All Chapters of Between Breathe And Goodbye: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Eliana woke to the sound of dishes.Not the violent clatter of a dropped plate, but the ordinary, methodical clinking of her mother unloading the dishwasher, slotting forks into their tray, sliding mugs onto the shelf with the quiet rhythm of someone who had done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more. The sound was so normal, so aggressively domestic, that Eliana lay still for a long moment, staring at the ceiling, convinced she had hallucinated the entire Realm. Perhaps she was still sixteen. Perhaps she had never driven the car. Perhaps Maya was still alive, still texting her about meeting at the diner, still breathing in the next room over.But the ceiling was wrong. She had painted it blue at fourteen, a sky full of clouds she had sponged on herself, but now it was white, the work of her mother in one of the years Eliana had stopped coming home. The room was the same and not the same. It was a museum of a girl who no longer existed.Eliana sat up.The compass s

The morning after the graveyard, Eliana’s mother made pancakes.They were terrible pancakes—burnt at the edges, raw in the center, the kind of culinary failure that came from a woman who had spent six years forgetting how to cook for someone else. She set them on the table with a defiance that dared Eliana to complain. Eliana ate three. They tasted like ash and love.“I have the appointment at ten,” her mother said, not looking at her. “The evaluation. Dr. Renner. I called in sick to work.”“You don’t have to come with me.”“I’m coming.”Eliana nodded. She understood, suddenly, that her mother was not just escorting her to a hospital. She was guarding her. She was afraid that if she let Eliana out of her sight, the world might open up and swallow her again, the way it had swallowed her on the road. The way the Realm had swallowed her.Eliana reached into her pocket. The compass was there, warm and patient. She didn’t open it. She just held it, feeling the shape of the lid, the engrave

The hospital corridors smelled the same as every hospital Eliana had ever known—antiseptic, institutional, scrubbed of the particular scents of life and death that might remind visitors of why they were there. But Dr. Renner’s office was on the third floor, in a wing reserved for outpatient psychiatry, and someone had tried to soften the effect. The walls were painted a pale green, like the inside of a leaf. The chairs were upholstered in fabric that didn’t squeak. There was a painting of a lighthouse on the wall, the kind of motivational image that was meant to suggest hope but mostly just looked lonely.Eliana sat on the edge of her chair. She didn’t touch the tissues. Her mother waited in the lobby, clutching a magazine she wasn’t reading, and Eliana could feel her anxiety through the walls like a radio tuned to the wrong frequency.Dr. Renner was sixtyish, with silver hair pulled back in a low bun and reading glasses that hung from a beaded chain around her neck. She had the look

And the road went on.The words echoed in Eliana’s mind like the last note of a song she couldn’t stop humming. The asphalt beneath her feet had felt solid, real, undeniable. She had touched the guardrail where Maya’s life had ended, and in that touch, she had found something she hadn’t known she was missing: permission. Permission to keep breathing. Permission to exist without her best friend’s ghost chained to her ankle. The wind had moved through the pine trees, and her mother had been waiting in the car, and the compass in her pocket had pointed west, toward home, toward the next hello, toward the possibility of a life that wasn’t defined entirely by absence.But before she could take another step, before she could open the car door and slide into the passenger seat and tell her mother that she was ready to go home, the world blinked.It was the only way to describe it. One moment she was standing on the shoulder of Highway 9, the gravel crunching under her shoes, the smell of pin

The stone beneath her feet screamed.Not a human scream. Something deeper and older, like the sound of mountains tearing themselves apart at the seams. Eliana grabbed the boy's wrist and yanked him backward, away from the widening fissure that was devouring the cavern floor. The compass slipped from his fingers and hit the ground with a sound like a bell being struck underwater. Light erupted from it—not the pale glow of the Realm, but something sharp, something that cut."Run!" Eliana shouted, though she didn't know where.The guide was already moving, his form dissolving at the edges, becoming a streak of silver and shadow that darted toward the far wall. She followed, dragging the boy with her, her free hand clawing at the air for balance as the ground pitched and rolled like a living thing trying to buck them off. A slab of stone the size of a car crashed down where they had been standing. Dust erupted in a choking cloud, and Eliana felt it pass through her—not around her, but th