Chapter 20 #2
His lips trembled. “You’re… really here?” he asked, and there was something terrifying in the way he said it—like he needed confirmation this wasn’t another hallucination his brain had built to survive.
“Yes.” My chest tightened painfully. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The lie sat between us immediately. Heavy. Unsettled.
He swallowed, eyes never leaving mine. “You said that before.” The words landed without anger. Without accusation. They were merely fact. They were worse for it.
“I know,” I said. My voice cracked on the second word. I didn’t try to steady it. “And I broke it.”
Silence stretched. The monitor hummed steadily, indifferent.
“You left,” he said again. This time quieter. More certain. “You didn’t just walk away. You erased me.”
I nodded once. My hands clenched together harder. “I did.”
“Why?” His breath started to shake. “Don’t say work. Don’t say timing. Don’t say it was for my own good.” Tears spilled over now, sliding into his hair. “Just tell me the truth.”
I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, there was nowhere left to hide.
“The truth,” I said slowly, “is that I loved you long before I admitted it to myself. And it scared the hell out of me.”
His chest rose sharply. A quiet, broken sound escaped him.
“I watched you fall apart,” I continued, forcing the words out even as my throat burned. “I watched you need me in ways I didn’t feel equipped to survive. And instead of asking for help, instead of staying and figuring it out with you, I convinced myself that distance was safer.”
“For who?” he asked.
The question gutted me.
“For me,” I admitted. “I told myself I was protecting you. But what I was really doing was protecting myself from the fear that if I stayed, I’d fail you.”
His jaw clenched. His eyes burned with something sharper now. “So you abandoned me,” he said. “Because you were scared.”
“Yes.”
“You blocked me.”
“Yes.”
“You let me think I didn’t matter.”
“No,” I said quickly, then stopped. Reframed. “You mattered too much. And I didn’t know how to hold that without breaking.”
He let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “That’s supposed to make it better?”
“It’s not,” I said. “It’s just the truth.”
His breathing picked up, shallow and uneven. His hand curled weakly in the sheets. “I spent weeks—months if I’m being honest—trying to figure out what I’d done wrong,” he whispered. “Every silence felt like proof. Like I’d finally loved someone enough to drive them away.”
I stood abruptly; the chair scraping softly against the floor, then stopped myself from pacing. From reaching. I stayed right where I was, hands trembling uselessly at my sides.
“You didn’t drive me away,” I said. “I ran. And I am so—” My voice broke completely. I swallowed hard. “I am so fucking sorry I left you alone in that.” Tears streamed down his face unchecked now.
“I didn’t want to die,” he said. “I just couldn’t live inside the quiet you left behind.”
The words crushed something vital in me.
“I know,” I whispered. “They told me about the alcohol in your system. But there was none in the car.” I looked at him, really looked. “You weren’t trying to disappear. You were trying to be heard.”
His lips pressed together. A nod, barely there. “I wrote the note because I didn’t know how else to reach you,” he said. “I found out you blocked me and it felt like being erased while I was still breathing.”
My chest seized. I dropped back into the chair hard, suddenly unable to stand anymore. “I read it,” I said. “Every word.” My hands shook violently now. “And I will carry it with me for the rest of my life.”
He watched me carefully. Hurt. Love. Something wounded and wary threading through both.
“I love you,” he said quietly. “But loving you shouldn’t feel like this.”
He was right.
“I know,” I said. Tears slid down my face unchecked now. “And that’s why I need you to hear this next part, even if it hurts.”
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands clasped tight like prayer. “I love you,” I said. “Completely. Ruinously. But I cannot pretend that love alone fixes what I broke. I don’t get to walk back in here and have you make it okay just because I finally showed up.”
His throat bobbed.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” I continued. “I’m asking you to let me stay and earn the right to be here. Day by day. With help. With honesty. Without disappearing when it gets hard.”
Silence.
His response was so soft I hardly heard it over the thundering of my heart in my temples
“And if I can’t?” he asked. “If one day you wake up and realize you’re still afraid?”
I met his gaze and didn’t look away. “Then I will say it out loud,” I said. “I will not leave without telling you. I will not vanish. I will not make my fear your punishment again.”
His hand trembled as he lifted it slightly, then let it fall back to the bed. “I don’t know if I can trust you yet,” he whispered.
“I know,” I said. “You shouldn’t. Not yet.”
A tear slipped from the corner of his eye. “But I still love you,” he said.
My chest cracked open. “So do I,” I said. “And this time, I’m not running from what that costs.”
He didn’t smile. He didn’t forgive me. But he didn’t turn away either. And that was the beginning—not of absolution—but of something fragile and real enough to hurt.
Elliot had passed out straight after I told him I wasn’t running. I was grateful I had the chance to process everything he’d said to me. He drifted in and out a few times before he eventually woke.
Elliot’s jaw had set. His gaze drifted away from me—not far, just enough to break whatever fragile thread had been holding us in place. His breathing changed, shallow and deliberate, like he was bracing himself for impact that had already happened.
“You don’t get to do that,” he said. The words were quiet.
But they hit harder than shouting ever could.
“Do what?” I asked, already knowing.
“You don’t get to come back,” he said, eyes fixed on the wall now, “and talk like you’re the only one who’s been afraid.”
My chest tightened. I stayed still. “I was terrified,” I said carefully.
“I know,” he snapped, turning back to me at last. His eyes were sharp now. Awake. “You made sure I knew.”
I flinched.
“You think I didn’t wake up every day scared?” he continued. His voice trembled, but he didn’t let it break. “You think I didn’t lie there replaying every moment, trying to figure out where I crossed whatever invisible line made you disappear?”
“That wasn’t—”
“Don’t,” he said, immediately. Not loud. Final. “Don’t interrupt me.”
I shut my mouth.
His good hand curled into the sheets, knuckles blanching. The monitors picked up the change—his heart rate ticking up, steady but unmistakable. “I didn’t need you to save me,” he said. “I needed you to stay.”
The word cracked through the room.
Stay.
“You talk about fear like it only lived in you,” he went on.
“But I was the one waking up in a house that still smelled like you. I was the one checking my phone like an idiot, knowing it wouldn’t light up.
I was the one trying to breathe around the fact that the person who promised not to leave decided I was too much to keep. ”
My throat burned.
“You blocked me,” he said. “You erased me without giving me the dignity of a conversation. Do you know what that does to someone who’s already lost everyone?”
“I thought—” My voice broke. “I thought space might help you—”
“Space?” His laugh was sharp, humorless. “You didn’t give me space. You gave me silence. And silence is not neutral. Silence tells someone they’re disposable.”
The words lodged in my chest like shrapnel. “I didn’t want to hurt you,” I said.
“But you did,” he shot back. “And then you left me alone with it.” His breathing hitched now, anger bleeding into something rawer beneath it. “I had to convince myself you never meant any of it,” he whispered. “Because believing you cared and still chose to leave was worse.”
I felt like I was drowning in the space between us.
“You don’t get to be the only one who’s scared,” he said again, softer now. “You don’t get to frame this like your suffering absolves what it did to me.”
He was right. I nodded once. “It doesn’t.”
Silence stretched. Thick. Charged. Then he looked at me—really looked this time—and there was something devastatingly clear in his expression.
“I still love you,” he said. “And that makes me angry.”
My breath caught.
“Because loving you cost me my dignity,” he went on. “It made me beg without words. It made me hurt myself just to feel seen. And I hate that part of me now.”
“No,” I said hoarsely. “You don’t get to hate yourself for my failure.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he replied. “You got to leave.”
The sentence settled between us like a verdict.
I leaned forward slowly, elbows on my knees again, hands clasped tight enough to ache. “You’re right,” I said. “I left. And I don’t expect you to make peace with that just because I came back.”
Elliot swallowed. “I need you to understand something,” he said. “If you stay—really stay—this can’t happen again. I won’t survive another version of that silence.”
The tremor in his voice betrayed how close that truth sat to the surface.
I met his eyes and didn’t look away. “I know,” I said. “And if I ever feel myself reaching for distance instead of honesty, you deserve to hear it before it becomes abandonment.”
His lips pressed together. “That’s not a promise,” he said. “That’s a boundary.”
“Yes,” I said. “And I accept it.”
Elliot looked at the wall as he processed my words. He let me sit with everything he’d said. My eyes slowly dragged over his body as I took in all the injuries he’d sustained.
A bloody nose and a cut to his head where the airbag deployed. A broken arm too, and thanks to the nurse, I knew he had a broken collarbone too. But those were just the surface wounds. They would heal in time without a mark.
The devastation that existed beneath his skin. The wounds I’d inflicted that had festered for months. Now those would take years to heal, if they ever did. He’d have to work on himself to become strong enough to survive them.
I refused to be a bystander in his journey. I wouldn’t be a band-aid. I wanted to be a pillar of support. I wanted to be his partner in every sense of the word. If he ever let me.
But that also meant I’d have to work on myself too. And I think finally what Thomas had been trying to tell me was starting to sink in. I projected my worst fears onto Elliot. All the unresolved issues and trauma I’d suffered were the catalyst for how terribly I treated him.
He added quietly. “I’m angry with you.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t forgive you… yet.”
“I know.” He didn’t know it, but I clung to that yet. It gave me hope that maybe, possibly, we’d have a future.
“But I don’t want you gone,” he finished, voice breaking at last. “I just want you to understand what it cost me to see you in this room. What it will cost me to let you back in.”
Tears slipped down my face, unchecked. “I do,” I said. “And I will spend the rest of my life proving I do—if you let me.”
He turned his face away again, exhausted now, anger having burned through what little strength he had. “Stay,” he said after a moment. Not looking at me. “But don’t touch me. Not yet.”
I nodded. Stayed exactly where I was. And for the first time, his anger didn’t feel like rejection.
It felt like survival.