CHAPTER FIVE
ELEVEN YEARS OLD
· · ·
If I could go back in time, it would be here.
Not to change anything.
Just to be there again. To know what I was standing inside before it became a before.
Because everything changed here.
And I wish I had been more prepared.
· · ·
I remember sirens first.
Then the lights — red and blue bleeding through my curtains, painting the ceiling of my room in slow rotations. I got up without thinking. Pressed my face to the window.
Next door.
Whatever was happening, it was next door.
Suddenly, the house was alive.
My parents were already moving. I heard them on the stairs, their voices low and urgent in a way that made my stomach drop. They told me to stay inside. Didn’t explain.
Just — stay.
So I stayed.
And I stood at the window and watched the lights and tried to breathe and couldn’t quite manage it.
I didn’t know then that what I was feeling had a name. That the tightening in my chest and the way the room seemed to tilt and the certainty that something was horribly wrong — that was a panic attack. The first of many.
They would usually always involve Cassian in some way.
My parents came back inside maybe two minutes later.
It’s crazy how much can change in two minutes.
My mom was crying. My dad had his hand on her back, his face showing something I didn’t have words for yet.
I asked about Cassian.
They said he was okay.
They said to go back to bed.
I didn’t sleep.
· · ·
My mom told me the next morning.
His mom had passed away.
I sat with that and couldn’t make it fit. She had seemed fine. Though sometimes, through the kitchen window, I’d catch her just standing very still in the middle of a room — not doing anything, staring at something I couldn’t see from outside.
I’d thought nothing of it then. I was ten. I thought adults stood still sometimes.
I wished I’d paid more attention.
They said she’d been sick. That it had been going on for a long time. That apparently even Cassian hadn’t known how bad it was.
I kept turning that over.
She had seemed fine.
Did I miss something? Should I have seen it?
And then the thought I’ve never quite been able to shake —
I wondered if Cassian regretted all the time he spent at my house.
All those afternoons at my kitchen table, in my pool, asleep on my living room floor. Time he could have spent next door. With her.
I’ve never asked him.
I’m not sure I want to know the answer.
· · ·
My parents said we needed to give them space.
That tomorrow we’d bring breakfast, pay our condolences, let them know we were there.
I didn’t understand it. The idea of being alone after something like that made no sense to me. I’d grown up in a house where no one was ever left alone with anything hard.
We faced it all together.
But my parents know best.
So I wiped my face and went to bed.
· · ·
I was almost asleep when I heard it.
Tap tap .
I was at the window before I was fully awake.
Cassian.
I took one look at him and felt something crack open in my chest.
Red eyes. The particular exhaustion that comes from crying for hours. A darkness around him I hadn’t seen before — something between anger and loneliness and something else I couldn’t place.
Cassian was not easy to read. Not like me — I wore everything on my face whether I wanted to or not.
He kept himself locked up tight, always had.
But in that moment I could see everything.
And it devastated me.
I opened the window without a word.
He climbed in silently.
We’d done this a hundred times — the window and him staying for a bit. But he’d always left before morning. Always held something back.
Not this time.
He stayed — the first of many more nights over the years.
We lay in the dark and I held him as tight as I could and he sobbed into my chest in a way I’d never heard from him before.
Open. Unguarded. Like he’d been holding it for hours and couldn’t anymore.
· · ·
That was the first time I’d ever seen him cry.
· · ·
And it destroyed me like nothing had ever before. Like I didn’t know true devastation and heartbreak until this moment.
I would have carried that pain for him if I could.
I would have taken every piece of it.
· · ·
I wanted to say something. Anything. But nothing came.
Words had always been easy for me and now, when they mattered most, I had none.
So I did the only thing I could think of.
I ran my hand over his hair, slowly, the way my parents did for me when things felt too big.
It was such a small thing.
I hoped it was enough.
He was gone by the time I woke up midday.
And even then — eleven years old, not understanding half of what I was feeling — I knew.
Something had shifted between us.
Some door had been barely opened and shut closed in the same night.
I didn’t have the words for it yet. But I remember the feeling.