Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 119

Caleb’s POV

Peace is louder than I expected.

Not in the way war is loud—all sirens and slamming doors and my mother's muffled sobs through drywall. This is the opposite kind. The hum of a house where people actually want to be, where no one flinches when a cabinet shuts too hard, where breakfast doesn't feel like a hostage negotiation.

It's July. The kitchen windows are open, and the morning air carries cut grass and coffee and the faint sweetness of Catherine's garden roses.

William sits at the head of the table with the newspaper spread in front of him, reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, and he looks up when I come downstairs.

"You see this?" He taps an article with his index finger. "New environmental bill just passed the committee. They're actually pushing carbon caps on manufacturing."

"About a decade late, but sure." I pull out the chair across from him and reach for the orange juice. "Who sponsored it?"

"Hargrove, believe it or not. The same senator who blocked the last three."

"Election year does wonders for a man's conscience."

William laughs—a real one, the kind that creases the skin around his eyes and makes his whole face warm. Six months ago, he could barely look at me across this table.

Now he argues policy with me before nine AM like it's the most natural thing in the world.

This is what fathers do, I think, and the realization doesn't sting the way it used to. It just settles, quiet and sure, into a space that Simon carved out and left hollow.

Catherine comes in from the garden with a handful of basil, soil still dark under her fingernails. She sets it on the counter, wipes her hands on her apron, and starts assembling plates with the practiced efficiency of a woman who's been feeding people her whole life.

"Serena, bunny, can you hand me the—"

She stops. Her hand freezes midair over the cutting board, and a flush crawls up her neck.

"I'm sorry." Catherine's voice is careful, almost brittle. "I didn't mean to—that just slipped out."

Serena stands in the doorway behind me. I don't turn around, but I feel her there the way I always do—a shift in gravity, the room recalibrating when she enters it.

"It's okay." Serena's voice is soft, but there's no tremor in it. No rehearsed forgiveness, no tight-lipped tolerance. She moves to the counter and pulls a bowl from the cabinet, handing it to Catherine with a small smile. "Really, Catherine. It's okay."

Catherine blinks, her eyes going glassy for half a second before she recovers. She takes the bowl and nods, pressing her lips together like she's holding back words that would come out too raw for a Tuesday morning.

William catches my eye over his newspaper. Neither of us says anything. Neither of us needs to.

After breakfast, Serena curls up in the window seat in the living room with her laptop balanced on her knees. She's been writing for weeks now—not the meticulous legal briefs and case analyses she used to produce like clockwork, but real writing.

The kind that comes from a place she doesn't guard with barbed wire anymore.

"What's the word count?" I lean against the doorframe, coffee in hand.

"Don't ask me that." She doesn't look up, her fingers still moving across the keyboard. "You sound like a professor."

"I sound like someone who watched you stare at paragraph three for forty minutes yesterday."

"That paragraph earned those forty minutes." She finally lifts her gaze, and the sunlight catches her hair, turning it the color of warm honey.

"It's about Mom. The early days, before the diagnosis. How she used to describe love like it was a place you could walk into instead of a feeling you had to earn."

My chest tightens. "That sounds like her."

"You barely knew her."

"I knew what she left behind." I hold her stare. "That's enough."

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