Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 114

Serena’s POV

The snow retreats like it owes the earth an apology, pulling back in slow, reluctant patches until the yard emerges green and startled beneath it.

The clearing fills with wild grass and early buds that push through the soil with the stubborn insistence of living things that refuse to stay buried.

I drive past it on my way back from campus and the sight catches in my chest — all that bare, frozen ground, suddenly breathing again.

Lucas's sentencing hearing is on the calendar. Two weeks out, but the outcome stopped being uncertain the moment the jury read guilty on every count. His attorneys filed motions that went nowhere.

The Bennett firm is hemorrhaging partners and under a federal investigation that Rachel says could take years to untangle. She told me on the phone last night, her voice steady and clear in a way I haven't heard since before Halloween.

She's working with the advocacy organization now, building case files for women who are still learning how to say what happened to them out loud.

Simon is gone. The divorce papers he held hostage for three years are filed and finalized, and the man who used his own son as a weapon has disappeared into whatever half-life awaits men who burn every bridge behind them.

Catherine and Dad's marriage stands — legally, permanently, in a way that no one can contest again.

And the four of us are learning, slowly and awkwardly and with more stumbling than grace, how to exist in the same house without a crisis holding us together.

It's Catherine's idea. She finds me in the living room on a Saturday afternoon with my pre-law textbook open on my lap and a highlighter bleeding yellow across a page I've already read three times.

"I want to try baking cookies," she says, leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed and a look on her face that's trying very hard to be casual. "Your father bought chocolate chips last week and they're just sitting in the pantry, judging me."

I set the highlighter down. "You want to bake."

"I want to attempt baking." She holds up a finger. "There's an important distinction. My track record with ovens is not what anyone would call distinguished."

"Catherine, last Thanksgiving you set a potholder on fire."

"It was smoldering, not on fire. And the smoke detector barely went off." She pauses. "I'm not asking you to trust the process. I'm asking you to help me not burn the house down."

The kitchen. My mother's kitchen, even though Elizabeth hasn't stood in it for seven years. The room where I learned to measure and mix while flour dusted her cheek and afternoon light poured through the window like honey.

The room where Catherine has cooked a thousand meals I've eaten without ever once acknowledging what it costs me to watch another woman move through a space that still echoes with my mother's humming.

‘Let yourself be loved by people who show up.’

Mom's words, written in her own hand, tucked in a trust letter I wasn't supposed to read until I turned twenty-one. She knew. Even then, even dying, she knew I would need permission to let someone else in.

I close the textbook. "Okay. But I'm in charge of the sugar."

Catherine's face breaks open with a relief she doesn't bother hiding. "Deal."

We stand side by side at the counter, and the awkwardness is immediate and enormous. She reads the recipe from her phone, squinting at it like it's written in another language, while I pull down mixing bowls from the cabinet my mother organized two decades ago.

"It says cream the butter and sugar together," Catherine reads. "What does that mean, exactly? Are we supposed to use actual cream?"

"It means mix them until they're fluffy."

"How fluffy? Like cloud fluffy or whipped cream fluffy?"

"Like — Catherine, just put the butter in the bowl."

She drops it in with the solemnity of someone defusing a bomb. I pour the sugar, and even as I do it, I know I'm adding too much. I always add too much.

"That looks like a lot of sugar," Catherine says carefully.

"She absolutely would have." Catherine's laughter softens into a smile that holds grief and gratitude in equal measure. "Elizabeth had the sharpest sense of humor of anyone I've ever known."

"I got it from her."

"You did." Catherine's eyes are bright and wet. "You got so much from her, Serena. I see it every single day."

The words land in the center of my chest and stay there, warm, spreading outward like ink in water. I don't say thank you because what I feel is bigger than gratitude.

I don't say I know because for years I wasn't sure. I just hold her gaze and let her see that I heard her, and that it mattered.

We slide the second batch into the oven. I set a timer this time.

"If these burn too," I say, "we're ordering from a bakery and telling Dad we made them."

"He wouldn't know the difference," Catherine agrees. "That man would eat a brick if it had chocolate chips in it."

I'm laughing again when I feel it — a shift in the air, the particular awareness that comes from being watched by someone whose attention I've learned to sense the way you sense weather changing.

I look up.

Caleb stands in the kitchen doorway. He's leaning against the frame with his arms crossed, and there's an expression on his face I've never seen before — not hunger, not protectiveness, not the sharp-edged want that usually lives behind his eyes when he watches me. This is quieter. Tender in a way that makes my throat tighten.

He's looking at me the way people look at a place they've finally come home to.

Catherine sees him. Her gaze follows the line between us — the invisible thread that has been pulling Caleb and me toward each other since the first day I walked into this house and hated him for making my pulse race. She has spent months learning not to look at what exists between her son and her stepdaughter. Turning away at breakfast. Finding somewhere else to focus when our hands find each other.

She doesn't turn away now.