Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 60

Caleb’s POV

The secrets we keep to protect the people we love are usually the ones that hurt them most when they finally surface.

It happens by accident.

I’m in the kitchen making coffee when I hear my mother’s voice—sharp, trembling, calling my name in a way that makes my chest seize.

There’s fear in that sound. The kind of fear that comes from a parent realizing they’ve missed something catastrophic.

I find her standing in my bedroom doorway, her face pale beneath the fluorescent hallway light. The duffel bag sits at her feet, zipper partially open, its contents spilling out like evidence at a crime scene.

Helmet, gloves, racing jacket. Cash.

“Caleb.” Her voice cracks on my name. “What is this?”

My first instinct is defense. Denial, deflection, the masks I’ve worn for two years to keep her from ever standing exactly where she’s standing now. The lies form automatically in my throat, ready to be deployed.

But her eyes are wet. Her hands are shaking. And she looks at me like I’m a stranger wearing her son’s face.

The lies die before I can speak them.

“Mom…”

“How long?” She cuts me off, her voice rising. “How long has this been going on?”

I can’t look at her. My gaze drops to the floor, to the bag, to the evidence of everything I’ve been hiding. “Two years.”

“Two years.” She repeats the words like she’s trying to make them real. “You’ve been doing this for two years, and I didn’t… I never…”

“You weren’t supposed to know.”

“Why?” The question comes out raw, desperate. “Why would you do this? Why would you risk your life racing motorcycles in the middle of the night like some kind of—”

“Because of Dad.”

The word stops her cold. She stares at me, confusion replacing some of the fear.

“He left debts.”

I force myself to meet her eyes, to hold her gaze while I deliver the truth I’ve been protecting her from.

“Collectors showed up at the hospital six months after he disappeared. They knew where you worked, knew your schedule, knew how to find you when you were alone.”

“What kind of collectors?”

“The kind you don’t ignore.” My jaw tightens at the memory. “They told me what would happen if the money wasn’t paid. Not to me—to you. So I found a way to pay it.”

“The racing.”

“The racing.” I nod. “It was the only option that didn’t involve dragging you into his mess. I did the math. If I won enough races, I could clear the debt before anyone got hurt.”

Mom’s face crumbles. She doesn’t explode with anger the way I expected.

Instead, she breaks down completely—a sound escaping her throat that’s somewhere between a sob and a keen, her hand pressed against her mouth like she’s trying to hold herself together.

“I should have seen it.” The words come out muffled, broken. “The exhaustion, the injuries you kept explaining away. The way you looked at me sometimes, like you were carrying something too heavy to name…”

“Mom, stop.”

“I was so busy.”

She’s crying now, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Working double shifts, building this new life with William, trying so hard to prove we could be happy after everything your father put us through. And the whole time, you were destroying yourself in secret, and I didn’t notice.”

“That was the point.”

I step toward her, but she flinches back, and the rejection cuts deeper than any crash ever could.

“I didn’t want you to notice. I wanted you to have the life you deserved without Simon’s shadow hanging over it.”

“Being part of a family means letting others share the weight.”

William’s voice cracks, rough with emotion he’s clearly fighting to control.

“It means trusting the people who love you enough to ask for help. Protecting someone doesn’t always mean suffering in silence, Caleb. Sometimes it means letting them protect you back.”

The words hit somewhere deep in my chest, loosening something I’ve kept locked tight for longer than I can remember.

The argument continues—about pride, about family, about what it means to accept help without seeing it as weakness.

I push back, old habits dying hard, insisting I handled it, insisting I’m fine, insisting I don’t need anyone to fix problems I’ve already solved.

But the fight drains out of me eventually.

Two years of carrying this secret, of performing strength I didn’t feel, of protecting everyone except myself—it catches up all at once, and I’m suddenly too exhausted to keep my walls standing.

We end up in the living room, the three of us, the argument fading into silence that feels less hostile than before. Mom sits on the couch and reaches for my hand, guiding me down beside her.

I resist at first—I’m too old for this, too proud, too accustomed to being the one who holds everything together.

But she doesn’t let go.

She guides my head into her lap, runs her fingers through my hair the way she did when I was small and the world felt too big and scary to face alone.

Her touch is gentle, familiar, carrying the weight of every bedtime story and scraped knee and nightmare she soothed before I learned to pretend I didn’t have them.

“I’ve got you.” Her voice is soft, steady. “I’ve got you now.”

For the first time in two years, I stop fighting and let someone else carry the weight.