5: WHAT ABOUT WHAT?

Layla's pov

Three days passed in a blur of pain and doubt.

My breasts leaked and ached and I had to bind them tight to stop the constant reminder that my body thought I still had a baby to feed, thought my daughter was waiting somewhere for milk that would never reach her.

I stopped calling the hospital.

Stopped asking questions that nobody wanted to answer.

Took the medication Claudia left for me because it made everything fuzzy and distant and I was so tired of thinking, so tired of the endless loop of questions in my head.

Maybe they were right.

Maybe grief had broken something in my brain that made me see conspiracies where there were none, made me imagine things that didn't happen.

I spent most of my time on the couch staring at nothing while the medication wrapped everything in cotton, made the world feel muffled and far away.

Claudia came by every day with food I didn't eat and sympathy I didn't want, sat beside me and talked about healing and moving forward and letting go.

"You need to start thinking about the future," she said on the third day while unpacking groceries I hadn't asked for. "Maybe going back to work soon, getting back into a routine."

"I don't want to think about the future," I said and my voice came out flat and empty through the medication fog.

"I know but you can't stay like this forever," she arranged things in my refrigerator with quick efficient movements. "You're young, you have your whole life ahead of you, eventually you'll be ready to try again."

Try again.

Like my daughter was a failed experiment, like I could just replace her with another baby and everything would be fine.

"I need to go to the bathroom," I said because I couldn't listen to her anymore, couldn't hear her talk about my future like my present wasn't still drowning in questions nobody would answer.

I locked the bathroom door and sat on the edge of the tub with my head in my hands, listening to Claudia move around my apartment like she owned it.

When I came back out she was on her phone, her back to me, voice low and tense.

"I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this," she was saying. "She's asking too many questions and eventually someone is going to slip up."

I froze in the hallway, my heart suddenly pounding despite the medication trying to keep everything numb.

"No I can't just," Claudia stopped, listened. "Fine, but if this blows up it's not on me."

She hung up and turned around, jumped slightly when she saw me standing there.

"Oh, you scared me," she said with a laugh that sounded forced. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Who were you talking to?" I asked.

"Just work," she said quickly, too quickly, shoving her phone into her purse. "Boring administrative stuff."

"You said someone might slip up," I took a step closer and watched her face carefully. "Slip up about what?"

"About a project deadline," Claudia moved toward the door, suddenly in a hurry to leave. "I really need to go actually, I have a meeting in twenty minutes."

"Claudia," I said and something in my voice made her stop. "What's going on?"

"Nothing is going on," she said while pulling on her jacket. "You're reading too much into a work conversation because the medication is making you paranoid."

"I'm not paranoid," I said but even as the words came out I wasn't sure if they were true, wasn't sure if I could trust my own perceptions anymore.

Claudia turned back to face me fully, her expression softening into something that looked almost like pity.

"Layla," she said gently while taking a step closer. "I'm worried about you, this fixation on finding hidden meanings in everything isn't healthy."

"I just heard you say—"

"You heard a work call that you interpreted through the lens of grief and medication," she cut me off, her voice still gentle but firm. "This is exactly what Dr Mitchell warned about, this paranoia, this inability to distinguish between reality and your trauma response."

I wanted to argue but the medication made my thoughts slow and sticky, made it hard to hold onto what I knew I'd heard.

"I'm not paranoid," I said again but my voice came out weaker this time.

Claudia sat down on the couch and patted the cushion beside her, waited until I sat down before taking my hands in hers.

"Listen to me," she said while looking directly into my eyes. "You've been through something terrible and you're trying to make sense of it by creating patterns where there aren't any, by turning normal conversations into conspiracies."

"But—"

"I love you," she said and squeezed my hands. "You're my best friend and it's killing me to watch you torture yourself like this, to see you spiraling into this dark place where you can't trust anyone or anything."

Tears started running down my face because what if she was right, what if I really was losing my mind, what if grief had broken me so completely that I couldn't tell what was real anymore.

"I don't know what's real," I whispered.

"I know," Claudia pulled me into a hug and stroked my hair. "That's why I think you need to get away from here, away from this apartment and this city and all the reminders of what happened."

I pulled back and looked at her, tried to focus through the fog in my brain.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean leave," she said. "Start over somewhere new, somewhere you don't have to walk past the hospital every day or see baby things in every store window."

"Leave where?"

"Anywhere," Claudia stood and started pacing, her movements excited now like she'd just solved a problem. "Paris maybe, or London, somewhere completely different where you can rebuild your life without all this weight dragging you down."

"I can't just leave," I said.

"Why not?" She turned to face me. "What's keeping you here? Your parents are gone, you lost your job at the university, you don't have any other family or close friends."

Each word was true but hearing them laid out like that made me feel even more hollow, even more alone.

"You have your parents' life insurance money," Claudia continued. "You could sell this apartment and have enough to start fresh somewhere new, somewhere nobody knows what happened, somewhere you could just be Layla again instead of the girl who lost her baby."

I stared at her while my mind tried to process what she was suggesting, tried to understand why she was pushing so hard for me to leave.

"Think about it," she said while sitting back down beside me. "Every day you stay here you're going to be reminded of what you lost, you're going to keep calling the hospital and asking questions that are only going to make you feel worse."

"But what about—" I stopped because I didn't even know what I was going to say, what argument I had against leaving when everything here hurt.

"What about what?" Claudia asked gently. "There's nothing here for you anymore Layla, nothing but pain and memories you need to let go of."

"The death certificate," I said and grabbed onto this one concrete thing. "I need to wait for the death certificate."

"They'll mail it to you," Claudia said. "Or I can collect it for you and send it wherever you end up, you don't need to stay here for paperwork."

She made it sound so simple, so easy, like I could just walk away from everything and start over somewhere new.

"I don't know," I said.

"You don't have to decide right now," Claudia stood and gathered her purse. "Just think about it okay? Think about what staying here is doing to you, how you're barely functioning, how every day is just more pain."

She kissed my forehead and headed for the door, paused with her hand on the knob.

"Paris would be good for you," she said. "Fresh start, beautiful city, far enough away that you could actually heal instead of staying trapped in this nightmare."

She left and I sat on the couch in the too quiet apartment, her words echoing in my head.

Leave.

Start over.

Let go.

Maybe she was right.

Maybe staying here was making everything worse, maybe I needed distance to heal, maybe running away was the only way to survive this.

I looked around my apartment at the bassinet and the changing table and all the things I'd bought for a baby who would never use them, looked at the walls that felt like they were closing in on me.

What was keeping me here?

Nothing but questions nobody would answer and pain that never stopped and the crushing weight of a loss I couldn't make sense of.

I picked up my phone and started searching for flights to Paris, started looking at how much it would cost to just leave everything behind and become someone else somewhere else.

The medication made everything feel distant and manageable, made the idea of running away seem less like cowardice and more like survival.

Maybe Claudia was right.

Maybe I needed to leave.