LOGINLoise' POV
I woke up and she was gone.
Not in the way people were gone when they went to the bathroom or the nurses' station or the café down the corridor for something that wasn't the hospital coffee. Gone in the way that had a di
Fletcher's POVShe had been quiet all day.Not her usual quiet, not the focused inward quiet of a child who was working through something in her head and would surface when she was ready. A different kind. The kind that had a temperature underneath it, that made her movements slower and her eyes less sharp and her drawing pad stay closed on the table beside her untouched from after breakfast until I noticed at three in the afternoon that she hadn't opened it once.I crouched beside her chair.
The room cost sixty dollars a night and had a window that faced the water.That was why I chose it. Not the price, not the distance from the city, not the fact that the woman at the front desk had asked no questions and handed me a key with the indifferent efficiency of someone who had seen enough people arrive at odd hours with one bag to have stopped wondering about the stories. The window. The water outside it, grey and constant and entirely unbothered by anything happening on the shore, and I needed something unbothered near me for a while.I had been here four days.My mother knew I was here. I had called her from the car on the way and
Loise' POVI woke up and she was gone.Not in the way people were gone when they went to the bathroom or the nurses' station or the café down the corridor for something that wasn't the hospital coffee. Gone in the way that had a different quality to it, a stillness in the room that was different from sleeping stillness, the specific absence of a presence that had been there and wasn't anymore.I lay on the cot for a moment and looked at the empty bed.The pillow still had the shape of her head in it.
Nicole's POVI waited until the hospital was at its quietest.That particular hour, somewhere between two and three in the morning, when the corridor outside reduced itself to one set of footsteps doing their rounds and the monitor beside me beeped into a silence that had texture to it, the specific texture of a building that had stopped pretending it was daytime.Fletcher was in the chair.He had fallen asleep in it, which I don't think he had planned to do, his head tipped slightly back and his arms crossed and his face doing the thing it did when he s
Nicole's POVLoise came in first.She climbed onto the edge of the bed without asking, which she had stopped asking permission for somewhere around day two of the hospital stay, and she opened her drawing pad to the page she had been keeping face-down for three days and held it out to me with both hands.I looked at it.The kitchen. Our kitchen, the morning one, the counter and the window with the garden behind it and the light coming in at the angle it came in at before seven when the day was still deciding what it wanted to be. She had drawn Fletcher at the counter with his coffee and his phone, and she had drawn me at the stove with my back sligh
Nicole's POVThey moved Loise at nine in the morning.Fletcher took her to get breakfast and the nurse came in after and checked my vitals and asked if I needed anything and I said no and she left and for the first time since I had opened my eyes to find Loise in the chair beside me, the room was empty.Just me.I lay there for a moment and listened to the empty and then I got up slowly, one hand on the bed rail, the headache reminding me of itself with the persistence of something that had decided it lived here now, and I made my way to the sink.
The Weight of Unspoken TruthsThe dinner plates clinked softly against each other as I cleared the table, the sound echoing in the quiet kitchen. Loise had barely touched her pasta, pushing the spirals around her plate while humming some tune she'd learned at school. The overhead light cast a warm
Christina's POV - 2 Hours EarlierChristina Walsh sat in the cramped motel room, staring at the burner phone in her trembling hands. Eloise was curled up on the bed behind her, finally asleep after crying herself into exhaustion. The sight of the little girl's tear-stained face made Christina's che
Daddy. What are you thinking so deeply about? Am I a burden to you?"The words hit me like bullets to the chest. Ten years old and she's asking me if she's a burden. Christ, what kind of father does that make me?I stared down at her pale face, those enormous eyes that seemed to see too much, know
When Everything Falls ApartThe morning started like any other—Loise's chatter filling the kitchen as I packed her lunch, her excitement about show-and-tell bubbling over as she described the seashell she'd chosen to bring. I braided her hair into two neat plaits, listening to her practice the stor







