Chapter 4
ANTHONY
Elliot was vanishing in pieces. Not all at once. There was no dramatic collapse, no midnight screams or broken glass. Just the slow bleed of absence: his fading voice, the untouched food, the hollow eyes that never quite looked at me anymore.
I saw it in the way his narrow shoulders curled inward, like he was trying to fold himself into a shadow. In how his sleeves swallowed his fidgeting hands. In the silence that used to mean comfort between us when he was a child, but now felt like a vacuum. Loud in all the wrong ways.
He didn’t eat the soup I left outside his door. But the spoon was gone.
That small, merciless detail cracked something in me. Not because I thought soup could fix grief—but because it meant he’d opened the door, seen the effort, and still couldn’t bridge the distance between us.
A spoon without a bowl. A ghost of hunger without the strength to answer it. It meant he was still reaching for the world. Just not enough to stay in it.
I’d thought after that night on the deck—when his tears had glistened as I held him for the first time in years—that we’d turned a corner. The way he’d leaned into me, the way his breath had finally slowed against my chest… I’d let myself believe it meant something solid. Something steady.
Maybe I’d needed it to.
Now I stood there in the hallway, the bowl cold and heavy in my hands, the ceramic biting into my palms where broth had spilled.
I lifted my fist to knock. And stopped. Because I didn’t trust myself—didn’t trust the pull in my chest that wanted to go to him, to gather him up, to keep him breathing if that was what it took.
My breath left me in a thin, unsteady exhale.
I had words—I always had words—but none that felt like they could reach across the ocean now stretched between us. I was terrified of choosing the wrong ones. Of saying something that would make him retreat further. Of being the reason he finally closed the door all the way.
So I didn’t knock. Instead, I turned on my heel and walked away carrying the bowl back to the kitchen like it weighed a hundred pounds.
The broth was ice-cold now, congealed at the edges.
I dumped it down the sink and rinsed the bowl under lukewarm water, watching the liquid swirl into nothing, watching it circle the drain like something unfinished. Something wasted.
Around me, the house barely breathed.
I moved through it quietly, cautiously. I watched for Elliot from doorways. From the bottom of the stairs. From the quiet edge of the living room, where I sat with a book I couldn’t read—its pages turning slowly beneath fingers too restless to focus.
Tried to time it right. To catch him mid-passage from one shadow to the next. But he slipped through the house like smoke. Hard to see. Impossible to hold.
When I did glimpse him—just the barest outline of his frame crossing a hallway or the soft scuff of his socked feet on the stairs—my chest tightened in a way I didn’t have language for. Like my body had already learned the shape of his absence and was bracing for it before my mind could catch up.
I stayed still when he passed. Held my breath without meaning to. Let him move through the space without calling his name, as if sound itself might spook him into disappearing again.
When he wasn’t locked away in his bedroom with the door half-cracked like an open wound, he was gone entirely—off to the cliffs, most likely.
That jagged edge of the world he kept drifting toward, like it whispered secrets the rest of us didn’t deserve to hear.
I could picture him there even now, hoodie pulled over his head, eyes hollow, wind howling against the rocks like the earth itself was trying to scream on his behalf.
There were days I nearly forgot how to speak to him. His silence had weight now. It distorted the air. He made himself so small, so quiet, it felt like any sound might shatter him. And I—God help me—I didn’t want to be the one who made the final break.
So I tried to be steady. Present. Gentle. I folded his laundry. Cooked his favorite foods. Left notes like breadcrumbs.
Thought of you when I saw this, don’t forget to drink water, I’m not going anywhere.
I thought maybe, if I was soft enough, consistent enough, it would guide him back.
But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough. And David… David was worse.
A week after the funeral, he’d returned to work like a wind-up toy, moving through the motions of a life he wasn’t really in anymore.
Sit. Stand. Type. Repeat. His eyes had gone dull.
His voice was colorless, brittle like an old film reel.
I didn’t think he’d heard a word I’d said.
He spoke only when necessary, and even then it was like he was reading from a script someone else had written.
I tried to reach him too. Left coffee on his desk. Gave him space, then tried again. I reminded him to eat. Asked about his projects. Asked about Elliot. Asked about anything. But he just nodded, said he was “fine,” then disappeared back into that office that might as well have been a crypt.
This house…This house wasn’t a home anymore it was purgatory. Filled with living things waiting to pass on. I hated it more with every stale breath.
David, locked in his study. Elliot, locked in his grief. And me—somewhere in between, stretched thin and unraveling, holding a thread that frayed more with each passing day. Every attempt I made to connect felt like a match struck underwater. There was no fire left in this place.
Still, I couldn’t stop watching Elliot. Couldn’t stop fearing he was disappearing—molecule by molecule—right in front of me.
I’d watch him press his forehead against the glass at the end of the hallway, and he looked like something half-formed.
Like a boy made of ash. Like one hard gust would scatter him to the wind.
And the worst part? I knew that feeling only too well. I’d seen that posture before—not in him, but in myself.
Years ago, in another life. That same silent ache hiding behind practiced smiles.
The same stillness that wasn’t peace but numbness.
The same moment when surviving felt like the only ambition left.
I remembered learning how to hold my breath long enough that no one noticed I was drowning.
I remembered the silence you wore like armor.
The way pain turned inward when there was nowhere else for it to go.
The way you convinced yourself that survival was enough.
Elliot had that look now. And I hated how familiar it was. But sometimes—God, sometimes—I still saw glimpses. Just flashes of the beautiful boy from my memories filled with child-like wonder. The innocence he’d since lost.
Three years old. Sticky fingers wrapped around my pinky, face smeared with jam and marker ink, eyes wide with love and fear. Whispering, “Don’t go.” Like he already knew I would. Like he already knew what kind of person I would become.
The kind who watched from doorways instead of stepping through them.
The kind who loved too carefully and arrived too late.
I shook the memory away, chest tight with the weight of it. I’d gone. I left. I made choices I thought were right, and maybe they were but they came at a cost. When I came back, there were already cracks between us—all of us—cracks I didn’t know how to seal. Cracks wide enough to lose someone in.
But I couldn’t lose them—him—again. Not like this. Not quietly. Not piece by piece.
So I stayed.
I kept knocking, even when I didn’t use my fist. Even when it was with soup bowls and folded clothes and quiet words in the dark.
Even when it looked like he wasn’t listening.
Even when it hurt.
Even when it felt like failure.
Because if Elliot was disappearing, I’d keep reaching for him—even if I had to follow him all the way to the edge of that cliff. Even if I had to hold his hand and teach him how to breathe again.
Later that afternoon, I found myself at the kitchen table with David. Two steaming mugs of coffee between us. Neither of us drinking. Neither of us speaking.
The silence was brittle, stretched thin like an old wire ready to snap. I was about to say something—anything—when we heard Elliot’s door creak open upstairs. His footsteps on the landing were slow and hesitant.
He came into view with his hoodie up, sleeves pulled over the palms of his hands, bag slung over one shoulder like it carried more than books. His head was down, jaw tight. He didn’t seem to have anywhere to go—only somewhere he needed not to be.
He didn’t look at me. He moved through the kitchen like a ghost, brushing past the edges of the light, barely disturbing the air. The urge to go to him, to steady him, to hold him close, slammed into me like a tide—and I had to bite it back, remind myself to stay still.
Behind him, the phone he’d abandoned on the counter last night blinked bright in the dimness. It was Madeline again. My chest clenched. I didn’t reach for it. I didn’t call out. I only watched.
Even as he passed me, fleeting, almost untouchable, I felt the familiar, unreasoning pull to shield him from whatever might hurt him, even from himself. My body remembered the weight of his absence and braced, quiet, tethered, waiting for the moment he might let me in again.
The vibration rattled faintly against the wood, like a nervous pulse. I watched it until the light died, until the screen went dark again. He didn’t look back. Didn’t slow. Didn’t reach for it.
Whatever was waiting for him out there—work, obligation, consequence—he was already running from it. And I didn’t know how long the world would tolerate that.
David glanced up as he swept past the table. “Madeline’s been calling.”
Elliot paused in the doorway, his shoulders bunching up like he’d been struck. His back stiffened, but he didn’t turn around.
“She said you’re not answering or returning her calls,” he continued, not giving either of them a chance to breathe.