Chapter 30 Loving Me #5
Celeste ignored him and adjusted Bramwell's blanket, then smoothed his hair back from his forehead with practiced tenderness.
"Have you eaten?"
"Yes."
"A proper meal?"
"I'm over thirty."
"That wasn't the question."
Martin crouched slightly to examine the sling.
"Can you move your fingers?"
"Yes."
"Good."
Then he rose and turned to me with sudden brightness.
"Tea? Coffee? Something stronger than either after meeting this family?"
I shook my head automatically.
"No matter," he said kindly. "You can change your mind at any time. We run a very flexible establishment."
Celeste was already halfway to the kitchen.
"There's soup on the stove, fruit in the bowl, and cake. Sit wherever you like, darling."
I did not answer. Neither of them seemed to notice in the least, or if they did, they treated silence as naturally as speech. Bramwell watched me carefully from the couch, seeing more than the others did.
His mother sat beside him and pressed a kiss to his temple.
"My brave boy."
"Mum," he said wearily.
"You frightened us."
"I am fine," he said.
Martin squeezed Bramwell's shoulder very carefully.
"You did well," he said quietly.
Something in Bramwell softened at once.
The room filled with easy movement after that.
Celeste brought me tea I had not requested and placed it in my hands as though warmth itself might help.
Martin sliced bread and told an elaborate story about getting lost in Lisbon because Celeste trusted a man who "looked musical.
" Celeste denied this entirely while feeding Bramwell spoonfuls of soup he protested he could manage alone.
Affection moved through the room constantly and without embarrassment.
Celeste touched Bramwell's face when she passed him, straightened his collar, kissed the air toward him when her hands were full.
Martin checked his medication times, refilled his water, and slipped a cushion behind his back without interrupting conversation.
Bramwell complained through all of it with the unmistakable ease of someone who had always been loved enough to protest safely.
I watched them and felt something begin to tighten inside me.
It happened quietly at first.
The room was warm, but my skin went cold. Their laughter became too bright. Every gentle touch that landed naturally on him seemed to strike somewhere closed inside me and echo there. They loved him so openly, so casually, with no bargaining, no caution, no cost attached.
My breathing changed. I tried to hide it, but Celeste looked at me immediately.
"Oh sweetheart," she said softly. "Are you all right?"
The kindness of it broke whatever thin control I still had. I stood too quickly, the room tilting with me.
"I—"
Of course I was going to embarrass myself. Of course the words stopped where panic began. Bramwell straightened despite the pain that crossed his face.
"April?"
I shook my head, grabbed my bag, and fled before anyone could touch me or ask another question.
I ran down the stairs, across the pavement, past parked cars and narrow streets, my breath tearing loose in my chest. I kept running until the buildings thinned and the path near the forest opened ahead of me.
Only then did I stop. I bent forward with my hands on my knees and began crying so suddenly it felt like being struck from the inside. There was no single reason for it.
Nothing had happened and yet everything had happened.
I sank onto a fallen log and cried harder because I could not understand what I was grieving. Their kindness had opened some locked room in me. The sight of love given freely, repeatedly, and without fear or transaction had left me feeling split open and unbearably sad.
Then anger came with it, at them for having what looked effortless, at myself for resenting tenderness, and at old hungers that still lived in me.
I called my therapist. She answered on the second ring.
"April?"
I could not speak. My throat locked so completely it hurt. I heard her wait through my silence and the inability to explain what was happening made frustration surge through me.
I ended the call. A moment later my phone lit with a message.
"Meet me now if you need me. No need to talk first. Just come."
I stared at the words until they blurred.
Then I ordered a taxi because I did not trust myself to drive. In the back seat, while the city slid past the windows in streaks of light, I opened the notes app on my phone and began typing everything I could not say.
I hate that I don't understand why I'm this sad. Why does something beautiful feel like pain. Why on earth am I so angry?
Chapter 22: Malachite
I could not sleep that night.
Therapy had helped in the practical sense.
I had written everything I could not say, and my therapist had read it all.
She spoke gently about grief that does not always recognize itself, about how witnessing tenderness can awaken the pain of never having received it, about the body mourning things the mind learned long ago to dismiss.
"There is a name for some of this," she said softly. "Attachment grief. Sometimes disenfranchised grief as well, grief for something you needed but never truly had, which means people often do not recognize it as grief at all."
She turned one of my pages over and continued. "When people grow up without safe affection, seeing it later can trigger what we call emotional flashbacks. Nothing dangerous is happening in the present, but the nervous system responds to old deprivation, old fear, and old loneliness."
Then she looked at me with steady kindness. "You are not upset because their love was wrong. You are upset because it showed your body what was missing."
She paused before adding, "Sometimes the anger comes with it. Anger is often grief that has finally found enough strength to move."
I understood everything she said, but understanding did not soothe me.
By midnight the walls of my house felt too near. I put on a sweater, took my keys out of habit, then put them back down when I remembered I had nowhere to go. The night air was cool and clean.
I walked without deciding to, following the familiar path into the lightly lit woods I always ended up in when I needed quiet.
It was close to home, safe, and familiar.
I reached a clearing where an old fallen log rested beside the path, worn smooth by time.
I sat there with my elbows on my knees, looking into the dark as though it might explain me back to myself.
I heard him before I saw him.
Not footsteps exactly, but a muttered curse followed by the unmistakable sound of someone trying to appear uninjured while being very much injured.
I turned.
Bramwell emerged from the trees with one arm still in a sling and his jacket hung open. His hair looked as though the wind had taken a personal dislike to it.
He stopped when he saw my expression.
"I'd like it noted," he said, slightly breathless, "that this was more graceful in theory."
I stared at him. He came closer, favoring one side despite every effort to disguise it.
"You vanish dramatically," he continued, "and I am left to either respect your need for space or ignore several medical instructions and limp into the woods after you. As you can see, I made the emotional choice."
He lowered himself onto the log beside me with a careful exhale that betrayed the effort.
For a while neither of us spoke.
The forest kept its own quiet around us. Leaves shifted overhead. Somewhere nearby, water moved over stone. Then he said, without looking at me, "I waited for you to come back. You didn't answer your phone."
I bowed my head.
"Sorry."
The word scraped on its way out. He turned at once.
"No."
I looked at him. "I won't have that from you, April."
The softness in his voice made the refusal firmer rather than gentler.
''You do not owe anyone an apology for being overwhelmed, and you do not owe anyone an apology for leaving a room where you did not feel comfortable.
I saw your face before you left. You were not rude, April.
You could never be. You are one of the purest souls I know.
You were simply going through something, and that was clear to anyone willing to see it. ''
Something in my chest tightened sharply. He rested his good hand on the wood between us.
"I don't really know your whole story, April, but I know enough to see you've been carrying something heavy. We all are, in different ways. I may not understand it yet, but I want to try."
I kept my eyes lowered because meeting kindness directly was still difficult.
"My parents adored you within thirty seconds, by the way," he continued. "My mother was absolutely convinced you looked like someone out of an old warrior tale, strong and beautiful, while you were still in the hallway."
He smiled, then grew quieter. I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the small notebook I sometimes carried. My hands shook slightly as I tore out a page, then another when I realized one would not be enough.
Bramwell said nothing. He only waited.
I wrote for a long time while the night moved around us.
I wrote about the silence that had become permanent after childhood taught me speech could be dangerous or useless.
I wrote about doors closed between me and the world, about learning to disappear in rooms where I was unwanted.
I wrote about how my voice just disappears.
I wrote about Ellis too. I did not give Bramwell the details of what happened, only that Ellis had hurt me in a way I had never fully been able to move past. I wrote that he had once been good to me, kinder than I knew how to receive, until he wasn't. I wrote about how he has been trying to make me forgive him for months now, and how I can't. I wrote that he has been learning about my condition and trying to be there for me, but I am still trapped in that moment, repeating it like a loop.