Chapter 10
Erik
Savannah sits across from me with her shoulders drawn inward, my jacket still wrapped around her like it’s the only thing keeping her together.
She hasn’t touched her food - two eggs, poached medium, sourdough, and a side of fruit.
She never orders bacon or hash browns, even though that’s what she really wants, so I’ve learned to order extra, but this morning she isn’t even picking at that.
She keeps stirring her coffee long after it’s gone cold.
I know that look, the way she chews on her bottom lip when she’s trying not to cry where anyone can see her. It’s the same one she used to get years ago, and seeing it now lands with more weight than I anticipate.
The diner feels louder than it needs to be.
Silverware clinks against plates, hot coffee pours endlessly, Christmas carols blast through the speakers, and someone laughs too hard in the corner, like they’re trying to outrun something.
The noise presses in from every direction, and it all feels wrong somehow, as if grief should come with its own private room.
“You don’t have to be okay. You don’t have to be strong right now.” I try to offer to her.
Her hand stills around the spoon.
She looks up at me, eyes already glassy, like she’s been waiting for permission to stop holding it all in. “I signed everything today. I didn’t even cry when I did it. Isn’t that awful? Does that make me a bad person?”
“No,” I immediately reassure her. “It means you got through it.”
Her mouth trembles.“She got sick so fast,” Savannah whimpers, voice thin.
“One minute she was fine. She was making plans. Telling me I worked too much. How we wanted to go to Paris for her birthday. She wanted to come to New York City, order a stupid overpriced hot dog with me. Then suddenly it was doctors and appointments and learning how to say things like prognosis without falling apart.”
I move before I think about it, sliding out of the booth and sitting beside her instead. I reach for her hand slowly, giving her time to pull away. She doesn’t. Her fingers curl into mine like they’ve been waiting.
“I kept telling myself I’d come home more,” she whispers. “That I’d make time but there was always something. A deadline. A meeting. Another excuse.” Her voice breaks. “And then she stopped asking.”
That’s when she cries. That’s when, she finally, releases the weight she’s been trying to hold for so long.
I pull her into me, her forehead pressing into my chest, her shoulders shaking as she finally exhales everything she’s been holding back. Her hands clutch my sweater like she needs something to hold onto.
“I don’t even know who I am without her,” she cries into the fabric of my sweater. “She was my constant. My childhood. My adult life. She was… everything.”
I tighten my arms around her. “You don’t stop being her daughter just because she’s gone,” I remind her, gently. “You carry her. You always will.”
She shakes her head, breath hitching. “The house is empty, Erik. Everything’s gone. It’s like she never existed.”
“She did,” I say firmly. “I remember her. I knew her. She mattered.”
She pulls back just enough to look at me, tears streaking her cheeks, eyes searching. “The photos,” she manages through a stifled sob. “I found them last night.”
I freeze in place. I wondered what might happen back at the old Joy home, if Aunt Carol would have revealed everything.
“I don’t understand why you took them,” she continues. “Why you kept doing it… every year.”
“I took them for…”
Her phone lights up on the table.
I see it before she does.
A name I don’t recognize.
Jack
Hey. You disappeared again. Are you okay? I’m worried.
The screen glows between us, bright and unavoidable.
Savannah freezes.
I don’t look away. I don’t pretend I didn’t see it.
She swipes the screen dark with a shaky hand, face flushing, guilt and grief colliding in her expression.
“I’m sorry,” she panics. “That’s just…”
“You don’t have to explain.” I’m quick to respond and I mean it.
Something inside me still shifts and settles inside of me, a quiet reminder that there’s a version of her life I’m not part of and that someone else gets her when she leaves this place.
Even so, she leans back into me, her forehead resting against my shoulder as if the interruption never happened.
This moment still belongs to us, held gently and without question, and for now, it is ours.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next,” she whispers. “I go back to New York and everything just… keeps going.”
I rest my cheek against her hair.
“And what do you want to do?” I ask. “What does Savannah Joy want?”
She doesn’t answer.
Her fingers tighten in mine instead.
I sit there holding her grief, her silence, the weight of what’s coming. I tell myself this is enough. Her head on my chest. Her hand in mine. That this is all I get.
So I stay, still.