Chapter 12 Nadia
NADIA
My head pounded, every heartbeat thudding against my skull like a cruel punishment. The air in my apartment was stale and sour, clinging to my skin until even breathing hurt.
It wasn’t just grief this time. It was last night.
The memories came in pieces. The stranger’s face, the grave, the sound of my own voice breaking.
Piercing blue eyes watching while I confessed everything I’d buried for four years. I didn’t even know his name. But I remembered every ugly thing that came out of my mouth.
“I told him everything,” I whispered to no one. My voice cracked, hoarse from crying. I pressed my palms against my eyes until colors flared behind them, desperate to block it all out. But nothing stopped it and the reel kept playing.
Why him? Why a stranger? Why did silence make me unravel like that?
He hadn’t touched me. He hadn’t comforted me. He’d just stood there, quiet, still, like the world stopped spinning while I broke open for him.
I splashed cold water on my face until my skin stung but it didn’t help. The guilt stayed; it was a living thing coiled in my chest. When I looked up, the mirror gave me a stranger back: pale, red-rimmed eyes, hair tangled, mouth trembling.
“Pathetic,” I muttered.
I left the bathroom and drifted through my apartment, the silence too loud, the floor creaking like it resented my weight. My body felt heavy, my chest hollow.
Because I knew what I did. And worse, what I didn’t.
I could still hear the sound of Billie hitting the pavement. It wasn’t just noise. It was final. The air split open, and everything good in me bled out with her.
I ran to her that night, dropped to my knees in her blood, begged her to breathe. Her body was twisted wrong, her eyes open but empty. I screamed her name until my throat tore, until Stacy and Rita pulled me away.
She never came back. And I never forgave myself.
I should’ve stopped it before it began. Should’ve dragged her out when Stacy started circling like a vulture. Should’ve fought. Screamed. Anything. Instead, I walked out, convinced it would make them stop. But it didn’t.
Now I carried that mistake in my bones. The guilt never dulled; it just learned how to breathe beside me.
A knock broke through the silence. Soft. Polite. Out of place.
My body froze. No one knocked on my door. I didn’t have visitors. I didn’t keep friends. I’d built my life small and simple. Online bills, no deliveries, no neighbors, no noise. Grief had stripped my world down to its bones, and I’d stayed there because it was safe.
The knock came again.
My pulse stuttered as I walked to the door, slow and reluctant, each step like walking into something I couldn’t undo.
When I opened it, he was there.
Tall. Calm. A paper bag in one hand, a coffee tray in the other.
The man from the café. The man from the cemetery. Recognition hit hard and cold.
He stepped inside before I could speak, like he already knew I’d let him. He moved with quiet purpose. No rush, without hesitation, as though he’d always belonged here.
The door clicked shut behind him. Soft. Final.
He set the bag on the table and pulled a chair out, the scrape of wood cutting through the silence. Then he sat, his presence filling the room, uninvited and impossible to ignore.
“Coffee,” he said simply, sliding a cup toward me.
I stared at it, then at him.
He didn’t flinch under the weight of my confusion.
My hands moved before my mind did, fingers curling around the cup. It was warm. Real. Grounding. I took a sip. The bitterness burned my tongue, but it made me feel human again.
“Why are you here?” I asked finally, my voice thin, raw.
He looked at me for a long moment, then said, “I thought that would be obvious.”
“Why?” I pushed. “How do you even know where I live?”
He paused, gaze steady. “I walked you home last night. You don’t remember?”
I blinked. The memory was fog - his shape beside me, the silence, the weight of everything I’d said. Maybe I had let him walk me home. Maybe I hadn’t cared enough to stop him.
Shame pressed down on me, hot and sharp.
We sat in silence after that. An empty silence that was thick with everything we didn’t say. I sipped my coffee again, hands trembling.
He watched me the whole time. And somehow, that made it worse. Because I could feel my grief shifting, softening, reaching toward him like something feral that didn’t know better.
I wanted to tell him to leave. I wanted to thank him for staying. Instead, I just sat there, bleeding guilt into the quiet, while he waited - like he always did - for me to fall apart again.
The croissant flaked apart in my hands. Crumbs scattered across the table, untouched. The morning light cut through the blinds in thin, surgical lines, slicing the room into neat little pieces.
When he looked away to peel the lid from his cup, I watched him.
He didn’t belong in my apartment. He didn’t belong anywhere ordinary. His movements were too precise, his silence too deep. The light caught his face, carved him in half; half man, half shadow, built for control.
And when his eyes met mine, I stopped breathing.
Blue. Hard. Cold. The kind of blue that didn’t warm - it froze.
And yet, I didn’t look away. I should’ve been afraid, but I wasn’t.
I felt… calm. Like the noise in my head had gone still for the first time in years.
Maybe it was the way he existed without pretending.
No small talk. No apologies. Just stillness. Real, unflinching stillness.
We started talking somewhere in between the quiet. I don’t even know how. One minute there was silence, the next I was telling him about medicine. We were discussing my degree, the exhaustion, the nights that blurred into morning. He didn’t interrupt. Just listened, patient as ever.
When I stopped, he said softly, “Sounds like you were born for it. Fixing things.”
His tone was calm. Certain. But he wasn’t talking about medicine, and I knew it.
Something twisted in my chest. “What about you?” I asked. “What do you do?”
He paused, like the question was a test. Then: “Cars. I rebuild them. Old ones. Rusted, forgotten. I strip them down, fix what’s broken, piece by piece.” His eyes dropped to his cup. “Until they shine again.”
It was more confession than answer. The words hit me somewhere deep, the way grief does when it starts to sound like hope.
I wanted to ask what he’d been rebuilding inside himself. But I didn’t. I just nodded and stared at my coffee, afraid to break the fragile thing sitting between us.
He stood then, slow and deliberate. The air changed. I didn’t want him to go, but I didn’t know how to ask him to stay.
“Thanks for the coffee,” he said.
“You brought it,” I murmured. “I should be thanking you.”
He paused at the door, turned once. His gaze lingered, heavy, unreadable.
Then he was gone.
The silence that followed wasn’t peace anymore. It was hollow. Like he’d taken something with him when he left.
I sat down again, hands wrapped around the cooling cup. The ache in my chest spread slow and deep, refusing to fade.
Maybe that was just how it went now; people came close enough to almost know me, then left before they really did.