The Chapter That Sat in my Throat
There are chapters you write with your hands.
And then there are chapters that write you.
Chapter Three of Yours, Theirs, Still—“Dusted Paint and Come”—was the latter.
It wasn’t the most explicit. It didn’t have the sharpest plot turn. But it wrecked me. Quietly. Deeply. All the way into the throat.
It’s the chapter where Elias comes home to sheets that still smell like someone else. Where he washes away the evidence of a love that isn’t cruel—just no longer his. Where Lina, his best friend, doesn’t meet him with coldness, but with a truth he wasn’t ready to hold.
Their tenderness has changed.
Their intimacy has… thinned.
And the tragedy isn’t in betrayal. It’s in misalignment.
Writing through emotional grief means honoring the story even when it mirrors your own too closely. This chapter did. It mirrored something of my own life—something unspoken but real. A shared space that slowly stopped being ours. A softness that remained, even as the wanting disappeared.
Writing it felt like placing my palms flat against a memory.
Not to change it. Just to say:
“Yes. This happened. And I survived it.”
Sometimes the deepest grief isn’t loud.
Sometimes it just lingers in the laundry.
And sometimes, writing through emotional grief is the only way to let it leave your body.
—R.
What’s Next in Yours, Theirs, Still?
The next book in the Tethered series picks up in the quiet wreckage of longing. Yours, Theirs, Still follows Elias as he becomes essential and invisible—claimed by desire, yet unmoored in love. Alaric returns, indifferent and consuming. Nico pulls Elias deeper into chaos. And Lina? She drifts—thriving sexually, painting Elias’s absence in color. As power shifts and sensual bonds fracture, the question is no longer “Who do you love?” but “Who owns you when everyone does?”
📖 Read the first book in the Tethered series – His, Theirs, Enough – Available now on Kindle
🧷 About Rowan Thornwell – Learn more about the author and the stories that haunt him
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