Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 93

Caleb’s POV

Serena finds me in the hallway outside my mother's room. Her eyes are red-rimmed and swollen, and the careful way she reaches for my hand tells me that whatever just happened behind that door left marks on both of them.

She doesn't ease into it. She doesn't soften the edges or wrap it in careful language the way she does when she's protecting me from myself.

"Your mom stayed with Simon because he threatened to take you away from her," she says. "Every time she tried to leave, he told her he'd fight for full custody. That he'd win. That she'd never see you again."

I hear the words. I process them individually — stayed, threatened, custody, never — but they refuse to form a coherent shape in my mind.

My hand is still in hers, and I can feel the tremor in her fingers, the residual emotion from a conversation I wasn't part of but am now drowning in.

"She stayed because losing you was the one thing she couldn't survive."

The hallway narrows. My lungs pull in air that doesn't contain enough oxygen.

She stayed for me.

Every memory I have of those years begins to tilt, like a painting knocked sideways on a wall. The nights I lay in bed listening to Simon's voice rise through the floorboards, hating my mother for not packing our bags and driving us somewhere safe.

The mornings she'd sit across from me at breakfast with a bruise she'd tried to cover with foundation, and I'd stare at my cereal, furious at her for accepting it. Furious at her for choosing him.

She never chose him. She chose me.

"Say something." Serena's voice is barely a whisper.

"All those years," I manage, and the words come out scraped raw. "I thought she couldn't leave because she was too broken, too beaten down to walk out the door. I resented her for it, Serena. I was twelve years old, hiding in my closet with my hands over my ears, and I hated my own mother for not being strong enough to save us."

"You didn't know."

"I should have." My voice cracks on the last word, and I press my free hand against the wall to steady myself because the ground beneath me has shifted in a way that no amount of physical balance can correct.

"She took every hit, every insult, every night of his rage, because the alternative was losing me. And I spent years thinking she was the weak one."

Serena steps closer, both hands wrapped around mine now, her forehead tilted up toward my jaw. "She didn't tell anyone. Not even you. She carried that alone because she was protecting you from knowing you were the weapon he used against her."

The rage arrives then. Not the kind I know — not the hot, reckless fury that sends my fists into walls and my body into fights I can't always win.

This is different. This is quiet, settling into my bones like concrete curing in a mold. It doesn't burn. It hardens.

I don't want to find Simon and beat him until my knuckles split open.

I want to take apart every structure he's built, every legal claim he's filed, every thread of credibility he's stitched together with Bennett money and borrowed time.

I want to dismantle him in a courtroom with documents and testimony and the kind of calculated precision he used against my mother for years.

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