Chapter four_ whatever this is.

CAMILLE

He didn't ask if I wanted him to drive me,he just drove.

I hadn't even made it past the gate before his car pulled alongside me, headlights cutting through the dark, window already rolling down like he'd been waiting for exactly this.

 I got in without arguing, mostly because my legs had stopped being reliable enough to argue with anyone.

Neither of us spoke for the first few minutes. I watched the city blur past the window, streetlights sliding over his hands on the wheel, steady in a way nothing else in my life felt steady right now, and I found myself grateful for the silence in a way I wouldn't have expected from him two days ago.

"You're doing the thing," he said finally, not looking at me.

"What thing?"

"Deciding you're alone in this before anyone's given you a reason to."

I almost laughed, except nothing about tonight felt funny. 

"Maybe I've learned that it's safer."

"Maybe." He glanced at me, quick, and it was gone before I could read it properly

"Or maybe you've just never had anyone worth testing that theory on."

I didn't have an answer for that. I turned back to the window instead, watching the rain start to streak sideways across the glass, and let the quiet between us stretch into something that didn't feel uncomfortable anymore.

The hallway outside my mother's room had the particular stillness hospitals get after midnight, machines humming somewhere, a cart wheel squeaking two floors down, everything hushed like the building itself was holding its breath. I sat with my knees pulled up against the plastic chair, and Zack sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, not quite.

"You don't have to stay," I told him, for the third time that night.

"I'm aware."

"Then why are you still here?"

He considered the question longer than I expected, like it deserved an actual answer instead of something easy. 

"Because you looked like you were about to fall down at that gate, and I wasn't interested in finding out what happened next if I'd driven away."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have right now."

Something about the way he said it ... .quiet, almost reluctantly, like the honesty cost him something,made my chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with my mother down the hall.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You're going to,whether I agree or not."

"Fair." I pulled my knees in tighter. "Do you ever just... let yourself feel something? Without turning it into a decision first?"

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer at all.

"No," he said finally. "Not usually."

"Why not?"

"Because feelings are inconvenient. They don't follow logic. I've built an entire life around things I can predict and control, and feeling something for no strategic reason doesn't fit anywhere in that." He looked at me then, properly, in a way that made it hard to hold his gaze and harder to look away from it. "Which is a problem, currently."

My breath caught somewhere it had no business catching. "Why is it a problem?"

"Because I've been doing it anyway. For days now. And I don't know what to do with that."

The hallway felt very small all of a sudden, the space between us smaller still. I could feel the warmth radiating off him, could see the exact moment his eyes dropped, briefly, to my mouth before he caught himself and looked away, jaw tightening like he was reeling something back in by force.

"Zack….”

"Don't." He said it low, almost rough. "If you say my name like that again, I'm going to do something I probably shouldn't do in a hospital hallway."

I should have looked away but I didn't. 

"Maybe I want you to."

His hand found mine on the armrest between us, slow, like he was giving me every opportunity to pull back before he committed to it. I didn't pull back. His thumb moved once, lightly, across my knuckles, and the simplicity of it undid something in me that two days of slaps and threats and cold orders hadn't managed to touch.

"Camille." My name in his voice sounded different than it ever had before,not an order, not a correction. Just my name, like it meant something to him to say it.

He leaned in, slow enough that I had a hundred chances to stop it and didn't take a single one of them, and for one suspended second I forgot entirely about hospitals and bills and everything waiting for me on the other side of this hallway.

"Miss Williams?"

We broke apart so fast I nearly knocked my own elbow against the chair. The nurse from earlier stood a few feet away, tablet in hand, her expression carefully arranged into something professional and unreadable.

"Yes…. sorry….. is everything alright with my mother?"

"She's stable. That's not why I'm here, actually." She hesitated, glancing briefly at Zack before deciding, apparently, that whatever she had to say didn't require privacy. 

"The toxicology results came back on the medication reaction. I wanted to flag something before the attending physician speaks with you in the morning."

"Flag what?"

"The reaction doesn't match anything in what was actually prescribed to her." She said it carefully, like she'd rehearsed exactly how much to say and no more. 

"Whatever caused this, it wasn't the medication on her chart."

The hallway, which had felt so warm and small a moment ago, went suddenly and completely cold.

"I don't understand," I said slowly. "If it wasn't her medication, then what was it?"

The nurse's eyes flicked to Zack again, longer this time, something uneasy passing behind them.

"That," she said, "is what we're trying to figure out."

My phone buzzed in my pocket before I could ask anything else. An unknown number. A single message with no name attached.

You should ask who visited your mother the night before she collapsed.

I looked up at Zack, and whatever softness had lived on his face thirty seconds ago had already hardened into something sharp and unreadable, his eyes fixed on my phone like he already knew, somehow, that whatever came next was going to be a great deal worse than either of us was prepared for.