Chapter 9 The Cost of Fear
THE COST OF FEAR
ROWAN
If you were a piece of the sky, would you be the sun or the moon?
ChaosInPurple: Moon. Without a doubt.
Not because the sun isn’t powerful enough, but because the moon feels…
kinder. I don’t think I’d like to be alone in such a vast sky, blazing all by myself, expected to shine the same way every single day.
I’d rather be the moon, hanging among the stars, never truly alone, even on the nights when I feel small.
I like that the moon is allowed to change.
Some nights it’s full and glowing, impossible to miss, lighting up everything around it.
Other nights it’s just a sliver, quiet and tucked away, still present even when it feels like it isn’t doing enough.
I love that it doesn’t have to apologize for those phases.
So yeah, I’d choose the moon.
I’m stretched out in the reading chair of my hotel suite, my body still, my mind chaos.
I glance over the things I had so carefully planned and now can’t bear to look at for too long. The untouched bouquet of purple roses with lavender stems. The unopened champagne, chilled to perfection. Everything looks cruel now. The person all of this was meant for never arrived.
I’d imagined this night so differently, and yet the same in some ways.
We were always going to talk through our phones.
I thought that if Purple could see past my mutism, the pauses and the way my voice refuses to cooperate with my heart, I could convince her to come here instead of sitting in a restaurant full of strangers and curious glances.
I had no ulterior motive, nothing hidden or physical. I just wanted her to be comfortable. I wanted to remove every possible discomfort except the one I couldn’t erase.
If she could choose me despite my silence, I would spend the rest of my life making sure she never wanted for anything.
The sharp trill of my phone cuts through the room, snapping me upright. For half a second, my heart stutters.
Is she finally calling to tell me how angry or hurt she is and that what I did tonight was unforgivable?
I feel that familiar chokehold tightening its grip.
Fuck.
Get it together, Ro. She doesn’t have your number.
I only get calls when someone close has been trying to reach me by text and I’m not responding fast enough. A call is their way of telling me to check my phone. But tonight, instead of stopping at the usual two rings, it keeps ringing.
When I grab the phone, Archer’s name flashes across the screen. I hesitate, thumb hovering, already bracing for the questions I know are coming.
How did it go? Did you meet her?
And then a new notification pops up before I can decide.
Archer: Pick up, Ro. It’s urgent.
Only then do I notice the flood of fifteen messages before it. I ignore reading them for now and swipe to answer.
“Where the fuck are you?” Archer’s voice is threaded with panic. “You never showed up at the restaurant.”
Shit. For him to even consider calling the restaurant means something has gone terribly wrong.
What the hell could have happened in the last hour?
As if he can hear the question spinning inside my head, Archer exhales hard. “There’s been an accident.”
The word hits like a blow. Faces flash through my mind.
My parents, who were supposed to travel soon; Charles and Daisy and Penny; Raymond and Willow and Quill.
Fuck, my sweet Quill. She might not be able to scream for help if something happened.
Like me, she has situational mutism. What kind of odds are those, that two people in our family carry the same rare silence?
Before the spiral can fully take me under, Archer speaks again. “It’s not family.”
The relief only lasts a heartbeat. Archer wouldn’t be calling me like this if it weren’t someone who mattered.
“It’s Violet,” he says. “She was coming back from Spring Falls.”
The room tilts. I just saw her.
Archer slows his words. “She was merging onto the highway when a drunk driver hit her.”
My fists clench, nails biting into my palms as rage, memory, and helplessness collide all at once.
I know this story. I lived this story.
I lost my voice because of someone else’s recklessness. That single moment rewrote my entire life. The pain, the recovery, the silence that followed, all crash back with brutal clarity.
My eyes burn as I squeeze them shut. I can’t—I won’t—let my mind go where it’s trying to go. I can’t imagine Violet trapped in my kind of quiet, not being able to speak.
“I’m at Raymond’s place,” Archer continues. “Willow got the call from Elodie. She’s Violet’s emergency contact and medical proxy.”
He doesn’t need to say it out loud. Violet has no family.
“Ro. There’s more. She was there on a blind date. From FYS.”
The ground beneath my feet slips.
“What happened?” Archer asks, his voice tightening. “Why was she alone on the highway? Did you realize it was Violet and leave her there?”
The accusation slices deep.
Do I feel less than because I’m unable to speak freely? Every fucking second.
Have I come to terms that I can have a meaningful life anyway? Yes.
But right now, the urge to scream, to tear sound out of my lungs and hurl it at the universe, is so overwhelming it feels like it might destroy me from the inside out.
I put the phone on speaker and type, my hands shaking.
Rowan: But she wasn’t wearing the ring.
Before hitting send, I finally scroll through Archer’s messages, watching the shift from impatience, where he’s asking me where I am, to panic as he mentions Violet’s accident.
I delete my typed words. It doesn’t fucking matter anymore if she had the ring on her finger or not.
Rowan: Where is she now?
I’m already on my feet, reaching for my jacket.
“They took her to the hospital. I’ll send you the address. Willow and the others are on their way.”
I’m in the elevator when I finally ask the only question that matters.
Rowan: Do you know how bad it is?
There’s a pause on the line, just long enough for dread to dig its claws in.
“From what Willow heard,” Archer says carefully, the way you speak when you’re afraid the truth might shatter someone, “it’s bad.”
Something raw slips out of me, a broken, wheezing sound. I hear Archer inhale sharply in response.
When I stopped speaking, I stopped making sounds altogether. It felt safer.
Silence meant no one waited for words that might never come. But emotions don’t care about the rules you make to survive. When I’m alone and feelings pile up, crashing into one another hard enough, they find their way out anyway.
In this empty elevator, I forgot for a second that Archer is still on the line.
“Ro, hang in there. I’m on my way to you.”
The elevator doors slide open. I step out on autopilot, while my mind stays stuck on the image of her. Alone, injured, frightened. I slide into the driver’s seat, and before I start the engine, I find Archer has already sent the hospital address.
Rowan: I’m leaving now. Please let me know if you hear anything.
“I will,” he promises. “Everything will be alright, Ro.”
The call ends, but his words echo as I pull out of the parking lot. The drive blurs into asphalt and headlights and thoughts I can’t shut off. I think about her the entire way.
Not Purple—the woman who has started to mean everything—but the vaguely familiar Violet.
Violet.
The truth had been right in front of me, wrapped up in her name, in the way she spoke and saw the world. I hadn’t missed it because it was subtle. I missed it because I hadn’t wanted to see it.
Her relentless optimism. Her faith in people. Her belief in destiny. Her job. Her laughter.
Everything was right there.
She’d brought up FYS, for Christ’s sake, practically handing me her truth, and I’d still turned my back on it.
I’d been too busy guarding my own insecurities and too afraid of my cousins finding out that I’d signed up for something I wasn’t supposed to need.
Strong, grown men aren’t meant to believe in soulmates or in finding something real in the anonymous corners of the internet.
I’d told myself it was maturity. But now it feels a lot like cowardice.
My fake confidence, my insistence on pretending I was above wanting more, had cost me her.
And her? I don’t even know what it cost her yet.
The hospital looms into view, all white lights and bright signage. I pull into the parking lot. As I open the door, the sound of an ambulance tearing into the emergency bay freezes me in place.
I know it’s not Violet. She’s already here.
But the image won’t leave me. Her alone in the back of that vehicle, hurt, scared, maybe unconscious, with no one’s hand in hers, no familiar voice telling her she’s safe.
Was she even conscious enough to be afraid?
And cold. How cold she must have been.
Fuck.
A car pulls in beside me, jolting me back to the present, and I force my legs to move.
Hospitals have always made my skin crawl, which is ironic considering how much of my childhood I spent in them.
Hallways that smelled like antiseptic and fear.
Rooms full of machines meant to fix you while quietly changing you forever.
Therapy clinics. Recovery rooms. Places where life split cleanly into the before and the after.
I step inside and immediately feel the shift in the air.
I don’t know if hospitals truly smell different or if my memory insists they do. Any place with the power to take so much with so little warning feels like it should announce itself the moment you cross the threshold.
My hands curl into fists as I walk toward the reception desk, my stomach tightening with every step. I already know how this will go. I pull out my phone and open the notes app, then tap on the pinned message I keep ready for moments like this.
My name is Rowan Teager.
I have situational mutism.
I can communicate using American Sign Language, if you or someone else knows it.
Otherwise, I will use my phone to communicate.
Please note: I am not deaf, so you don’t need to speak louder.