Chapter Eight

It started with a phone call I almost didn't take.

"We're cutting your hours," my manager said, not unkindly, just tired, the way people get when they've had to say something difficult too many times that week. "It's not personal. We just don't have the volume right now."

I said I understood. I didn't, not really, not with rent already tight and my savings thinner than they'd been in months. But there wasn't time to sit with it, because my phone buzzed again before I'd even put the first call down.

The hospital. A new charge on Ephraim's account, something insurance hadn't covered, a number large enough that I read it twice hoping I'd misunderstood the decimal point. I hadn't.

Then the university portal lit up — a notice about a missed f*e deadline, my name flagged, a warning that my enrollment could be affected if it wasn't resolved by Friday.

Then Valerian.

I know you're avoiding me. This isn't over just because you want it to be.

Four things. One after another, no space between them to breathe. I stood in the middle of the quad with my phone buzzing itself into silence in my hand, and something in me simply stopped trying to process any of it individually. It all became one shapeless weight instead, too heavy to sort into pieces.

I remember strange details from that exact minute — a group of students laughing somewhere behind me, the smell of someone's coffee drifting past, a bicycle bell ringing twice. The ordinary world kept moving around me at its usual speed while something inside me quietly stopped keeping pace with it. I remember thinking, distantly, that I should probably sit down somewhere. I don't remember choosing not to.

• • •

I don't remember deciding to walk away from campus. I just remember walking, past the gates, past the bus stop, past the point where I should have turned back, my feet moving on some instinct that had nothing to do with a destination. The noise in my head didn't quiet with distance. If anything, it got louder — money, Ephraim, Valerian's name lighting up my screen, the sound of my manager's tired voice, all of it folding over itself until I couldn't tell which worry belonged to which problem anymore.

I ended up by the river at the edge of town, where the path gave out into overgrown grass and nobody had a reason to be after dark. I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough that the cold stopped registering as cold and started registering as nothing at all. Long enough that my phone, buzzing somewhere beside me, stopped sounding like anything urgent.

I wasn't thinking clearly. I want to be honest about that, because I think it matters. I wasn't making decisions. I had simply run out of whatever it takes to keep functioning, and my body had brought me somewhere quiet and stopped, the way a machine shuts down when it's been pushed too far past what it was built to carry.

Somewhere in the fog of it, I thought of my father — not clearly, not as a full thought, just a fragment of his voice from some earlier visit. You don't have to carry everything, Zéphyrine. I remember almost laughing at that, a broken, silent thing that never made it past my throat, because carrying everything was the only version of myself I actually knew how to be.

I didn't hear him arrive.

• • •

"Zéphyrine."

His voice came from somewhere above me, low and careful, like he was approaching something that might startle. I didn't answer. I'm not sure I could have, even if I'd wanted to. My hands had gone stiff in my lap, and the part of me that usually knew how to respond to my own name simply didn't have anything left to offer.

He crouched down in front of me slowly, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him in the cold air, and for a long moment he didn't say anything else. He just looked at me, the way you'd look at something fragile you were afraid of breaking further by moving too fast.

Then he took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders, and the weight of it, the warmth of it, was the first thing that felt real in what might have been hours. He reached for my hands next, wrapping both of his around them, rubbing warmth back into fingers that had gone stiff and pale without my noticing. He didn't comment on how cold I'd let myself get. He just kept working the warmth back into them, patient, like it was the only task in the world that mattered right then.

"I'm here," he said. "You don't have to explain anything right now."

I don't know what I expected. Some part of me, the part trained by years of managing everyone else's reactions to my own exhaustion, braced for questions I wouldn't have the strength to answer. Why did you come all the way out here. Why didn't you call someone. Why didn't you think about how worried people would be. Why didn't you think about your father.

He didn't ask any of it.

He just sat down beside me on the cold ground, not touching me, just present, close enough that I could feel I wasn't alone anymore without him making it feel like a demand for anything in return.

"I got scared when you didn't answer," he said eventually, quiet. "Neriah said you weren't in your room. I just started walking places I thought you might go."

He didn't say how many places that had actually been, but I found out later — from Neriah, days afterward — that he'd checked the library, the café, the hospital waiting room, before someone finally mentioned they'd seen me walking toward the river road hours before. He'd been searching in the cold for the better part of an hour before he found me, and not once, in everything he said that night or after, did he make that search sound like a burden I owed him for.

I still couldn't find words. He didn't seem to need them. We sat there together as the cold settled deeper, until slowly, in pieces, my hands started remembering how to move again, my breath started finding a rhythm that didn't feel like drowning.

"I'm sorry," I finally managed, though I wasn't entirely sure what I was apologizing for.

"Don't." He said it firmly, the first firm thing he'd said all night. "You don't have anything to apologize for. Not this."

"I didn't mean to scare anyone."

"I know you didn't." His voice softened again, though the firmness stayed underneath it, steady as a hand on a railing. "You didn't do anything wrong by reaching a limit, Zéphyrine. Everyone has one. You just found yours alone, in the dark, because you've never let anyone close enough to help you carry it before now."

I didn't have an answer for that. I wasn't sure I'd fully understood it myself yet — that reaching a limit wasn't the same thing as failing, that needing help wasn't the debt I'd always assumed it was.

• • •

He walked me back slowly, one arm steady around me, matching his pace to whatever my legs could manage. Neither of us spoke much. I think we both understood that words weren't the thing that mattered right now — just the walking, just the warmth of his jacket, just the fact that someone had come looking.

The campus lights came into view eventually, distant and warm against the dark, and with each step closer to them I felt something in my chest loosen by degrees, like a fist slowly unclenching after holding on too tight for too long. I was aware, in some dim corner of myself, that I should have been embarrassed — a grown woman found sitting alone in the dark by a river, wrapped in someone else's coat because she'd forgotten how to hold herself together. The embarrassment didn't come. There wasn't room for it yet, not with everything else still settling.

Near the edge of campus, under a streetlight, he finally stopped and turned to face me properly, studying me in a way that felt less like concern and more like understanding settling into place.

"This wasn't just about him tonight, was it," he said. Not really a question. "The work stuff. Your dad. All of it."

I nodded, throat too tight to trust with words.

"You've been carrying all of that," he said slowly, like he was only now seeing the actual shape of something he'd been looking at sideways for weeks. "Not just Valerian. Everything. All at once. For a long time."

I didn't answer, because there wasn't anything to add. He'd already said the thing I hadn't let myself say out loud in longer than I could remember — that I hadn't just been surviving one bad relationship. I'd been surviving everything, alone, for so long that I'd forgotten what it felt like for the weight to be shared.

"How long?" he asked quietly.

I looked at him, and something in my silence must have answered clearly enough, because whatever he saw in my face made his jaw tighten, gentle concern hardening into something steadier, more resolved.

"Longer than I knew," he said, mostly to himself. "I should have seen it sooner."

"You couldn't have known. I'm good at hiding it."

"I know." Something in his voice caught, just slightly. "That's what worries me."

I didn't have the strength to tell him it wasn't his fault. I only had enough left to let him keep walking me home, his arm still around me, the cold night finally starting to feel survivable again.

I didn't fall asleep easily that night, even wrapped in blankets, even with the worst of the cold finally gone from my hands. But somewhere underneath the exhaustion, something had shifted that I didn't yet have words for — the quiet, unfamiliar knowledge that someone had come looking, and hadn't needed an explanation to know I was worth finding.