Chapter 22
They sat on the floor. Their backs against the couch. Hands hanging clasped between them. “Something bad got brought into the unit. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen. It was the worst thing any of us had ever seen.”
She didn’t have to hold on tight. He wouldn’t let her hand go.
“The dad … he was distraught. We had to have security take him outside because he pulled a knife on us when he didn’t understand what was happening. He didn’t understand what we were doing.
“We tried everything, but we couldn’t … we couldn’t fix it.” She shut her eyes against the memories. The chaplain had insisted everyone involved be offered trauma counseling after that night. The paramedics, too. All of them. That was a rarity.
“I got off at three AM that night. I usually cut through the ambulance bay to walk back to my apartment. My roommate stayed late that night, but I needed to get home. I was barely holding it together. I can still see it. I don’t move on from things like some people can.
I didn’t think I’d be like this, but I am.
” Felicity paused for a couple of sharp breaths.
“The dad was smoking out there because security wouldn’t let him back in the building.
There was a bottle on the ground. I thought he was just sad.
I told him I was so, so sorry. But he grabbed me.
Recognized me. He said it was our fault.
He was angry and drunk and … he broke a beer bottle.
” It was why she couldn’t drink anymore.
The association to what happened was too strong for her to stomach it.
She’d tried drinking again once, a few weeks after her injury. She’d just wanted to sleep, so she’d downed half a bottle of her roommate’s vodka along with an extra couple of pills. When she woke up the next day, covered in vomit, she realized what could have happened.
And she’d felt nothing.
No relief.
No disappointment either.
Just an emptiness pitted in her stomach.
They found the lingering injury in her back and shoulder soon after. The doctor sent her to physical therapy, but it was hard to rehab an injury when a small part of you thought being gone would have been the easier road.
“I…” She licked her dry lips. “I-I was lucky. Someone pulled him off me. I couldn’t breathe.
” Some reflex sent her hand to her neck, like she needed to remind herself that nothing was there.
“I blacked out. There was blood everywhere. You … you saw the scars.” The rest of the night was blur of sutures and staples and CT scans and neuro exams and hospital attorneys and police and signing things she barely remembered.
Dylan and Derek driving her back to their house, where she stayed for months while recovering from several surgeries.
The hand around hers tightened.
“I was lucky. I know I was. But I thought I’d seen the worst already that night, and then … I don’t know. People have gone through worse things.”
He came to face her. “You don’t have to justify your reaction. You don’t have to feel lucky.”
Her body crumpled into his.
He wrapped her in his arms.
When the shaking stopped, her head was on his chest, her ear resting over his heart, which was pounding much faster than she had expected. He’d pulled her onto the couch at some point while she cried. The weight of everything crashed into her, and she couldn’t keep her eyes open.
When she woke, he was on the floor beside her and a small white something clung to the cuffed sleeve of her sweater.
It was part of the paper she’d ripped up at the table.
Sticking to the sweater fibers like those thoughts had clung to her.
Vague at first.
She knew she was loved. And at first it was enough to remember that her family needed her—wanted her—around. But as her mental health worsened and she hid more, it became harder to balance the worth of her existence. All reasons to stay became feebler.
No one needed her.
Years had passed. Everyone else moved on. And she wasn’t better.
She had become another chore. Friends called her on weekdays, not weekends, as if managing the weight of what she’d become was only possible during the slog of business hours.
Her future constricted into an endless tunnel.
There were no bright horizons beyond whatever this was.
Or if there were, she couldn’t see them.
The temptation of relief had called to her. She needed the gratingly shrill noise of her racing thoughts to stop. A sound like razor blades scraping against a chalkboard makes rest impossible. The louder it gets, the less you feel anything else.
Once you’ve drowned in that liminal gray space, what’s one more step down into the nothingness beyond?
It couldn’t hurt worse than this.
She’d written the note while sitting in her car. She’d pulled a page from a journal and scribbled it against her steering wheel.
And then her phone rang.
Days later, she loaded her car with her fifteen boxes and drove across the country to save a place she’d loved for the woman who’d given her so much when she was a child. The task gave her purpose. She did what she had to do.
There were days when her performance stopped feeling like a mask. There were glimmers of her former self. There were times when she could forget about that day she wrote the note. But that crackling current of dread hit at random moments.
Every time she started to unpack those fifteen boxes, a voice in the back of her head stopped her.
More work for them later if I give up. Better not.
Everything she was too embarrassed to say bottled up inside her like a dormant malignancy. How long did a person have to try, anyway?
The note had stayed stuffed in her coat she’d been wearing on the day she wrote it. She’d been cold all the time back then.
“You’re awake?”
The voice startled her.
“Yeah.”
He sat up and came to his knees beside her head. “What you’ve been through. It’s…” He winced and swallowed. “But what you wrote in that note…”
“I just—”
He shook his head, cutting off the bullshit lie he knew she would give him because false assurances were so much easier. One more way to protect the people she loved from the bitter brokenness she hated. He knew.
“You have to exist.”
“Nic—”
“No. I listened. It’s your turn now.” He held out his large, calloused hand like a safety rope, and she grabbed hold.
“The world is a better place with you in it. That voice—that one convincing you that all your deepest fears about yourself are true and that you don’t matter—that voice is a liar. Because the world needs Felicity Gallagher.”
“I’m not—”
“And the other stuff you wrote. Christ, there’s not an old you and a new you. It’s all you. You are not a before and after. You’re not some tool that’s been beat up and broken into obsolescence.
“Felicity, you … you are a perfect entirety.
“And you have to exist.
“Every beautiful, battle-scarred cell of you has to exist.” His voice broke.
Their eyes locked together.
Words like those deserved to be spoken on a mountaintop.
Some high-reaching place closer to the stars.
Someplace where you could see the great expanse of world around you and the universe above and feel the full mysterious wonder of a single, small person needing to exist amid the starkest representation of each human’s own insignificance.
She mattered?
She was a damaged woman curled up on a threadbare couch beneath a chipped popcorn ceiling. Yet nothing could feel more epic than the certainty held by each facet of his green eyes.
This man was her friend.
And maybe it was okay for it to start this way.
Maybe it was okay for Felicity to believe she should exist because a person she loved and trusted told her she needed to.
It was a start. Even if she couldn’t face it all at once. That might be okay. She had been stuck in a binary between fixed and broken. And this man was telling her that she was neither.
The weight of understanding was a crashing wave.
He was reading her eyes again.
“D-do you think you could help me unpack my kitchen?”
A grin spread on his face. “Only if you promise I can throw away all of that shitty Teflon.”
“Not a chance.”