Chapter Nineteen Nora #2
His skin is warm. He has squeezed his hand into a bloodless grip, the muscles beneath my touch rigid with strain. He clutches that memory with a crushing strength, tethered to it to prevent his entire world from drifting away.
He looks up at me then.
His eyes are red, glassy, unfocused for a second before they find me. There’s a flicker there—surprise, sharp and unguarded. His breath catches, his whole body going still under my hand, as if he’s trying to understand what just happened.
He wasn’t expecting this.
Not from me.
He stares at where my hand rests on his. Then back at my face. Then down again, as if checking that this is real.
For a second, doubt hits me. A quick, uneasy twist in my chest. I might have crossed a line. Stepped into space he keeps protected.
But I don’t move.
Because under my palm, his grip changes. The pressure eases. Just a little. His fingers don’t dig in as hard, the strain loosening enough for me to feel the change. He doesn’t pull away or shut down. He lets me stay.
So I leave my hand there, resting over his, staying with him.
He draws in a breath. It catches halfway, held in his chest before it slips out uneven. Another follows, deeper this time, filling his lungs more fully, though it still falters on the release.
His shoulders shift under it, rising, then easing down, the tension in him loosening by degrees. Each breath goes a little deeper than the last, staying longer, leaving with less strain.
He finds his path back to the story and continues. “We were in the grocery store. Middle of the aisle. He was holding the cart. I was holding the list.”
His hand glides beneath my palm, abandoning its guard over the tattoo. His fingers travel across my skin until he rests his weight atop my hand, pinning my palm against the ink.
“He said something—” He swallows. “I don’t even remember what. Then he stopped.”
His fingers press into my hand. Desperate. Needing anything real to hold onto.
“He grabbed his chest. Just for a second.” His thumb traces the line of my knuckles, his touch heavy with the weight of the memory. “Then he went down.”
I can see it without him saying more. The hard, polished floor. The cart tipping sideways, groceries scattering. The sound it must have made.
“I thought he slipped.” He stares at the gravel beneath our feet. “I thought he tripped.” His shoulders draw in, his jaw tightening for a second before he continues. “But he didn’t get up.”
“I kept holding the list,” he says. A sudden, sharp shiver wracks his frame. “I don’t know why. I held it the whole time. Even when people started yelling. Even when they told me to step back.”
His jaw tightens as the memory pulls him under. “I remember looking at it,” he continues, gaze distant, unfixed. “Reading the same lines again and again. Milk. Bread. Eggs.”
His lips press together, the next part harder to get through. “I could hear them. I knew what was happening.” His brows draw together, frustration, guilt, confusion all tangled together. “I just… couldn’t make myself drop it.”
He swallows hard, his eyes squeezing shut for a brief second before opening again, still somewhere else. “It was still in my hand when the ambulance arrived.”
A tight ache spreads through my chest, heavy and unshakable.
His voice wavers, but he keeps going. “My dad passed away that day.”
My hand tightens on his arm without thinking.
He avoids my gaze, his mouth trembling. “I thought—” A jagged sound erupts from his chest, a ghost of a laugh that carries the weight of a sob. “I thought that was the end. The worst a person could endure. My first heartbreak.”
His shoulders drop, the tension bleeding out into a hollow exhaustion. “I truly believed the world ended there. That pain had reached its limit.”
His breathing comes apart, turning ragged, hitching in his chest between each attempt to keep going. Still, he pushes through it, forcing the words out, driven by the need to finish.
“And then…” His mouth opens, closes, then tries again. “A week later, my mom passed away. In her sleep.”
The confession breaks everything he had left.
His gaze drops. Then lower. Until his head bows completely, his chin almost to his chest, his shoulders following, folding inward under the weight of it.
He can’t hold it in anymore.
The first sound tears out of him before he can stop it. Then another. His shoulders shake, harder now, each breath coming in broken pulls that don’t quite settle. His chest rises and falls unevenly, struggling to keep up.
He stays bent forward, lost in it, everything he’s been carrying finally spilling over.
Through all of it, his hand stays where it is, resting over mine, his fingers curling in, seeking contact, grounding himself in it without pulling away.
My eyes fill before I register it. The sting builds, spills over, and suddenly everything blurs—the sunlight, the world around us—until all I can see clearly is him, breaking right in front of me.
I don’t reach up to wipe them away. I let them fall, one after another, unchecked. He’s crying. Leaving him alone in that feels wrong. I need him to feel it—that he isn’t the only one unraveling here, that someone is right here with him, seeing it, staying.
My other hand lifts on its own, drawn to him before I can think it through. I place my hand against his head, fingers sliding into his hair. It’s soft beneath my touch, warmer than I expect. I don’t move much after that. I just stay there, my hand resting, my touch present, offering what I can.
His reaction is immediate.
A broken sound leaves him, caught somewhere deep, pulled out of him before he can hold it back. He leans into me, pressing into my hand, seeking that contact. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t try to pull himself together.
He just gives in.
His weight shifts toward me, his body losing the rigid hold it had carried. Years of keeping himself upright seem to slip from him all at once, replaced by exhaustion that runs deeper than this moment, deeper than today.
I stay exactly where I am. Hand in his hair. Fingers resting. Letting him lean, letting him break, letting him have this without rushing it away.
“I lived with Maeve after.” His gaze stays lowered, fixed somewhere near our hands. “Her parents took me in.”
He pauses, his chest heaving with the effort of remaining present.
“I was… I was lucky.” His fingers flex once against mine, then go still again. “I know that.” His eyes close for a brief moment. “They were good to me.” His head tilts slightly, remembering, holding onto it. “They gave me space when I needed it. Stayed close when I couldn’t handle being alone.”
He leans heavier into my palm, the heat of his forehead seeping through my skin. “They simply let me exist in the wreckage. They gave me room to bleed without demanding I heal on their schedule.”
I run my fingers through his hair, again and again, keeping the touch gentle, unhurried, letting him lean into it.
“But other people…” His gaze drifts, a harder edge cutting through the grief.
“Other people weren’t like that.” His mouth twitches, a broken hint of a smile that doesn’t hold.
“At school, teachers would pull me aside. They’d say things like—‘You’re strong.
’ ‘Your parents would want you to focus on your future.’”
“Parents of other kids…” His lips press together before he continues.
“They’d say it was tragic. Really tragic.
” His head tilts, a flicker of bitterness there now.
“And then they’d follow it up with ‘life goes on, doesn’t it?
’” His head dips, a faint shake, disbelief still sitting heavy in it.
“‘You can’t let this define you.’ ‘You have to move forward sometime.’”
His shoulders draw in, the weight of it all pressing down again. “As if I was choosing this.”
He leans in, his frame vibrating with a tremor that feels as old as his grief.
“And if I ever mentioned them—if I said, ‘my dad liked this song’ or ‘my mom hated raisins’—everything would change. Faces would tighten. Smiles that didn’t reach anywhere real.
Someone would rush to fill the space, change the subject, move on. ”
His fingers curl faintly against mine, then loosen again, restless. “I could feel it every time. That shift. That… weight dropping into the room.” His jaw clenches. “I was the one doing that. Bringing everything down. Making it uncomfortable.”
He lifts his head then, finally looking at me. His face is streaked with tears, eyes red, lashes wet. Another tear slips free, tracing down his cheek. My gaze follows it, watching it fall.
“So I stopped.” The words come out thinner now, worn down. “I stopped talking about them.”
His gaze holds on mine, open in a way that feels almost unbearable to witness.
“Because every time I did, someone tried to fix it. Tried to tell me what to do with it. Tried to show me where it was supposed to end. They all had this idea… that there was a point where it would be done. Where I’d be okay.
Where I’d move on and leave it behind.” His head dips again. “There isn’t one.”
It hits me all at once, heavy and sharp in my chest, a mix of grief that isn’t mine and anger that burns anyway—at everyone who tried to rush him through it, who tried to shrink something this vast into something manageable.
He sniffles. “I thought if I kept to myself, they’d leave it alone.
But when I went quiet, they started worrying I wasn’t ‘processing.’ And when I spoke about them, I was ‘dwelling.’” His mouth tightens.
“There was no guide. No way to get it right. No right way to be a boy whose whole world had ended.”
My chest tightens, a deep ache settling in. All I can think is how alone he must have felt, and how I don’t want him to feel that way again.