Chapter 3: Caleb's Revenge and a Second Chance

Caleb chained me to the bed and made me pay for everything.

My wrists ached, the cold metal biting into my skin. My heart jackhammered in my chest every time I heard his footsteps in the hall. That room smelled of sweat and old wood. He’d lock the door behind him, his face carved from stone. Sometimes he’d turn the radio up so no one heard me cry. Every night, my world shrank to those four walls and his shadow.

Only then did I learn that, because I had drugged him, the woman he loved despised him and married someone else.

I heard it through the vents—Natalie’s voice, tight with disgust, filtered through the house: “After what she did to him? No way I could ever trust a guy again. Hard pass.” I pieced together the rest from Caleb’s midnight mutterings and the broken picture frame hidden under his pillow.

He tormented me—words sharp as knives, his silence colder than the cuffs.

Every word cut deeper than the chains. He told me I ruined him. Said I haunted his nightmares. Some debts, he swore, never get paid off.

In despair, I killed myself, hoping to repay him with my life.

The pain was sharp, but I felt nothing at all. Sirens blared, boots scraped linoleum, voices shouted in panic. I drifted, weightless, into the dark.

But when I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day I drugged him.

Sunlight streamed through my window, just as I remembered. I heard birds outside, the distant honk of a school bus, the faint smell of pancakes wafting from the kitchen. Somehow, impossibly, everything was reset.