Chapter 46 Miguel
FORTY-SIX
MIGUEL
By the time I’m back in Luis’s office, I feel like someone wrung me out and hung me over a space heater.
Same ugly carpet. Same plant in the corner that refuses to die.
The same soccer scarf over the back of the visitor chair.
None of it looks different, but I do. I have the hospital visitor tag on my sweatshirt, and Caleb’s blood is still trapped under one fingernail, stubborn as hell.
Luis watches me as I drop into the armchair. He doesn’t reach for his notebook right away. Just… waits.
“How’s your week been?” he asks, like we didn’t spend part of it texting about Caleb being in the ICU.
I laugh, and it comes out sharp. “You mean besides my boyfriend trying to die in our bedroom while I was sitting in this exact chair talking about trusting the fucking net?”
He doesn’t flinch. “Yes,” he says calmly. “We can start there.”
“Cool,” I say. “Then I’d rate it as… suboptimal.”
He huffs, a tiny almost-smile that doesn’t quite make it. “Walk me through it from your side.”
I stare at my hands, they look more or less normal. The bruise on my upper arm from slamming the door is a sick yellow under my sleeve. “We already walked it,” I say. “In the ER. On the phone. In the fucking ambulance.”
“That was triage,” he says. “This is processing. Humor me.”
He’s right. I hate that he’s right. I lean my head back against the chair and stare at the ceiling.
“I left him that morning,” I say. “He was… loud. Seven, maybe eight. He said seven. Told me he was tired. That his dad’s call was ‘a lot.’ That he didn’t have the word count for it yet.” I swallow. “I believed him. Or I decided to believe him.”
“You chose to trust what he said,” Luis says. “That’s different from blind belief.”
“Feels like the same thing,” I mutter.
“Keep going.”
I pick at a loose thread on my jeans. “I went to work. Tried not to think about it too hard. Checked my phone every ten minutes like a maniac. He texted once, a picture of his coffee and ‘studyingggg.’ No volume number.” I blow out a breath.
“Then I came here. Sat in this chair. Talked about how I was practicing net-thinking and not going full SWAT every time he sighed.”
My throat tightens. “While I was here, he was at home taking the pills.”
The room goes quiet for a second. The air feels thicker.
“You don’t know exactly when he took them,” Luis says gently.
“I know it was in that window,” I snap. “Between me patting myself on the back for not catastrophizing and me texting him a cute little ‘how’s stats going’ message, he was getting ready to die.”
The silence this time is heavier.
“What does that mean to you?” he asks.
“It means I missed it,” I say. The words are acid in my mouth.
“Again. First attempt, I was too busy being nineteen and stupid and pretending not to see his sleeves in the summer. This time, I was literally in therapy, talking about how I’m not God, while he was…
while he…” My voice cracks. “How fucked up is that, man? That’s some cosmic irony bullshit. ”
Luis lets that sit. He leans forward a little, elbows on his knees, fingers steepled. “I’m going to say something annoying,” he warns. “Ready?”
“No,” I say, narrowing my gaze. “Do it anyway.”
“You didn’t miss it,” he says. “You weren’t there for the exact moment, no.
But you noticed he was louder. You checked in.
You talked to him. You got scared when things felt off.
And when you came home and realized something was wrong, you acted.
Fast. You broke down the door. You called 911.
You stayed with him. That is not ‘missing it.’ That is responding. ”
I want to fling that back at him. Tell him how useless “responding” feels when you’re kneeling in blood and unswallowed pills. But the image of Caleb’s chest rising, shallow but steady, flashes in my brain.
“Bare minimum,” I mutter. “I did the bare minimum.”
“The bare minimum would’ve been nothing,” Luis says. “The bare minimum would’ve been shrugging off the locked door, assuming he was sleeping, and watching TV until it was too late. That’s not what you did.”
My stomach turns.
“Don’t,” I say hoarsely. “Don’t put THAT picture in my head.”
“I’m not,” he says. “Your brain is. Trust me, it had it loaded already. I’m just naming it so it doesn’t run the show in the dark.”
My palm runs over my stubble and my skin feels too tight.
“It still feels like I fucked up,” I say.
“We had the safety plan. We had the ‘tell someone when it’s an eight.’ We had the net.
And he still got that far. He still had time to—” My hand twitches, remembering the little line across his wrist. “What’s the point of all this if the net has that big of a hole in it? ”
“The point,” Luis says quietly, “is that the net caught him before he hit the ground.”
I bark out a laugh. “Yeah, I saw his bandage, alright? He hit something.”
“He hit,” Luis agrees. “He did damage. To himself. To you. To everyone who loves him. I’m not minimizing that. But he is alive. That’s the difference between ‘the net failed completely’ and ‘the net strained under a storm it wasn’t fully built for.’”
I roll my eyes. “Love a good metaphor hurricane.”
“You picked me,” he says. “You knew what you were getting.”
I stare at him, and the anger in my chest has teeth.
“I am so fucking mad,” I confess, the words bursting out.
“At him. At his mom’s ex. At the system.
At his dad. At myself. At you, a little bit.
At Dr. K. At fucking anybody who has ever told me, ‘You’re not the only line,’ because when it came down to it, it was still me on that floor with his blood on my hands. ”
Luis nods slowly. “There it is.”
“There what is?” I snap.
“The part we need to talk to,” he says. “The one that says, ‘If he lives or dies, it’s on me. My watch. My failure. My job.’”
“If I hadn’t come home when I did—”
“If the paramedics had gotten caught in traffic,” he counters. “If the doctor had been at the end of a double shift. If the nurse had missed something in the labs. There were a dozen variables between ‘attempt’ and ‘outcome.’ You are one of them. An important one. Not the only one.”
My jaw clenches. “Feels like a cop-out.”
“It feels like not being God,” he says simply.
I stare at the soccer scarf on the spare chair because looking at him hurts.
“What if I can’t do this?” I ask, barely above a whisper.
“What if I can’t watch him go that close to the edge again?
What if the net holds this time but not next time?
Or the time after that? What if this is our life forever, me waiting for him to go quiet, him trying not to, and both of us burning out? ”
“That’s not a hypothetical we can solve today,” he says. “What we can do is adjust the plan so you’re not doing this alone.”
I snort. “The plan that already apparently sucked?”
“Not sucked,” he says. “Incomplete. It was built on data from the first few years after his attempt. You two are different now. Your relationship is different. His triggers are different. We need a 2.0 version.”
Sitting with that thought for a minute. “So what,” I say. “More bullet points on the fridge?”
“Some of that,” he says. “But I also want a plan for you. Not just for him.”
I give him a look. “I’m fine.”
He actually laughs at that, a short, disbelieving sound. “Miguel, you’re shaking,” he says calmly.
I look down.
He’s right. My hands are vibrating like I stuck my fingers in a live socket.
“Cool,” I say. “So I’m fine but on vibrate.”
“Exactly,” he says. “You called me from the ER and told me you felt… what was the phrase?”
“Like someone scooped my organs out and left a Miguel-shaped balloon,” I mutter.
“Right,” he says. “That guy needs a plan too.”
I sigh, long and shaky. “Okay,” I say. “Fine. Hit me with the crisis manual, doc.”
He leans over to the side table and pulls out a yellow legal pad. The sight of it makes something in me unclench a fraction.
Lists.
I can do lists.
“Let’s start with your job in a crisis,” he says. “What are the things you did this time that you know were helpful?”
“Called 911,” I say. “Checked his breathing. Got the pill bottle. Stayed with him.”
He writes it down. “Good. Anything else?”
“Opened the door for the paramedics,” I say, picturing the red and blue flash on the walls. “Gave them as much info as I had. Rode in the ambulance. Answered the doctors’ questions.”
He nods, jotting. “Those are all supports. Now, what did you do that hurt you?”
I think of sleeping in the chair with my spine in knots. Of refusing to eat until Mom shoved a fucking torta into my hand and glared. Of staring at the monitors like if I looked away for one second, his heart would flatline out of spite.
“Didn’t sleep,” I say. “Didn’t eat. Didn’t leave the room unless someone physically moved me.”
Luis adds another column. “So. We want to keep the first list and not repeat the second.”
“Feels like if I’m not doing the second, I’m not doing enough,” I admit.
“That belief,” he says, tapping his pen on the pad, “is going in its own column: lies your burnout tells you.”
I roll my eyes. “Cute.”
“Accurate,” he counters. “Okay. Crisis Miguel, version 2.0. Step one: you notice red flags. Locked door. Silence. Scary texts. Volume numbers that don’t match behavior. What do you do first?”
“Check on him,” I say. “In person if I can.”
“Good,” he says. “Step two, if you suspect he’s in immediate danger?”
“Call 911,” I say automatically. I’ve heard the operator’s voice in my dreams since that night.
“Yes,” he says. “And while you’re on with emergency services?”
“I… stay with him,” I say slowly.
“Right,” he says. “You don’t call his therapist or his dad before. You call them after. The sequence matters. EMTs first when it’s life-or-death.”
I nod. That, at least, I’m solid on.