss, the ropes of the swing before settling into stillness. I know the shape of those headlights the way I know my own heartbeat.

Serena’s car idles at the edge of the tree line, and through the windshield I can just make out her silhouette behind the wheel.

She always finds me here.