Chapter 19
CATHERINE
The first thing Catherine registered was the beeping. Slow, steady, persistent. Then came the sharp scent of antiseptic, the dull ache that radiated through every limb like old fire, and the sterile weight of hospital sheets tucked too tightly over her chest.
She blinked once, then again, the light overhead a blurred glow that burned through her eyelids.
“Catherine?” A voice, low and tight with emotion. Roz.
She turned her head slightly, the effort monumental. Roz’s face swam into view. Her eyes were rimmed red and her jaw clenched. Her hand hovered above Catherine’s before settling, warm and solid, on top of hers.
“She’s awake,” Roz said, and Catherine realized she wasn’t the only one in the room.
Olivia appeared beside her sister like she’d never left, her fingers already curling gently around Catherine’s wrist. “Hey,” she whispered, soft and breaking. “Hey, you’re okay. You’re here.”
Catherine blinked again, fighting the heaviness pressing down on her skull. Her lips parted, dry and cracked.
“Water,” Olivia said, reaching for a cup. Roz beat her to it, pressing the straw carefully to Catherine’s mouth. The water was cool and shocking, a mercy and a curse all at once. It brought clarity. And with clarity came memory.
The road. The rain. Her mother’s voice, bitter and sharp like glass. Sloane’s name on the phone screen.
She pulled away from the straw.
“Is she…” Her voice rasped like gravel. “Is Sloane here?”
There was a beat, just one, but it was enough.
Roz looked at Olivia. Olivia looked away.
No one answered.
The silence was deafening.
Catherine felt the fissure begin to spread inside her chest, something small and hairline, like a crack in a pane of glass. But it ran deep. Her fingers twitched slightly against the blanket, reaching for nothing.
She shut her eyes again.
The pain was everywhere now—bones, ribs, spine—but it wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was the absence. The knowing.
She didn’t come.
“I’m okay,” Catherine said flatly, though her throat burned with the effort.
Roz’s mouth pressed into a thin line, but she nodded. “You’re lucky,” she said. “There was internal bleeding, a hairline fracture in your pelvis, and a concussion. But we caught it in time.”
Caught it in time.
Everything except the thing she wanted most.
“She hasn’t been by?” Catherine asked again, quieter now, her eyes still closed. Olivia’s hand tightened ever so slightly around hers.
“She…” Olivia’s voice trailed off. “We’ll give you some time.”
Catherine didn’t open her eyes to watch them leave. She didn’t need to. She knew what the silence meant.
Sloane was gone.
She’d chosen to walk away, and this time, she hadn’t come back.
Catherine turned her face to the side, into the cool pillow. Her body ached, but it was nothing compared to the hollow, echoing ache that opened like a sinkhole in her chest.
She had survived.
But she wasn’t sure she could survive this.
The room was quiet after Roz and Olivia left, too quiet. Catherine could hear her own breathing, slow and shallow, the rhythmic pulse of machines nearby measuring life in mechanical certainty. But all it did was remind her how loud the silence inside her had become.
Her fingers itched for her phone. For a message. For a call. For anything.
But there was nothing.
She stared at the ceiling tiles, counting the faint grid lines in them.
Seventeen visible from this angle. She blinked.
Sixteen. Her vision blurred. She blinked again.
Her ribs protested the motion, a stabbing reminder that every breath was hard-won.
Every heartbeat was a reminder she was still here. Still alone.
She tried to sit up, gritting her teeth as pain knifed down her spine and across her ribcage. She made it halfway before she slumped back into the pillows, exhausted by the effort.
The movement dislodged a small object from the sheets: her phone.
It must’ve been left on the tray table and got knocked loose when Olivia adjusted the bed. She stared at it for a moment, then slowly picked it up, her hand trembling.
The screen was dark. No missed calls. No unread messages.
No Sloane.
She opened the message thread anyway, staring at the last thing she’d sent, before the accident, before everything.
“Busy. Can we reschedule dinner?”
Sloane hadn’t replied. Not then. Not now.
And suddenly, all the strength she’d fought to build—the neat lines, the sealed-off compartments of her emotional survival—collapsed inward like a house with a rotted foundation.
She had pushed Sloane away. Repeatedly. And when Sloane stopped coming back, Catherine had no one to blame but herself.
Her throat tightened.
She set the phone aside with too much force, and it clattered against the bedside table.
Outside her window, the city lights blurred through a haze of early evening fog. Somewhere out there, Sloane was living in a world Catherine no longer had the courage to reach.
She pressed the heel of her palm to her chest, where the ache had taken root. No scalpel could cut it out. No suture could hold it closed.
It throbbed with all the things she hadn’t said.
Catherine turned onto her side, every joint screaming in protest. She stared at the wall.
And finally, she whispered to the dark, “I could’ve died.”
Her voice cracked on the last word. The silence that followed seemed to answer.
And it wasn’t the pain or the surgery or the memories that undid her.
It was the thought that she could’ve slipped into the dark and Sloane never would’ve known how much she meant to her. How desperately Catherine had needed her. And how deeply, irreversibly she had loved her.
Tears welled, unbidden. They slipped down her cheeks, hot and quiet.
No one had ever told her that surviving could feel like failure.
She thought of Sloane’s hands, her laugh, the way she always saw more in Catherine than she wanted to show. The way she had kissed her, looked at her, touched her like she was something wild and soft and worth loving.
And she let her go.
Because she had never known how to keep someone. Only how to keep them out.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, though there was no one to hear it. “God, I’m so sorry.”
The beep of the monitor stayed steady. The city outside kept moving.
But inside the room, inside her, something fractured further…and then, quietly, began to shift.
She had nearly died. And what terrified her most wasn’t the blood loss or the surgeries or the pain; it was the thought of dying with her heart sealed shut. With love left unspoken. With no one to sit by her side because she’d told them, again and again, to stay away.
She couldn’t live that way anymore.
Not if she wanted a life. A real one. One worth something more than prestige and control and perfect scars.
She reached for her phone again.
It took a long time to unlock it with trembling fingers. She scrolled to Sloane’s name. Her finger hovered over the message icon. Then the call button.
But she didn’t press it. Not yet.
Instead, she sat with the ache. Let it live in her chest. Let herself feel all of it.
And this time, she didn’t push it away.
She didn’t tell herself to be strong or still or silent.
She just…sat there. Bruised, broken, breathing.
Alive.
And for the first time, truly wanting to be.
The room dimmed into late afternoon, a filtered hush settling over the hospital floor. Catherine sat propped up by pillows, a tray of untouched soup beside her. She’d said she wasn’t hungry, but the truth was her appetite had vanished with the echo of silence.
She stared at the door when Olivia appeared, carrying a small bouquet of wildflowers and a thermos of her favorite ginger tea. The sight of her sister—gentle, steady Olivia—made something tight twist in Catherine’s chest.
Olivia set the flowers on the windowsill and sat beside her. “I thought you might like something not hospital-issued,” she said softly.
“Thank you,” Catherine murmured. She didn’t look up.
There was a pause, and then Olivia’s voice returned, lower now. “You don’t have to be okay right now.”
Catherine’s throat closed around a response.
“You scared the hell out of us,” Olivia said, her hand covering Catherine’s. “And I think you’re still scaring yourself.”
Catherine let out a soft, bitter laugh. “You have no idea.”
“I have some,” Olivia said, her thumb brushing Catherine’s knuckles. “You’ve always been the strong one. The one who held everything together so the rest of us wouldn’t have to.”
“And?”
“And I think that nearly dying shook something loose. You’re allowed to come undone. You’re allowed to want more.”
Catherine’s jaw tightened. Her eyes flicked to the door. “She’s not coming, Liv.”
Olivia didn’t say anything. But she didn’t have to.
Later, Roz arrived. No flowers or soft entry. She leaned against the frame of the doorway and raised one pink eyebrow.
“You look like shit,” she said.
Catherine’s lips twitched. “Thanks.”
Roz stepped inside and perched on the foot of the bed. “So, are we gonna talk about how you’re lying in here like a sad ghost or…?”
“Not in the mood, Roz.”
“That’s new.” Roz crossed her arms. “You’ve been staring at that door like you expect her to walk through it. She hasn’t.”
“No,” Catherine said flatly.
Roz tilted her head. “And you think that’s because she doesn’t care? After everything?”
Catherine didn’t answer.
Roz leaned forward. “You think she wouldn’t be here unless someone stopped her?”
That caught Catherine. Her spine stiffened. “What?”
Roz’s gaze didn’t waver. “You think she’d just…stay away? Without a word? That doesn’t sound like Sloane. That sounds like interference.”
“She could’ve called.”
“She probably thinks you don’t want her here.” Roz’s voice was calm but hard. “What did Evelyn say to her?”
“I don’t know,” Catherine whispered. “Nothing. She barely acknowledged her.”
Roz scoffed. “Exactly.”
The silence between them was thick.
“She loves you,” Roz added. “That was obvious to anyone with eyes. If she’s not here, it’s not because she doesn’t care. It’s because something or someone got in the way.”
The seed was planted. Catherine looked away, but the doubt bloomed.
Night came slowly.
The city glittered beyond the window, but Catherine wasn’t looking at it. She sat upright in the bed, legs drawn slightly under the covers, a book unopened in her lap. Her phone rested on the tray beside her, dark screen taunting.
She reached for it once. Then again.
Did Roz have a point?
What would her mother even say, what had she said?
She remembered Evelyn’s cold composure, the way she always knew exactly how to wound without ever drawing blood. Would she have done it? Warned Sloane off with the same icy superiority she used to mold her daughters into steel?
Of course she would. And Sloane… Sloane had too much heart to push back in that moment.
The thought filled her with a strange ache. If that’s what had happened, then maybe, maybe Sloane hadn’t left. Maybe she’d been made to feel unwelcome.
Catherine’s fingers hovered above her phone. She opened their message thread. Nothing new. Nothing since before the accident. It was still there, quiet, waiting.
She scrolled past the old messages, the flirting, the stubborn standoffs, the softness. The last voice note Sloane sent was her laughing, breathless, after Catherine had told her she couldn’t cook.
“I burned the damn rice,” Sloane had said. “Guess we’re even now.”
Catherine pressed play. The sound of her voice filled the room, and it hurt.
She hesitated. Her thumb hovered over the call button. Her heart raced.
What if she didn’t answer?
But what if she did?
“If she’s gone,” Catherine whispered aloud, “I need to hear it from her.”
She took a breath, then another, before she pressed the button.
The phone rang.
Once.
Twice.
A third time.