Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 120

120 /120

Serena’s POV

Some truths hide in linings.

The racing jacket sits across my lap like a relic from another life, cracked leather still carrying the faint ghost of engine grease and velocity.

Shane sent it back with no explanation beyond a package on the front porch and a return address I did not recognize until I saw the cramped handwriting on the shipping label.

I run my fingers along the collar, tracing seams that have survived more than any piece of clothing should. Caleb returned this months ago, stood in Shane's garage and laid down the last pieces of a life he was finished living.

The helmet. The gloves. The jacket. All of it surrendered with the quiet certainty of a man walking away from a war he had already won.

But Shane sent it back.

My thumb catches on a lump in the interior pocket, a stiff shape pressed flat against the lining. I reach inside and pull out a folded piece of paper, creased and worn at the edges, written in Shane's unmistakable scrawl — letters cramped together like they are trying to save space on the page.

Kid, you left this behind. Thought you'd want it back. It was in the lining of the jacket. —S.

Tucked inside the note, pressed flat like a dried flower between the folds, is a photograph.

My breath catches when I see it.

The image is old. The colors have faded to that particular warmth only analog prints carry, the edges worn soft from years of handling, corners rounded where fingers have held and turned and held again.

Two children on a swing — the swing, our swing, the one in the clearing beneath the oak that has witnessed every version of us.

A boy with dark hair and defiant blue eyes stands behind the swing, arms outstretched mid-push. A girl with honey-blonde curls flies forward, her head thrown back, mouth wide open in the kind of laughter that only exists before the world starts taking things away — unguarded, whole-bodied, free.

We could not have been older than six or seven. Before grief taught me to hold everything inside. Before Simon's fists taught Caleb that love was a language spoken with bruises.

Before the world demanded we become the careful, armored people we spent years pretending to be.

I turn the photograph over.

On the back, in a child's handwriting — wobbly and earnest, the letters too big for the space — are four words that make the room tilt beneath me.

My favorite person ever.

Caleb's handwriting. I recognize it with a jolt that starts in my chest and radiates outward until my fingers tremble against the photograph's worn edges.

He wrote this as a child, before he learned to hide tenderness behind cruelty, before he buried every soft thing about himself beneath layers of rage and recklessness.

He kept it. For years, sewn into the lining of his racing jacket like a prayer he never said out loud, carried through every race, every near-death moment on the track, every dark night when the engine screamed and the asphalt blurred and the line between survival and surrender was measured in millimeters.

I was with him the whole time.

Through every hairpin turn and finish line. Through every moment when the world felt too heavy to survive and he straddled that bike anyway, threw himself into the dark anyway, because the debt demanded it and his mother needed him and no one was coming to save a boy who had been taught that asking for help meant weakness.

He carried me. Not the real me — not the girl who fought him and resented him and pretended she did not lie awake listening for his footsteps through the wall.

He carried the memory of who we were before all of it. The version of us that existed before hatred became the only safe language between two children who never stood a chance against what they felt.