The Forbidden Throb Chapter 174

Emma's POV:

She wiped her eyes with a paper napkin, her fingers tightening around the cup until her knuckles went white.

Her face went very still. The tears stopped as if someone had flipped a switch.

For a long moment, she just looked at me—really looked at me—and I saw something shift behind her eyes.

Something cold and bitter and utterly devoid of the pleading desperation from moments before.

"Of course you wouldn't understand," Lily said, her voice dropping to a flat, hollow tone. "How could you possibly understand what it was like?"

I blinked, caught off guard by the sudden change.

She said with a sharp shake of her head. "Even though we grew up in the same building, you never once looked at me. Not really."

The words hit me like a physical blow.

The same building.

My mind stuttered, trying to process what she'd just said.

"I don't understand," I said slowly, my voice barely above a whisper. "We grew up in the same house?"

Lily's laugh was bitter, sharp-edged. "See? You don't even remember. Why would you? You were always downstairs in your grandmother's apartment, with the bay windows and the garden view. While we—" Her voice cracked slightly. "While we were crammed into the attic conversion. The cheapest unit in the building."

I tried to recall, to pull up memories.

Harbor Street. The old converted Victorian, where Grandma Grace had lived before she moved to the cottage. Where I'd spent countless afternoons after school, playing in the garden while Grandma worked on her designs upstairs.

But it had been so long ago. The specifics were hazy, filtered through the lens of childhood nostalgia.

She moved to the window, her silhouette stark against the city lights beyond. "Do you know what it's like, Emma? To live in an attic where the ceiling leaks every time it rains? Where the walls are so thin you can hear everything happening in the apartments below? Where your clothes smell like mildew no matter how many times you wash them because the closet is right up against the exterior wall and the moisture just seeps through?"

"Every morning," Lily said quietly, still staring out the window, "I'd put on clothes that smelled like damp and mold. I'd walk down those stairs past your grandmother's door—past the sound of you laughing inside—and I'd go to school pretending everything was fine. That I was just like you."

She turned to face me, and I saw her eyes were glistening. "I remember the first time I saw you up close. Really saw you."

Her voice took on a distant quality, as if she were watching a scene play out in her mind.

"You were maybe seven or eight. Coming out of your grandmother's apartment in this white dress—pristine white, with little flowers embroidered on the collar. And these shoes, these shiny patent leather Mary Janes that looked brand new. Your hair was braided perfectly, not a strand out of place."

I had a vague memory of that dress. Grandma had made it for my school's spring concert.

"I was coming down the stairs," Lily continued, her voice barely above a whisper. "Wearing jeans that were too short and a sweater with a stain I couldn't get out no matter how hard I scrubbed. My hair was in a ponytail because my mother didn't have time to do anything fancier. And I saw you standing there, looking like something out of a storybook, and I—"

She broke off, swallowing hard.

"I wanted to run. Just turn around and hide back in our apartment until you were gone. But I couldn't. I had to get to school. So I told myself... I told myself that maybe your apartment was worse than it looked. That the first floor probably got less sunlight, so maybe it was actually damper than ours. Maybe your clothes smelled bad too, and the dress was just covering it up."

The desperation in her voice made my chest ache.

"I worked up the courage to walk past you," she said. "Squeezed by on the stairs, keeping my head down, praying you wouldn't notice me. And then I caught it—the scent of laundry detergent. Fresh and clean and nothing like the musty smell that clung to everything I owned. "

She laughed, but it sounded more like a sob.

"I went to school that day and I couldn't eat lunch. Couldn't eat dinner when I got home either. I just kept thinking about how different we were, even though we lived in the same building, walked down the same stairs. That night, I cried myself to sleep."

"Lily—" I started, but she wasn't finished.

"My mother saw you once," she said, her voice taking on a harder edge. "Saw you with your grandmother in the garden. She came back upstairs and told me I looked like you. "

She took a step toward me, and I saw something fierce and wounded in her eyes.

"Your grandmother said the same thing to my mother once. " Lily's voice cracked. "They both thought it was funny. This cute little coincidence."

The air in the room felt thick, oppressive.

"So tell me, Emma," Lily said, her voice rising. "If we looked alike, then why? Why did you get the life you got, and I got stuck with mine?"

The question hung between us, raw and unanswerable.

"Why did you get a grandmother who made you beautiful dresses and braided your hair and gave you a safe, warm place to grow up? While I got an attic that leaked and clothes that smelled like mold and a mother who worked herself to exhaustion just to keep us from being homeless?"

Her voice broke completely, and she turned away, her shoulders shaking.

"While I got nothing," she finished in a whisper. "While just staying alive has taken everything I have. "

The silence that followed was suffocating.

"I can't change the past," I said quietly. "And Lily, my life—it hasn't been the fairy tale you think it was. You saw the white dress and the shiny shoes, but you didn't see everything else. You didn't see my mother remarrying a man who resented me, or being sent away because I didn't fit into their new family. You didn't see me working multiple jobs to help pay for college, or the nights I cried myself to sleep too."

I took a breath, steadying myself.

"Everyone has their own struggles to face. Different struggles, yes, but pain isn't a competition. And whatever hardships we've endured—they can't become an excuse to hurt other people."

"Maybe not," she agreed. "But it would feel fair."

The honesty of it—the stark admission that she wanted me to hurt the way she'd been hurt—left me momentarily speechless.