Chapter 3
ELLIOT
Ialways thought the nights would be the worst.
I braced for the darkness to swallow me whole, to leave me gasping in the hollow echo of my own thoughts. I expected the weight of my grief to press down hardest when the world slept, when there was nothing but shadows and silence to keep me company.
Strangely, it was at night when I found a peculiar kind of peace.
It wasn’t healing or comforting—just… stillness. In that quiet calm, memories surfaced like slow-burning stars. Flickers of her laughter. The way she used to hum when she thought no one was listening. How the corners of her eyes crinkled when she smiled.
They came unbidden, soft and sharp all at once. And somehow, in that haunting familiarity, the agony dulled. Just a little. Just enough to breathe without feeling like I was choking.
But when morning came, it wasn’t the warm kind of light that filtered through the blinds like an invitation to start again. It was cold. Unforgiving. It illuminated everything she wasn’t a part of.
Every new hour felt wrong. Like time itself was betraying her memory. It had no right to keep moving forward when she wasn’t here to witness it. That’s when it hit me all over again. The unbearable truth wasn’t her absence from the past.
It was her absence from the future.
Every new day was a fresh wound. Every plan, every routine, every tiny, insignificant decision only reminded me she wasn’t there to share it. To argue about what to cook for dinner. To roll her eyes when I forgot something.
To exist.
And the house… my home had turned into a mausoleum of might-have-beens.
Every room echoed with her ghost. Not the spooky kind, but the kind you felt when you caught a scent that shouldn’t have been there, or when you walked into a room and your gut twisted because your brain, for just a split second, believed she’d be there.
Sitting. Laughing. Breathing.
But she wasn’t.
The silence wasn’t gentle. It was heavy. Filled with everything no one said.
The way my dad looked at me now, like he was searching for something in my face but kept coming up empty, gutted me. Maybe he was looking for her. Maybe he was looking for the version of me that died the day she did.
I wouldn’t blame him if he was.
We barely spoke. What was there to say? Words felt too small, too fragile to carry the weight we were both dragging. So we said nothing.
Yet every lingering silence was louder than any scream I could have set free. Every unsaid word? It cut deeper than any goodbye ever would. Because at least a goodbye was something. A line drawn in the sand. An end.
But these… these unsaid things just hung in the air, decaying slowly, poisoning everything they touched.
I was left asking what was the point. What was the point in living in a world she didn’t exist in? I wasn’t suicidal. Not exactly. I didn’t want to die. I just didn’t know how to live like this.
That was the thing no one told you about grief. It wasn’t just sadness. It was disorientation. It was waking up in a life that no longer fit. It was trying to remember who you were before your world fell apart—and realizing you weren’t that person anymore.
I didn’t know who I was anymore. I just knew I missed her. And I didn’t know how to stop.
That morning was no different. The house was too quiet when I woke up. Not in a peaceful, soft way. Not the kind of quiet people wrote about in novels where sunlight spilled through gauzy curtains and everything smelled like hope.
This was the kind of silence that hurt. It pressed into my skull until my ears rang. It made me feel like the last person alive and the house knew it.
Grief in architectural form. Walls too still. Floors that creaked like old bones. The haunting echo of a life that had been carved out of every corner and was now irrevocably gone.
Just like the house didn’t know what to do without her. Neither did I.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. It didn’t matter. Food tasted like ash anyway. Everything did—air, water, life—brittle and scorched, the aftermath of a fire no one bothered to put out.
Time didn’t pass. It bled. Days, nights, mornings were just the same ache in different clothes.
I dragged myself into the bathroom, turned the shower on, brushed my teeth while the water ran. Took a piss. Moved through the motions like some mechanical toy. I couldn’t bring myself to look in the mirror. What was the point? The reflection would lie or worse, it wouldn’t.
Not prepared to see what I’d become, I stepped into the shower.
The water was freezing. It needled into my skin, made my teeth chatter but I didn’t flinch. I didn’t really feel it. I was elsewhere. Lost. A ghost in someone else’s life.
By the time I made it downstairs, Dad wasn’t in the living room like he usually was, staring at nothing. The house felt heavier for it.
The coffee machine sputtered to life on autopilot; the sound too loud in the quiet kitchen. From down the hall, strained voices drifted, seeping through the air from his office.
My feet moved without asking me to. I stopped just outside the door. Anthony’s voice was calm. Controlled. Like he was holding something back.
“David, you need help. You need to talk to someone—”
“I don’t need anyone,” Dad rasped. “I need Natalie.”
Silence followed in the wake of his words.
“I know,” Anthony said quietly. “But that’s not going to happen.”
The sound my father made after that wasn’t human. It ripped right through me.
The mug slipped from my sweat-slicked fingers. Scalding coffee splashed over my arm, but I didn’t feel a thing. My mind was already somewhere else—drowning in memories that hit like artillery fire.
Stories she’d told about when I was a baby. How she used to drag me to doctors, begging them to believe something was wrong when I kept getting sick. How they called her hysterical. Said she was overreacting. That she had postnatal depression.
Until the day I stopped breathing, and they finally listened as I was rushed to the ER.
Where I was diagnosed with neutropenia. They said I had no immune system.
Next to no white blood cells. No natural defenses to fight off diseases.
It was the common cold that nearly killed me.
They said it was a miracle I was still alive.
For the next three years, I lived on antibiotics, all but wrapped in a bubble.
Mom became my shield. My world. And now… Now she was gone.
I didn’t notice the office door swing open until I stumbled straight into Anthony’s chest.
Large hands caught my shoulders instantly, steady and sure, like his body had decided before his mind could. My breath punched out of me. My own trembling hands braced against him, fingers curling into the solid line of his ribs without permission.
Cedar. Sea salt. Smoke. The scent hit first, sharp and grounding, and something in my chest loosened. My pulse stuttered, then slowed, like it had finally found something to sync to. He was warm. Solid in a way nothing else seemed to be.
For one breathless second, my weight sagged forward, my forehead hovering just shy of his collarbone. My body leaned in before I could stop it. Before I could remember I was supposed to be holding myself together.
Then he pulled back like I’d burned him. His hands fell away and the sudden absence made my skin prickle, cold rushing in where his warmth had been. He clenched his fists once, hard, before shoving them into his pockets.
His beautiful face twisted, something pained flickering behind his dark brown eyes. The fine lines at their corners deepened like he was holding something back.
Even though it was wrong—wrong timing, wrong everything—my heart fluttered. A warmth I’d forgotten I was capable of feeling unfurled low in my chest, spreading through my veins like the first rays of sun after a storm. Not desire, not yet, but relief. That terrified me more than the grief ever had.
“How’re you holding up, El?” he asked, voice unreadable.
“Fine,” I lied like it was second nature.
He didn’t question it. Didn’t look closer at me even though I silently begged him with my eyes. That was the worst part. Not that he didn’t believe me, but that he just didn’t care enough to try and look deeper.
He turned on his heel and marched down the hallway. The front door slammed behind him. I stood there, unable to move, while his scent clung to my skin like an accusation.
When people asked how I was doing, I always said the same safe things. “I’m fine,” or “Like you’d expect.” No one wanted the truth. No one wanted to see me. Not even him.
As that truth settled in my bones, I let that fleeting warmth crystallize, frozen just like me.
Not long after, my dad shut the office door, shutting me out like I wasn’t even there. I picked my mug up off the floor, head hung with shame and embarrassment as I stumbled back to the kitchen.
There used to be a warmth in my dad, or maybe I was too na?ve to see the truth. Maybe I’d always seen him through her rose-colored glasses. Now, though? He didn’t see me at all. We shared a house, but not a life.
Yesterday, I tried to talk to him. We sat at the table, two people separated by an ocean.
“Dad, I—” The words stuck like glass in my throat, sharp and bloody.
He looked up for the first time since her funeral, blinked once, and went back to stirring his coffee. Like I wasn’t even there.
That quiet dismissal shattered another part of me. Not loudly—silently. A single sorrowful tear trickled down my cheek. A death by neglect.
Shaking the memory away, I filled my thermos with coffee instead of using the chipped mug on the counter, the one that still held her lipstick stain in the glaze like a fingerprint. I shoved it back in the cupboard. The clang echoed in the quiet kitchen like an accusation. I ignored it.
Bag slung over my shoulder, I stepped out the back door and let it close behind me without looking back.