42. Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-two
Samantha
The breaking point didn’t come all at once.
It had crept in a little at a time.
The first few times I’d visited Nate, all I’d cared about was getting through another day. If he woke up the next morning, it had been a good day.
That was enough.
Then life kept happening around his recovery.
On day three, Adrian had found a therapist who could see me right away.
After our first appointment, we’d decided I’d come twice a week to start.
Each time I walked out of her office, the wounds I’d feigned as pinpricks most of my life were raw and gaping.
I’d climb into my car wrung out, cry halfway home, wash my face in a gas station bathroom, then drive to see Nate with my game face on.
Some days, we sat in silence. Others, I talked and he listened. He shared a little about group therapy and how his new prescription made him feel. But mostly, we sat together in the sun and held on tight.
What I didn’t do was tell him about my therapy. I didn’t share my last conversation with Kelly, or my decision to walk away from my family for good. As much as I longed to hear his thoughts, I couldn’t pull his focus away from his recovery, and the last thing he needed was to worry about me.
Leaving me carrying everything alone.
Therapy cracked me open, and visiting Nate meant stitching myself back together long enough to smile at him and be his cornerstone. By the time I crawled into his bed every night, I was barely holding my own pieces together.
My therapist told me confronting deep-seated issues often left people feeling worse before things got better. It was to be expected. She was right on that front. I felt like dog water most of the time.
And the truth was, if Adrian hadn’t been shoving me out the door to my appointments, I would have given up after the second one. I didn’t want to confront hard truths about myself—not when the man I loved was fighting for his life.
Adrian slapped sense into me. “I don’t like seeing my best friend break her back for people who wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire.
You don’t need their validation anymore.
They are never going to love you enough.
Not ever. And none of them deserve your kind of love.
You need to find a way to stop giving it to them so you can give some to yourself, and the rest to my brother.
He deserves it a hell of a lot more than they do. ”
I’d wanted to argue with him, but the truth was undeniable.
So I kept going. And in between appointments, I wrote in my journal. My therapist had told me to write down any time my thoughts drifted to my family. So I wrote a lot.
Many of my first pages started with, “Maybe if I’d…”
And every doubt and insecurity I’d ever had about myself became a list of what I could have changed in order to be loved.
But eventually, those sentences changed.
Maybe there was never anything I could have done.
I wrote about everything I was going to miss about them, and surprisingly, it was a lot. But the list of what I wouldn’t miss about them was twice as long.
The pages were filled with my angry scrawls, the ink blotted with tears.
On day thirteen, Nate was transferred to a residential facility in the mountains, two hours outside of Denver. Four hours daily in the car left me a lot of time to think, and not much time to do anything else.
My house was a mess. Ants were probably having a field day with all the crumbs on my counters.
My laundry pile qualified as a mountain at this point.
I couldn’t remember the last meal I’d eaten that hadn’t been prepackaged or from a drive-through window.
I hadn’t slept a full night in over two weeks.
I was running on energy drinks and determination.
Hence the breaking point.
It came on day seventeen, while I was getting ready to make the drive to see Nate. I kicked my pajamas out of my way as I searched for my shoes. They were nowhere. How could shoes be nowhere?
Dropping to my knees, I crawled on the floor, spotting one beneath the bed.
I ducked lower, my head under the heavy wooden frame, and grabbed it.
But I’d misjudged how far under the bed I was and whacked my skull on the edge of the frame.
My arms slid out from under me, sending me sprawling on my belly, my forehead connecting with the hardwood.
For a beat, I was stunned motionless. Then my pain receptors fired to life, and a sharp ache shot through my skull and down my spine so fast it left me breathless.
I wasn’t grievously injured. I’d probably have a couple goose eggs. I was, however, utterly and completely defeated.
I stared at the floor and the shoe in my hand.
One stupid shoe had defeated me.
And suddenly, I couldn’t stop crying.
This was another thing on top of too many. I couldn’t even put my damn shoes on without struggling. When was it going to end?
I rubbed my eyes, so tired I couldn’t think straight. Or maybe that was the head injury. And the thought of sitting in the car for four hours made me cry harder.
But I had to. Nate was expecting me. There was no way I could cancel on him, even if I desperately needed to do a million things I’d put on hold, including taking care of myself in a meaningful way.
For one weak moment, a tiny awful part of me wished someone would tell me I didn’t have to go today.
Nate’s name flashing on my phone screen should have made me excited or fluttery or given me any sort of positive feeling, but it only made me cry so hard I missed his call.
As soon as it stopped ringing, I regretted not hearing his voice something fierce, and that was enough for my tears to dry up. I managed to call him back a minute later. My voice barely wobbled, but he heard it.
Of course he did.
“Hey, Natey.”
“Hey, Sammie,” he said gently. “Are you okay?”
Two words. That was all he’d needed. Because he was Nate. Before he’d gotten lost in the dark, he’d always seen me.
My heart twinged with the hope he was coming back.
“I’m okay.” I didn’t have the energy to put on a cheerful act, though. “I’m a little tired, and I bonked my head when I was looking for my shoe…”
“Shit. Did you hurt yourself?”
“Only my pride. Well…my skull a little bit, but nothing permanent.” I pinched my bottom lip when it started to quiver. “I didn’t expect to hear from you. I’ll be there in a couple hours.”
“I know. Can we video-call?”
“Of course,” I replied without thinking. If I’d taken some time to consider his question, I would have remembered I’d just finished crying and there was no way I’d be able to hide it, even through the phone screen.
But the next thing I knew, Nate’s face appeared, his eyes drinking me in. He didn’t have to say anything. His brows furrowed over his worried gaze when he saw me.
“You’ve been crying.”
I nodded. “A little.”
He sighed. “You’re tired, sweet girl.”
“Yeah…” I whispered.
“That’s why I called you before you got in your car.”
“What do you mean?”
“You need a break, Sammie.” He scrubbed his face hard. “Being here is good for me. I’m where I need to be, but it’s hard. It’s really fucking hard.”
From my therapy appointments, I had an inkling of how hard it was, but Nate was doing it all day, every day. Yet he looked rested. Healthy. His eyes were clear and focused.
He looked like my Nate.
“I talked to my therapist this morning,” he said quietly.
I smiled. “That’s good.”
“It was.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We talked about you.”
“What about me?”
“We talked about how every morning I wake up counting down until you get here.” His smile was small, almost apologetic. “And how every night, after you leave, I start counting down until tomorrow.”
I frowned. “I do the same thing.” Was that wrong?
He looked away for a second before meeting my eyes again. Gently, so very gently, he said, “The thing is, I’ve been measuring my days by you instead of the work I’m doing here.”
When I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, he continued. “I love seeing you. God, Sammie, you’re my favorite part of every day.” He smiled sadly. “But that’s becoming the problem.”
Oh, I didn’t like the sound of that. But I’d always been a problem, so I should have been ready.
“I’m sorry,” I choked out around the fist squeezing my throat.
He shook his head. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. I love you a lot, Samantha. That isn’t the problem and never will be.” He swallowed, his throat visibly working. “I need to learn how to sit with the ugly feelings instead of waiting for you to come make them hurt less.”
I couldn’t breathe. I had been so consumed with getting Nate better, I hadn’t been braced for him to end things.
“And...I can’t stop thinking about you driving four hours every day.”
“I don’t mind,” I rushed out.
“I know you don’t.”
“I’d drive eight.”
“I know what you’re thinking. I’m not breaking up with you. I want you…well, that’s it. I want you like I’ve never wanted anything else.” He smiled again, tears gathering in his eyes. “But I have to ask you to stop coming here, for both our sakes.”
I wanted to argue, but wasn’t this exactly what I’d been wishing for—someone to give me permission to take a break? It was just…I’d never imagined it would come from Nate.
“Nate...”
“I saw your face when you answered the phone. I’ve never seen you so exhausted.”
“I’ll sleep when—”
“No.” He shook his head. “I tried that too. Told myself if I just pushed through, the other side would be better. But it never got better.”
I looked down. My fingers were digging into my thigh, and I hadn’t even noticed.
“You can’t fall apart on me, Samantha. I need you whole for me to come home to.”
A tear landed on my hand. “I want that.”
“Me too. But I need to get better first.”
“You will.”
He let out a long, rough sigh. “Knowing you believe in me after seeing me like that means a whole hell of a lot.”
I finally forced myself to face the screen again.
“That was your worst, and I’m still here.
I want to be here for you when you’re ready to come home.
” I glanced around the room, my gaze snagging on the other shoe I couldn’t find, the empty glass on the bedside table, the unmade bed.
“I’ve been letting everything go. Your place is kind of a big mess. ”
He chuckled, and I swore I felt it all the way down to my toes. It’d been so long since I’d heard him laugh; I wished I could have rewound time to hear it again.
“All I care about is if you’re a mess.”
“Oh, Nate, I’m absolutely a mess.” I pinched my nose hard. “The drive has been stressing me out.”
“I know. When I first got here, I wasn’t thinking about you on those twisting roads. Then, this morning, I couldn’t think about anything else. That’s not good. For either of us.”
“So, what do you think we should do?”
He hesitated. “I want you to take care of yourself while I take care of myself. We’ll see each other on the other side.”
I rolled my lips over my teeth, trying my hardest not to feel rejected. It was nearly impossible.
He must have seen my turmoil. His eyes immediately went soft, and his voice turned into a croon.
“I love you, Samantha. This isn’t about that. Not even close. I’m not stepping back from you—from us. Please don’t think that.”
My knee-jerk reaction was to argue. How could it not be about me? But I’d gone to four therapy sessions in the last two weeks, and though I wasn’t even close to being healed, I was able to talk myself down with my therapist’s voice in the back of my head.
Listen to what he’s actually saying. Don’t invent the rest.
He’s telling you what he needs. Honor that while giving yourself what you need.
Hurting yourself to make someone else comfortable isn’t sustainable.
I sucked in a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. I’ll give you the space you need.” I held up a finger. “But I need you to stay in communication with me. We can talk about what that means, but if you go silent on me, it’ll feel like you’ve pulled away, and I can’t agree to that.”
He nodded eagerly. “There’s no way I can get through this without at least checking in on you.” His eyes roved over me, taking as much of me in as he could. “Tell me something, Samantha. Give me something to think about other than how sad you look right now.”
“I’m not sad.” As soon as I said it, a wet laugh burst out of me. “Okay, that isn’t true. I miss you like crazy, but I’m a lot less sad than I was seventeen days ago. I’ve…started therapy. I think it’s going well, but I have no basis for comparison.”
“That’s incredible, love.” His gaze was bright, interested. “You set a clear boundary with me just now. Is that something you’ve been talking about?”
“Is that what I did?” I pumped my fist. “Go me. I think that might be a first.”
His laugh was so beautiful, I nearly burst into tears again. “I’m really proud of you.”
“Thanks.” I smiled back at him, feeling optimistic for the first time in a while. “Right back at you, buddy.”
That made him groan. “Did you just friend zone me?”
“Never. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at you without wanting to kiss your beautiful face.”
He blinked a few times, and something vulnerable winged his brows. “Even now?”
“Especially now, Natey. Probably always.”
When we hung up, I cried for a few minutes more.
Not from exhaustion or because it felt like Nate was pushing me away. No, these were grateful tears. That man loved me enough not to allow me to destroy myself to save him. He loved me enough to tell me clearly what he needed.
And I loved him enough to give him that while being kind to myself.
I picked myself up off the floor and stood, surveying the room. This place really was a mess.
The first thing I did was fling my stupid shoe away, then I stripped off my clothes down to my underwear. I used the last of my energy to throw a load of laundry in the washer and clean my kitchen—which was technically Nate’s.
Periodically, I had to remind myself a break didn’t mean a breakup. Nate was still mine, and I was still his. We’d get to the end of this, and we’d be better for each other.
Every once in a while, a nefarious little voice whispered that he’d changed his mind. That he was slipping away. That asking for space was the first step toward leaving me.
Then I’d remind myself to listen to what he’d actually said. Nate hadn’t asked me to stop loving him. He’d only asked for room to heal.
Giving him that didn’t mean sacrificing myself. It meant trusting him.
We were going to meet each other on the other side, and we would be whole for each other.