Chapter 18
I saved Willa from Dex, from physical danger, from external threats that I could identify and neutralize with tactical precision. But I couldn’t save her from this grief, and it was killing me to watch her disappear into it.
Three weeks passed since Agent Morrison’s phone call destroyed everything we’d just won. Three weeks of watching the woman I loved retreat so far into herself that sometimes I wondered if she was even aware I was in the same room.
She stopped coming to my room the morning after we’d gotten the news about Jude. No discussion, no explanation—I had just woken up to find her things gone from my bedroom and her door closed with the kind of finality that suggested I shouldn’t knock.
“I need space,” she said when I tried to talk to her about it. “I need time to process.”
I gave her space. I gave her time. I gave her everything she asked for and watched her slip further away from me every day.
The woman who’d faced down her abusive ex-husband with a gun to her head, who’d fought back with courage that left me breathless with admiration, had been replaced by someone who could barely make it through a conversation without her eyes going distant and empty.
She stopped eating regular meals, surviving on coffee and whatever I could convince her to pick at during our increasingly silent dinners. She stopped sleeping through the night—I could hear her moving around at all hours, pacing her room like a caged animal.
Most devastating of all, she stopped letting me touch her. No casual contact, no hugs, no hand-holding during movies we weren’t really watching. The physical distance she put between us felt like a wall I couldn’t scale, no matter how carefully I tried.
“You need to eat something,” I said that morning, setting a plate of scrambled eggs in front of her at the kitchen table. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts and pajama pants, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail that made her look younger and more fragile than ever.
“I’m not hungry,” she replied without looking up from the newspaper she wasn’t reading.
“You said that yesterday. And the day before that.”
“And it was true then, too.”
I sat down across from her, trying to catch her eye. “Willa, you’re going to make yourself sick. Jude wouldn’t want—”
“Don’t.” The word came out sharp enough to cut. “Don’t tell me what Jude would want. You don’t get to use my dead brother to manipulate me into taking care of myself.”
The accusation hit me like a slap. “That’s not what I was doing.”
“Isn’t it?” She finally looked at me, and the emptiness in her eyes was worse than any anger would have been. “You think if you invoke his memory enough times, I’ll go back to being the grateful victim who needed you to save her?”
“You were never a victim to me. You were—”
“I was what? The obligation you inherited when your best friend died? The responsibility you couldn’t abandon because it would dishonor his memory?”
Each word was delivered with surgical precision, designed to hurt in the way that only someone who knew you completely could manage. But underneath the cruelty, I could hear the pain—raw and desperate and looking for somewhere to land.
“You know that’s not true,” I said quietly.
“Do I? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like I’m just another problem you’re trying to solve. Another crisis to manage until you can figure out how to hand me off to someone else.”
“There is no one else. There’s only us.”
“There is no us.” She stood up from the table, leaving the untouched eggs cooling on her plate. “There’s you, feeling guilty about surviving when people like Jude didn’t. And there’s me, trying to figure out how to exist in a world where everyone I’ve ever loved either dies or leaves.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“You haven’t left yet. There’s a difference.”
She walked out of the kitchen then, and I sat there staring at her abandoned breakfast, feeling more helpless than I had since I was seventeen years old and watching social workers split up families because the system couldn’t figure out how to keep people together.
The worst part was that I understood why she pushed me away.
Grief was a predator that convinced you loving people was dangerous, that caring about anyone was just setting yourself up for inevitable loss.
I felt the same way after my parents died, after I learned that the adults who were supposed to protect you could disappear without warning.
But understanding didn’t make it easier to watch her destroy herself with isolation.
I tried everything I could think of. I brought her books I thought she might like, only to find them untouched days later. I suggested we take a trip somewhere, get away from the city and all its reminders of everything we’d lost. She looked at me like I suggested we colonize Mars.
I arranged for a grief counselor to come to the penthouse, thinking maybe talking to a professional would help her process what she was going through. She was polite but distant during the session, giving all the right answers while revealing nothing of substance.
“She’s protecting herself,” Dr. Margaret Fox told me afterward. “This level of withdrawal is common in people who’ve experienced multiple traumas. She’s essentially shutting down all emotional connections to avoid further pain.”
“How do I help her?”
“You can’t. She has to decide to let you help, and right now, she’s not ready to take that risk.”
“So I just wait? I just watch her disappear and hope she comes back.”
“You be patient. You’re consistent. You show her through your actions that you’re not going anywhere, even when she’s pushing you away.”
But patience was a luxury I wasn’t sure we could afford. Every day she retreated further, every meal she skipped, every night I heard her pacing her room instead of sleeping, I felt like I was losing her by degrees.
The breaking point came the previous evening, when I found her standing on the balcony in the rain.
She was wearing nothing but a thin nightgown, her hair soaked and plastered to her head, staring out at the city like she was trying to memorize it. Or like she was saying goodbye.
“Willa.” I stepped outside, immediately soaked by the October downpour. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking,” she said without turning around.
“You’re going to catch pneumonia.”
“Would that matter?”
The casual way she said it, like her life was something disposable, sent ice through my veins. “It would matter to me.”
“Why?” She finally turned to face me, rainwater streaming down her face like tears. “Why would it matter to you if one more person disappeared from your life? You’ve survived it before. You’d survive it again.”
“Because I love you.”
“Love,” she said the word like it tasted bitter. “What good is love when everyone you love ends up dead or gone? What’s the point of caring about someone when caring just means you’ll eventually have to watch them leave?”
“The point is that the alternative is worse.”
“Is it? Because right now, loving people feels like the most dangerous thing I could do.”
I stepped closer to her, rain soaking through my clothes, desperate to reach her somehow. “Jude died doing what he believed in. He died protecting people who couldn’t protect themselves. That doesn’t make loving him a mistake.”
“Doesn’t it? He protected me his entire life. The moment I moved out, got married, and didn’t need him anymore, he enlisted. Like taking care of me was the only thing keeping him here.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can’t know anything. That’s the problem.” She wiped rain from her face with shaking hands. “I can’t know if you’re going to wake up tomorrow and decide this is too hard. I can’t know if caring about you is just setting myself up for another phone call like the one we got three weeks ago.”
“So you’re going to push me away before I have the chance to hurt you?”
“I’m trying to survive. I’m trying to figure out how to exist without needing other people to make me feel whole.”
“And how’s that working out for you?”
The question hung in the air between us, and for a moment, I thought she might actually answer honestly. Instead, she walked past me toward the door.
“I’m going inside before we both get sick.”
That night, I lay awake listening to her move around the guest room, and I realized that all my tactical training, all my experience protecting people from external threats, meant nothing when the literal enemy was grief and the person I tried to save was determined to save herself by pushing everyone away.
I built my entire adult life around the principle that love meant protection, that caring about someone meant standing between them and whatever might hurt them. But how do you protect someone from their own fear? How do you fight an enemy that lives inside the person you’re trying to save?
The answer, I was beginning to understand, was that you couldn’t. Some battles couldn’t be won through force, strategy, or sheer determination. Some battles could only be won by the person fighting them when they were ready to believe that victory was possible.
But that didn’t mean I was giving up. It just meant I had to find a different way to fight.
I decided to love her consistently and quietly and without expectation, to be the constant presence in her life that proved not everyone would leave.
Even when loving her felt like holding water in my hands.
Even when I went to bed every night, wondering if tomorrow would be the day she finally decided that staying was too dangerous and left before I could wake up to stop her.
Because the alternative—giving up, walking away, proving her worst fears right—was unthinkable.
Some people were worth fighting for, even when they couldn’t fight for themselves.
Especially then.