My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 215

Chapter 215

“I am trying to help you!”

“I don’t want your help!” she shrieked, her voice breaking, reaching a pitch that made my blood cold, “I don’t want your pity scripts or your genius brain looking at me like I’m a broken toy! You want to know the pattern, Raphael? You want the real problem?”

She surged forward, her face inches from mine.

“The letters dance! They flip and they spin and I can’t make them stop! I’m a mess! I’m a stupid, broken bitch who can’t even read a goddamn server log without ruining everything! I’m the girl who’s only good for one thing because my brain is a fucking scrambled disaster!”

She let out a sharp, pathetic laugh that made my chest tighten.

“That’s why I was on that stage. That’s why I strip. Because it’s the only thing I’m good for. I love to dance, I’m good at ballet, so I took the only path for a girl with a brain that’s basically a black hole. It would have been better for everyone—especially you—if you’d just looked at me that night and kept on walking. You wasted your time saving a girl who was never worth the effort of being found.”

The silence that followed was loud. She was panting, her chest heaving against my hands, her eyes wide and terrified. She looked at me like she expected me to laugh.

Then came the first sob. It wasn’t loud, it was a small, hitched breath that shuddered through her entire frame.

“I’m dyslexic,” she whispered, “And dysgraphic. I’ve always been… I was born with a brain that just doesn’t work like yours.”

Her hands, still trapped in mine, stopped fighting and just hung there, trembling.

She dropped her hands, her face going cold and vacant as she stared at the pavement. The light had completely gone out of her.

“Then I got here,” she whispered, “I saw you. I saw what a real mind looks like, how fast you are, how effortless it is for you. And the fantasy just… died.”

She looked at me then, her eyes searching mine for a truth I wasn’t ready to give.

“The fairy tale is over, Raphael. I was never going to be the girl who made it. I’m never going to be good enough for anything, am I? Not for this job, not for this life… and definitely not for someone like you.”