Chapter Fourteen #2
"I don't feel safe." The admission cost me something—a chunk of the determination I'd carried out of Xavier's bedroom like a shield, the same determination that had let me look into his wrecked, beautiful face and say no when every molecule of my being was screaming yes.
"I feel like I'm going to die. I know I'm not going to die, obviously I know that, I can hear you about to say it—but my body doesn't know it, and my body is louder than my brain right now, and the only thing that makes my body quiet is—"
"Xavier." Anna said his name without judgment.
Without the clinical distance I'd expected.
She said it the way you said the name of something you understood, the way Clare understood, the way Emily understood, the way anyone who'd ever been held together by another person's presence and then had to learn to hold themselves understood.
"I want to call him." The tears were coming freely now, soaking into the knees of my jeans, and I pressed my forehead against them and breathed the salt and the denim and the nothing-smell of my own clothes.
"I want to call him and tell him to come get me, and I want to go home except this is supposed to be home, this apartment is supposed to be home, and it doesn't feel like home because home isn't a place anymore, Anna.
Home is a person. Home is his chest and his heartbeat and the way he says my name, and I know that's the dependency talking, I know that's what you're going to say, that I can't distinguish between love and need right now, and that's the whole point of being here, that's why I'm sitting on this floor instead of in his bed, but knowing the reason doesn't make the floor less hard and it doesn't make the silence less—"
"Molly." Anna's voice cut through the spiral with the precise, practiced incision of someone who'd talked people off ledges enough times to know exactly when to interrupt and exactly how much force to apply.
Not sharp. Not harsh. Just present. A hand on the steering wheel of a car that was veering.
"I want you to listen to me very carefully. Can you do that?"
I nodded, which was useless on a phone call, but Anna waited as if she could hear the motion anyway.
"Yes," I managed.
"What you're feeling right now is real. The panic is real. The grief is real. The wanting is real. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that any of it is a symptom or a malfunction or something to be corrected. Do you hear me?"
I pressed my phone harder against my ear, like proximity to the speaker could substitute for proximity to a person. "I hear you."
"Good. Now. The fact that your body is in distress right now does not mean you made the wrong decision.
It means you made a hard one. Those feel the same from the inside—wrong and hard are almost identical in the body.
The cortisol spike is the same. The adrenaline dump is the same.
The desperate urge to reverse course and return to safety is the same.
Your nervous system doesn't have a category for 'difficult but necessary.
' It only has 'threat' and 'not threat,' and right now, being alone in your apartment is registering as threat because for the past eight weeks, being alone meant—"
"Don't." The word came out sharper than I intended. "Please. I know what it meant. I don't need to right now. I can't go there right now."
"Okay." No pushback. No redirection. Just acceptance, clean and immediate, and I was grateful for it with a gratitude that sat right next to the ache and didn't diminish it at all.
"We won't go there tonight. Tonight is just about getting through tonight.
Can we agree on that? Not tomorrow. Not the week. Just the next few hours."
The next few hours. I could almost hold that.
Almost wrap my hands around it the way I'd wrapped my hands around the green pencil that first day with Clare and Emily—trembling, uncertain, but willing.
The next few hours was not the same as forever.
The next few hours had an end point, and end points were survivable.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to get up off the floor."
"I don't think my legs work."
"They work. They carried you out of a place that wanted to keep you. They carried you up the stairs to your apartment. They work, Molly. Trust them."
I pressed my palm flat against the door behind me and pushed.
My legs shook—not the fine, neurological tremor of withdrawal, which had mostly resolved, but the deep, muscular unsteadiness of a body running on adrenaline and grief and the physical memory of being held that was still imprinted on my skin like a sunburn.
I stood. The apartment rearranged itself around me from the floor-level perspective of a woman in crisis to the standing-level perspective of a woman who was, technically, upright.
The tulips were still yellow. The window was still new. The suitcase was still packed.
"I'm up," I said.
"Good. Now I want you to unpack one thing. Just one. Open the suitcase and take out one item and put it somewhere that feels right. Not where it should go. Where it feels right."
I stared at the suitcase. The blue fabric. The extended handle. The luggage tag I'd written my name on in Xavier's kitchen with a Sharpie that smelled like his junk drawer—coffee grounds and rubber bands and the faint, ineradicable scent of a man I loved.
I unzipped it.
On top was the coloring book. The woodland animals one—the rabbit in the underwater garden, surrounded by confused fish and a disgruntled orange tabby sticker.
I hadn't packed it consciously. Or maybe I had.
Maybe some part of me—the part Emily called the Little part, the part I'd been burying for four weeks under adult clothes and simple braids and the deliberate, systematic excision of every soft thing—had slipped it in when the rest of me wasn't looking.
I pulled it out. Held it against my chest the way I'd held Xavier's pillow an hour ago, both arms wrapped around it, the glossy cover cool against my collarbone.
It smelled like colored pencils. Like Clare's perfume.
Like the afternoon I'd cried on the rabbit and Clare had said he's a garden rabbit, he's used to rain, and I'd laughed and cried at the same time and felt, for the first time since the rooftop, like a person instead of a patient.
"I have it," I said into the phone. "The coloring book."
"Where does it feel right?"
I looked around the apartment. The kitchen counter was too exposed. The bathroom was too small. The closet was—
The nightstand. The one beside my bed. The small, scarred wooden surface that had held a lamp and a water glass and, before all of this, a dog-eared copy of whatever novel I'd been reading before the world had ended.
It was bare now, cleared by whoever had prepped the apartment for my return.
Empty the way Xavier's nightstand had been empty before he'd started leaving notes on it. Notes signed Daddy with a capital D.
I walked into the bedroom. My legs held. Anna was right about that. And I knew they'd carried me out of worse places than an empty apartment, and the fact that they were shaking didn't mean they were failing. Shaking and failing were different things. I was learning that.
I set the coloring book on the nightstand.
Propped it up against the lamp base so I could see the rabbit, the garden, the autumn leaves, the expression of uncomplicated peace on a cartoon face that had no idea how much weight it was carrying right now.
It looked small and absurd and completely out of place against the fresh white walls and the new sheets and the aggressive blankness of a room that had been scrubbed of its history.
It looked like the first word of a sentence I hadn't finished writing yet.
"It's on my nightstand," I told Anna. "The coloring book. Next to where I sleep."
"How does that feel?"
I stared at the rabbit. At the sticker—the grumpy orange tabby, slightly warped from the tears that had fallen on the page, still stubbornly adhered to the corner where Emily had pressed it down with her thumb.
At the yellow butterfly I'd colored with trembling hands while Clare held them steady.
At the teal seaweed that had once been garden leaves before Clare had unilaterally decided my rabbit needed an ocean.
"Like a beginning," I said. And then, because honesty was the only currency I had left: "Like a beginning that hurts."
"Most of them do." Anna's voice was warm in my ear, warm the way chamomile was warm, warm the way a blanket was warm.
"Molly, I want you to know something. What you did tonight in leaving a place of safety voluntarily, walking into discomfort by choice, calling me instead of him, isn't the behavior of a woman who can't distinguish between love and dependency.
That's the behavior of a woman who knows exactly what she feels and is willing to suffer for the integrity of it. "
The tears came again. Quieter this time.
Not the panicked, gasping sobs from the floor by the door, but the kind of crying that came from a well that wouldn't run dry tonight and maybe not tomorrow either, but that wasn't trying to drown me.
Just flowing. The way water flowed. The way it was supposed to.
"He asked me to stay," I whispered. "He begged me, Anna. He said he was wrong about all of it. And I said no."
"How did that feel?"
"Like cutting off my own arm to prove I could survive without it."
Anna was quiet for a moment. Not the clinical silence of a therapist formulating a response, but the human silence of a woman sitting with the weight of what I'd just said and honoring it with her attention.
"Can I tell you something that isn't strictly therapeutic?" she asked.
"Please."
"The fact that he asked you to stay, the fact that he reversed his own conditions when faced with losing you, tells me something important about where he is in this process.
And the fact that you said no and held the boundary even when he couldn't, tells me something important about where you are.
You're not in the same place, Molly. You're ahead of him right now.
And that's okay. That's actually—" She paused, and I heard something in the pause that sounded almost like admiration. "That's actually remarkable."
I didn't feel remarkable. I felt hollowed out and raw and desperately, achingly alone in a way that the yellow tulips and the new locks and the stocked refrigerator couldn't touch.
I felt like a woman standing in the rubble of a controlled demolition she'd triggered herself, surveying the damage and knowing it was necessary and hating every brick of it.
"What do I do now?" I asked, and the question was so small, so childlike, that it caught in my throat and almost didn't make it out.
What do I do now. The question of a Little without her Daddy.
The question I'd been asking in one form or another since the rooftop, since the seizure, since the first night I'd pressed my ear to his chest and let his heartbeat replace the one the drugs had tried to erase.
"Now," Anna said, "you brush your teeth. You put on pajamas. You get into bed. And you let tonight be terrible."
"That's your professional advice? Let it be terrible?"
"My professional advice is that you stop trying to make it not terrible.
The terror and the grief and the wanting are going to be there whether you fight them or not.
Fighting them takes energy you don't have.
So let them be there. Let them sit in the room with you like uninvited guests.
You don't have to entertain them. You don't have to engage with them.
You just have to coexist with them until morning, and in the morning, they'll be smaller.
Not gone. Smaller. And smaller is enough. "