Unwanted Blood (Harper) novel Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Harper’s POV

A year passed.

Life in Vancouver felt quieter and more real than I ever thought anything could be for me.

I lived in a small apartment in a plain residential neighborhood.

The days followed a steady rhythm I had come to count on. I woke up at the same time, walked the same route to the community center, I knew when the bus would be late and which corner smelled like fresh bread in the morning, helped the kids with homework in the afternoon, and often got pulled into dinner by the aunties who smiled at me and called me sweet girl.

At the community center, no one knew who I used to be. They didn’t know the name Harper Wilson. They only knew me as someone who listened when the kids talked.

When the kids fought, I crouched down between them and separated their hands before it got worse without raising her voice, who remembered which kid was afraid of the dark and which one hated being touched.

When one of them started crying, I didn’t rush them. I just sat there until they were ready to speak.

They needed me there.

I didn’t know what to do with it. It had felt fragile, like if I moved the wrong way, it would disappear. But it stayed. And over time, I began to

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depend on it too.

I was no longer the girl forced into a corner, told not to speak, not to look anyone in the eye, as if my very existence was a mistake that needed hiding. I could look at people when I spoke. I could speak at all.

Here, I was allowed to simply exist.

Ethan was the first friend I met shortly after arriving.

I met him a few months after I settled in. He felt like the older brother I had never had. He didn’t ask about my past or try to dig into the parts of me I kept closed. When I went quiet, he let the silence sit between us. When I pulled away, he gave me space. When the weight got too heavy, he simply handed me a glass of water and sat beside me without saying anything.

That was probably why I didn’t push him away.

That night, he handed me an invitation to an online public interview. It was for a project on post-trauma recovery, intended to be streamed to schools and psychological institutions.

“Public interview,” I read.

“It’s online,” he said.

My stomach dropped. I shook my head immediately. “No.”

Being seen had always meant danger. It meant being defined by others, being misinterpreted, and being hurt.

Ethan looked at me for a long moment over his coffee cup. “You don’t have to talk about them, Harper,” he said. “You just have to talk about who you are now.”

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I didn’t answer right away. But that night, lying in the dark, his words/ stayed with me. I realized I had never actually said out loud who I had become. I was always the survivor or the victim in my own head.

So, I agreed to do it. On the day of the recording the room was quiet. The camera felt less like judgement and more like a window.

Ethan stood behind the lights, watching me.

“Ready?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Hi…I’m Harper…someone who was once abandoned and damaged.” I thought I would stutter, but words came out of my mouth, easier than I thought.

I took a deep breath, started to tell my story. I didn’t go back to the past. I spoke about the present, how I lived now, how I had learned to meet people’s eyes again, and how I had gone from someone who couldn’t speak in a room full of people to someone who could say what she meant and be heard.

The more I said, the more I calm I was, sometime I smiled. I even admitted that being needed had felt strange at first.

“Because I had only ever been pushed out of every relationship before.” I said. The images of them flashed in my mind. But I didn’t stop.

I never mentioned the Wilson name. I never mentioned Ryder, Logan, Grayson, Colton or anything that once defined me.

“I had once lost my voice and spent a long time learning how to live again.”

When I finished this sentence, I paused. Not because the memories still

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hurt, but because I realized they no longer had the power to. They had/ become something no longer capable of destroying me.

I looked straight into the camera one last time.

“Now I think I did it.”

I gave a small, quiet smile.

“Thank you for listening.”

Ethan cut the recording. I reached up, unclipped the microphone, and let it rest on the table.

Ryder’s POV

I never thought I would see Harper again.

To the world, Harper Wilson was a closed ###Chapter. To us, she was the girl we had started to accept that was gone.

For a year, all of us had lived in a state of suffocating regret. We carried the weight of what we had done in silence, unable to move forward.

I had become someone who buried himself in work until the numbers blurred, who woke up at night reaching for a phone that never rang with news of her body. The eldest brother who once sat at the head of the table in cold indifference, letting the others throw their insults and never stopping them, now couldn’t pass Harper’s old room without his chest tightening.

Logan had turned even quieter, more withdrawn into his own head. The loner who used to slip things into her food…poisoning her…now spent hours staring at old security footage, rereading her farewell letter, as if analyzing every detail could somehow undo what he had done. Colton and Grayson, the twins who had once been the loudest, had lost all their

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fire.

We had all changed. The rules we had written in red marker on her wall no longer hung anywhere, but their weight still pressed on every room in the house. We couldn’t move forward because every ordinary day reminded us of the girl we had broken with our own hands, through the small and large cruelties we had convinced ourselves she deserved.

We couldn’t let go of her, even when we believed she was gone.

I was passing a meeting room in the office when a flicker on a wall- mounted screen inside caught my eye. I stopped. I froze so abruptly I felt the air leave my lungs.

Then she spoke.

My breath stopped.

“…Harper.”

I didn’t realize I had said her name out loud until someone nearby looked

at me.

I stepped closer to the screen without thinking.

It was her.

The girl on the screen was stable. She was poised. She looked so healthy that my mind refused to accept what my eyes were seeing. My breath caught hard in my chest.

But it was her.

My breath hitched. I felt as if I had been nailed to the floorboards. I stood there nailed in place for several seconds before I pulled out my phone and forwarded the video to the others.

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