The Version That Never Was: Renee, Portland, and a Loaded Choice

Some scenes die quietly in notebooks. Others claw their way to the surface again and again, demanding to be seen… even if only in candlelight.

In one of the earliest, darkest branches of Mad Honey, Renee made the wrong choice.

She didn’t go to rehab.
She went back home with Mason.

He met her at the hospital in a the same ‘‘Will you…?” T-Shirt he wore to propose and ask her to prom, clutching flowers like a bribe. His smile was stitched together with apologies he never meant. She was fragile, drugged and aching, such easy prey for someone who knew how to exploit trauma bonding coated in nostalgia.
“You don’t need rehab,” he murmurs. “You need rest. You need familiar things. You need me.”

And so she did.

She’s still foggy with pain meds. Her body screams when she moves. Her thoughts come slower than they should. Mason counts on that.
Because whatever he’s planning, he knows the clock is ticking.

At night, while Renee sleeps under layers of numbed exhaustion, Mason moves through the apartment like a shadow.

A length of rope disappears into a duffel bag.
A roll of duct tape.
A camcorder.
A shovel in the trunk.

He’s not sure how he’ll do it yet. But he knows why.
Because if she remembers, like really remembers, what he did after the crash, it’s over. And if he can’t have her…

He tells her he’s running to the store. Say’s he’ll back in twenty.

That’s when the window creaks open.

Renee bolts upright, breath caught in her throat. The man climbing through isn’t Mason, it’s someone she doesn’t recognize.
Soaked from the Portland rain, wild-eyed, breathless.
“You probably don’t remember me,” he says. “But I’m Anita’s brother, Nick. I’ve been looking for you.”

She fumbles for her phone. “You broke into my house—”

“You’re not safe here.”

Nick doesn’t get to finish before the front door slams open.

Mason’s home.

And he sees red.

“What the fuck is he doing in here?” he snarls, eyes cutting straight to Renee. “That’s the stalker. He’s the one who posted the photos. The bachelor party, you remember that, don’t you?”

Nick steps in front of her.

“You left her bleeding on the road, Mason. I know who picked you up after you walked away.”

“You’re insane.”

And then… violence.

Nick swings first. Mason fights back harder. The two men crash into furniture, knock over the lamp, fists flying. Renee screams, half in pain, half in fury. She crawls with her casted leg to the dresser. Finds Mason’s gun in the bottom drawer where he keeps everything he thinks she’ll never look for.

She holds it with shaking hands.

One of them would die.
She had seconds to choose.

The man who left her for dead and made her question her sanity.
Or the man who claimed to love her, but never told her the truth that might’ve saved her before she bled.

The trigger was slick with sweat.

She pulled it.

This scene never made it into the final manuscript, but the choice haunted me. It still does.

Renee never needed saving. She was the reckoning.
But in this version…
What did it cost her to become it?

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