Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 99

Caleb’s POV

I walk into the kitchen to find Catherine and Serena at the table, hands linked over the scarred oak, and the air carries the heaviness of women who have been crying.

My mother's face is stripped raw — no composure, no mask — just swollen eyes that find mine the moment I cross the threshold.

Serena's expression tells me to sit down without saying a word. So I do.

"I need you to hear this from me," my mother begins, fingers tightening around Serena's hand. "Before the attorneys put it on paper, I need you to hear it first."

I lower myself into the chair beside Serena. "I'm listening."

Catherine draws in a long inhale that shakes on the way out. "Your father didn't leave us, Caleb. I made him go."

The sentence lands in my chest and sits there, dense and foreign. I open my mouth, but she holds up her hand.

"Three years ago. That last night. You were at Marcus's house for a barbecue, and I told you to stay as late as you wanted."

Her voice is thin but deliberate, every word rehearsed a thousand times. "I told you to stay because I knew what was coming. Simon had been drinking since noon, and by sundown he was past the point where I could manage him."

My hands press flat against the table. "What happened."

"He broke the bathroom door off its hinges because I locked it." She says it the way you'd describe weather, and the flatness is worse than any tremor.

"Got me by the arm and dragged me into the hallway. I hit the wall hard enough to crack the drywall. You've seen the patch — I told you it was from moving furniture."

I have seen the patch. Walked past it a hundred times without question. The realization that I accepted her lie so easily makes my stomach fold in on itself.

"I called the police from the bathroom floor after he passed out. They came within twenty minutes, filed a report, helped me with the paperwork for a temporary restraining order."

She pauses, jaw tightening. "By the time you came home the next morning, he was gone. I told you he'd left because I couldn't figure out how to explain to my fifteen-year-old that his mother had his father removed by law enforcement."

Serena's hand finds my knee under the table. I don't feel it. I am somewhere else entirely — walking through the front door that next morning with barbecue sauce on my shirt, calling out and getting only my mother's voice in return, thin and too bright: ‘Daddy had to go away for a while, sweetheart.’

"For three years, I believed he walked out." My voice comes out level, which surprises me, because nothing inside me is level.

"Because the truth felt worse." Catherine's eyes glisten. "How was I supposed to tell you that the man whose blood runs through your veins put me through a wall? You were already so angry, Caleb. Already carrying his temper like a loaded weapon. I was terrified that if you knew, you'd go looking for him and end up in a cell right beside him."

The logic is maddening because it makes sense. At fifteen, with the fury that lived in me like a pilot light, I would have tracked him down and tried to finish what the police started.

"There's more," my mother says.

"Tell me."

"The divorce papers. I had them drawn up the week before — everything was ready. But when the officers escorted him out, he took the papers with him. I didn't realize until the next day when I went looking for the envelope and found it gone."

The kitchen goes very quiet.

"He took them on purpose," I say, and it isn't a question.

He didn't just leave. He laid a trap.

I cross the kitchen and wrap my arms around my mother, and she crumbles against my chest the way she never let herself do when I was fifteen.

Her shoulders shake with the kind of crying that lives behind locked doors and patched drywall and lies told in voices too bright for morning.

Serena stands beside us, close enough to touch but giving us space. I catch her eye over my mother's head, and what passes between us doesn't need language — gratitude, fury, the shared understanding that Simon was never a force of nature but a strategist.

My phone vibrates against the counter. Then again. A third time in rapid succession.

Catherine pulls back, wiping her face. "Who is it?"

I reach for the phone and see Whitfield's name. William's lead attorney doesn't call three times unless the ground has shifted. I answer.

"Caleb, listen carefully." His voice is clipped, carrying the contained urgency of a man who deals in facts that change lives.

"Simon's criminal record and the Bennett financial connection have both been entered into evidence as of this afternoon. The judge has agreed to an expedited hearing."

My grip tightens. "How expedited?"

"One week. Next Thursday. Full evidentiary review. Every piece of testimony, every document — it all goes before the judge in seven days."

I hang up and look at my mother, then at Serena.

"We go to court in one week."