Chapter 44
Two months earlier
I sit up in bed, screams ringing in my ears. It takes me a moment to realize that the screams aren’t in my dreams, they’re real and they’re mine.
My pulse thumps against my ribs, followed by a painful tightness that makes it hard to breathe.
I wonder if I’m having a heart attack. If I’m going to die here, alone, in my bed. Then I wonder how long it will take someone to find me. Days? Weeks?
I reach for my phone and dial the only person I can think to call.
He answers immediately, and when I tell him about the pain in my chest and the tightness in my throat, he says he’s coming over.
I don’t know how long it takes, but when Liam arrives, he finds me curled up on the edge of the bed, clutching my chest, crying.
Am I dying? I ask him.
You had a panic attack, he says.
But am I dying?
No, he says. You’re going to be okay. I’m here.
Then Liam pulls me into his chest, his hand on my spine, his pulse synchronizing with mine.
I’m sure in the morning I’ll be embarrassed about calling him, about asking for help, about falling apart in front of the absolute last person I want to see me like this, but right now, with his fingers in my hair and his arm tucking me into his warm, solid frame, I allow myself to sink into him.
To forget, even if for a moment, that everything between us is broken. That I’m not his and he isn’t mine.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but when I wake up the next morning, I’m tucked into bed and there’s no trace of Liam.
I half wonder if I dreamed the whole thing.
If Liam was nothing more than a fevered extension of my nightmare.
But when I drag myself out of bed and downstairs, I find that the fridge is stocked, the laundry is folded, and the pile of dirty dishes that cluttered the sink before I went to bed is washed and put away.
There’s no note, no other evidence he was there, almost as if the chores were performed by ghostly apparitions. But it was him. And a foolish, naive part of my heart hopes that maybe, just maybe, he still cares.