Chapter Six

I woke up already reaching for my phone.

It was a small thing, the kind of habit that doesn't ask permission before it happens. My hand found the nightstand before my eyes had even opened all the way, fingers closing around the phone like they'd done every morning for two years, expecting the same small glow waiting there. Good morning. Or a complaint about traffic. Or nothing important at all — just proof that I existed somewhere in his day.

There was nothing.

I lay there staring at the blank screen for longer than I want to admit, and it took me a full minute to understand what had actually woken something sharp and unfamiliar in my chest. Not the empty screen itself. The fact that I'd been expecting it to be full. Twelve hours after telling him I was done, some stubborn, unlearned part of me was still waiting for him to prove I hadn't meant it.

I set the phone down without checking it again. That felt like its own small victory, even if nothing about the rest of the day was going to feel like one.

• • •

I made it to my nine o'clock lecture, though I couldn't have told you a single thing that was said in it. I copied notes off the board because my hand knew how to do that without my mind being present for the instructions. Someone made a joke near me and the row laughed, and I laughed half a second late, the way you do when you're following along with something happening just out of reach.

Neriah caught my arm outside the lecture hall. "You look like you're underwater."

"I'm fine."

"You don't have to be fine today. Nobody's grading you on it."

I managed something close to a smile. "Noted."

She didn't push, which I was grateful for, because I didn't actually have anything true to give her if she had. I wasn't sad exactly. Sadness would have required feeling something specific enough to name. What I had instead was a kind of static — low and constant, humming under everything, making the whole day feel like it was happening on the other side of glass.

Walking between buildings, I noticed things I usually didn't. A couple sharing headphones on a bench. A boy running to catch up with his girlfriend, calling her name until she turned around laughing. Small, ordinary proof that other people's lives were still moving forward in the usual ways, while mine seemed to be holding perfectly still, waiting for instructions nobody was going to give me anymore.

• • •

At the café that afternoon, I underfilled an order twice and didn't notice until a customer pointed it out, polite but visibly annoyed. My manager gave me a look that used to make my stomach drop and now just registered as one more thing happening to someone standing roughly where I was.

I kept working because the shift didn't end itself. I wiped down tables that were already clean. I refilled napkin dispensers that weren't empty. My body had apparently decided that motion was easier than stillness, so it kept finding tasks to justify staying upright. Somewhere around the third hour, a coworker asked if I was okay, and I said yes so automatically that I almost believed it myself, the way a lie becomes easier the more times your mouth practices it without your permission.

By the time I got to the hospital that evening, I'd stopped noticing that I was hungry. I only remembered when the smell of someone's dinner tray drifted past me in the hallway and my stomach twisted so hard I had to stop walking for a second.

Ephraim was propped up against his pillows, thinner than he'd been a month ago, but his eyes still found me the second I walked in, still lit in that particular way that had nothing to do with how tired he was.

"There's my girl," he said.

I sat beside him and let him take my hand, and for a moment the static quieted, just slightly, just enough to notice how loud it had been.

"You look tired," he said.

"I'm okay, Dad."

"You always say that." He studied my face with the kind of attention only he still gave me — not looking for what he wanted to see, just looking. "Something happened."

I told him, in pieces, careful not to let my voice do anything dramatic. He listened without interrupting, his thumb moving slowly across my knuckles the whole time, the same unhurried patience he'd given me my whole life.

"Good," he said, when I finished.

"Good?"

"You deserved better than someone who made you doubt yourself." He squeezed my hand, weaker than he used to, but the intention behind it was exactly the same as it had always been. "I just wish it hadn't taken you this long to see it."

I didn't say what I was thinking — that some people spend their whole lives mistaking exhaustion for proof they're trying hard enough. I just let him hold my hand until visiting hours ended, grateful for one place in my life where love had never once required me to earn it.

Walking out of the hospital afterward, the parking lot lights buzzing overhead, I felt the loneliness catch up with me all at once, like it had been waiting patiently a few steps behind for the right moment to close the distance. My father's love was steady and real, but it lived inside a body that was growing smaller and more tired by the week. Neriah's love was fierce, but it wasn't the kind that could sit beside me at eleven at night when the apartment went quiet. There was a specific shape of company I didn't have anymore, and no amount of being loved in other ways seemed to fill it.

• • •

Rhydian was in the study lounge when I got back to campus, alone at a table stacked with papers, and he looked up before I'd even fully stepped through the door — like some part of him had been listening for the sound of me arriving.

"You look like you haven't eaten," he said. No greeting first. Just the observation, plain and unbothered.

"I've eaten."

"When?"

I opened my mouth to answer and realized, with a small, embarrassed jolt, that I couldn't actually remember. Breakfast felt like it belonged to a different day entirely.

He didn't make it a bigger moment than it needed to be. He just reached into his bag, pulled out a granola bar he'd clearly been saving for himself, and slid it across the table without a word, going back to his notes like he hadn't just noticed something about me that I hadn't noticed myself.

I ate it slowly, watching him work, grateful in a way I didn't fully have words for. He didn't ask what was wrong. He didn't offer advice or sympathy shaped like a performance. He just made sure I wasn't running on empty, and let the rest of it be mine to carry in my own time.

"Thank you," I said, once the wrapper was empty.

He glanced up, something almost amused in his expression. "For a granola bar?"

"For not making it complicated."

Something shifted behind his eyes — brief, unreadable, gone before I could name it. "You've had enough complicated for one week," he said, and went back to his notes, and I sat there a little longer than I needed to, unwilling to let go of how simple it felt to just exist near someone who didn't want anything from me.

I stayed at that table longer than I meant to, pretending to read a chapter I'd already read twice, mostly just borrowing the quiet of him being there. He never asked me to explain myself. He never filled the silence with something that needed managing. It occurred to me, watching him underline a sentence with the same careful attention he seemed to give everything, that I had spent two years with someone who made silence feel dangerous, and one evening with someone who made it feel like rest.

• • •

My phone buzzed at eleven that night, right as I was finally starting to feel tired enough to sleep.

I almost didn't look. Then I did, because some habits take longer than a day to unlearn, and the static that had followed me through the whole day sharpened suddenly into something with an edge.

Valerian: We need to talk. Meet me tonight.

I sat there in the dark, phone glowing against my palms, and read it three times like the words might rearrange themselves into something less certain. Twelve hours ago I had told him goodbye and meant it with everything I had left. Now here he was, five words in, acting like none of that had happened at all — like the door I'd closed so carefully hadn't closed at all, just swung a little, waiting for him to walk back through whenever it suited him.

I didn't answer right away.

I just sat there, staring at the screen, feeling the static under my skin turn into something closer to dread.