Chapter Thirty-One
? Holly ?
Everyone told me to take time off.
“Don’t push yourself.”
“School can wait.”
Take time off. Try yoga. Try journaling. Grief isn’t meant to make sense.
Yeah, well. We could at least agree on that last bit.
One night, I was on the phone with Mom. Back at my apartment, staring at the ceiling, and ignoring the textbooks beside me.
“Honey, your dad and I have been talking. There is this really great therapist-”
“No. No shrinks.”
“It might help.”
“It won’t.”
She didn’t argue further, just changed the subject and I did my best to play along until she hung up the phone.
I stared at the dark screen. Therapy? The thought of sitting in some dull room while a stranger dissected my pain made me want to throw up.
I’d done that dance before. Years ago, after the thing I never spoke about.
The mandatory counseling sessions. The clipboard.
The pitying looks that said poor broken girl.
Never again.
So I went back to school. Because movement meant survival, and stillness meant remembering.
The first week was fine. I showed up. Turned things in.
Slept when I could. My professors treated me like I might burst into tears mid-sentence.
Everyone around me overcompensated with awkward cheer.
People I barely knew came up to me with murmured apologies.
I was going to launch myself off Rooker Hall if they kept this shit up.
But I learned to smile and say, “I’m ok,” until the words stopped meaning anything.
Dalton was a constant, steady presence and eventually stepped into his role as a natural buffer. Everything was fine. I was fine.
Then the fog hit. I found myself staring at the same paragraph until it blurred. My brain wouldn’t focus; my heart wouldn’t stop racing. I willed my eyes to focus. To just get to the end of one sentence. But my body wouldn’t obey. I felt trapped in my own skin.
Some guy in my study group offered me an Adderall. “It helps me lock in,” he said.
I hesitated but took it back to my apartment with me.
Maria texted me. A cute picture of Jewel, concern disguised in what was supposed to be a carefree message.
Wishing me luck on my next test. The study guide for said test taunted me, and I eyed the Adderall.
Just to help me focus, just this once. I swallowed it dry.
It worked.
The noise in my head straightened out. The ache dulled. I cleaned the apartment at 3 a.m. and finished three essays I barely remembered writing. I didn’t cry once.
Progress, right?
I passed that test with flying colors. My professor looked at me with more than a little surprise. It felt good doing something wrong, proving someone wrong. The next night, I took another.
Then two.
Dalton noticed before anyone else. “You look wired,” he said one morning, holding out my usual coffee like it was peace.
“I’m fine,” I scoffed.
He arched a brow. “You say that a lot.”
“Because it’s true.”
“It’s bullshit.”
“Don’t start, Dalton.”
He didn’t. But he also didn’t leave. He started showing up more. At my door, in the library, outside my classes. Always with food or coffee. Always pretending he wasn’t watching me unravel. Watching me like if he could just catch the fraying threads of my soul he could tie me back together.
Weeks blurred. I ran on caffeine and pills and pure willpower. If I stopped, the memories came crawling back. The funeral, the flag, the way I’d felt frozen while everyone else moved on. And beneath that, older ghosts. The ones I’d buried so deep I thought they were gone.
Therapists back then had called it repressed trauma.
I called it surviving when I downed a Xanax to shut the voices up.
I was sixteen. The world had been rough hands and a locked door. They’d told me talking would help, but all it did was make me watch their faces twist with sympathy. I hated that look. I still did. So no, I didn’t need therapy. I needed quiet. Control.
The pills gave me both.
By midterms, I wasn’t sleeping. My body buzzed like a live wire. One weekend when I was home, I found an old bottle of hydrocodone in my mother’s drawer. A pain killer from a long ago surgery. She didn’t notice its absence.
One to wake up.
One to slow down.
One to survive another day of pretending.
Dalton found me in the kitchen of my apartment one night, staring at a pill bottle like it might blink first. I’d given him a key a long time ago, something I was seriously regretting now.
“Don’t,” he said quietly, eyes flicking between me and the little yellow bottle like someone rubbernecking a car crash. Couldn’t look away even if he wanted to.
“It’s prescribed.”
“Not for this.”
“You’re not my babysitter.”
His jaw flexed, voice sharpening. “No. But I promised your boyfriend I’d look out for you, and I’m not breaking that promise just because you’re trying to disappear.”
The word boyfriend hit like a slap.
“He’s gone, Dalton. Gone. He’s not coming back. He left me.”
“I know,” he said. “It sucks, but he knew the risks. He signed up for this.”
“Yeah, well. I didn’t.”
“And you think I did?!”
I flinched. I’d never heard him yell before. His voice cracked, ragged with something more than anger.
“You’re not the only one hurting here, Holly,” he went on, breath coming fast. “Mom cries all the damn time. Dad and Mac take turns drinking themselves stupid. Everybody’s trying to pretend they’re fine, like if we just fake it long enough, it’ll stop hurting.”
He dragged a hand through his hair, eyes glassy with exhaustion. “It’d be really fucking nice if, for once, someone just didn’t hide it.”
Silence. The only sound was the hum of the fridge and my heartbeat pounding in my ears. He waited for me to say something. I didn’t. Finally, he turned, muttered something under his breath, and walked out.
The next morning, there was a note taped to my door: He would want us to get through this together. Sorry for yelling.
But I was still alone. That was the problem.
The pills worked until they didn’t. Then I chased them with whatever I could find—caffeine, leftover painkillers, anything to level out the crash.
Maria texted constantly.
Mom called almost every night, except for when I could find an excuse for her to leave me alone. Big test coming up. A headache. Busy. Anything.
Hannah threatened to drag me home if I didn’t bring myself. So, some weekends, I would find myself back there, pretending I was coping while the memories threatened to eat me alive.
Then I would go back to my apartment in Athens. Repeat the cycle. My friends and family were safe in Atlanta. They couldn’t see me unraveling one dose at a time.
Dalton could. And he wouldn’t look away.
He’d stop by uninvited, bringing food I wouldn’t eat, talking until I stopped pretending I didn’t hear him. Sometimes I’d lash out just to make him leave. He never did.
“Why do you care so damn much?” I snapped once.
He met my glare without blinking. “Because he did.”
That shut me up.
The night before finals, everything caved in.
I’d been awake for three days, papers due, heart hammering like it wanted out. My hands
wouldn’t stop shaking. The mirror showed a stranger. Pale, bruised under the eyes, hair
matted.
I swallowed another Adderall. Then half a Xanax to smooth the edge. The math made sense at the time.
When the world started tilting, I tried to sit down. The floor hit back. The tiles were cold. I liked that part. They cooled the fire under my skin. Somewhere far away, my phone was buzzing.
Oh, right.
Maria.
She was coming over for…dinner. Or something.
I blinked at it when it buzzed again. Reached for it. But my arms felt so heavy. And I was so tired. I yawned and curled in on myself. Suddenly, I was very cold. Distantly, I wondered who had turned on the AC. Maria’s name kept lighting up the screen, then it was Dalton’s.
I was half asleep, and then I heard Dalton’s voice outside the bathroom door. I tried to tell him to go away. I was trying to sleep. But the words were like sandpaper on my tongue.
“Holly? Open up.” A pause. Louder. “Holly!”
“Hermana! You need to open this door. Now! Please, open the door!”
Oh, Maria was here. Why was Maria in Athens?
I struggled to remember. I could hear them arguing in the hallway, and I wanted to tell them I couldn’t think with all the arguing.
Then the crash of wood splintering. Hands on my face.
Her voice breaking. Dalton on his knees, pulling me into his lap as Maria grabbed her phone from her purse and cursed when she dropped it.
She was crying, and I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
I wanted to tell her not to cry. I felt fine. I just wanted to sleep.
Dalton started smacking my cheeks, and I turned my attention back to him. “Hey, come on, breathe, don’t you fucking do this!” He shook me none to gently, and for a second, I could’ve sworn I saw Jackson. Right there. He was right there.
“Is it you?” The words dragged, thick and broken. Dalton’s brow furrowed, but Jackson understood.
He knelt beside me, his hand running down my face. “I’m here, Malibu.”
I tried to smile. Maria was still crying.
Then nothing.
When I woke up, it was to beeping and white light. My throat burned. My body felt hollow. Frantically, I scanned the room.
Dalton sat in the corner, head bowed, blood dried on his knuckles. He looked up when I moved. “Hey,” he said hoarsely. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Jackson?” I glanced around the room again and licked my cracked lips. But Jackson…I could’ve sworn I had heard him.
He looked at the floor, then back at me. And that was answer enough. My lip trembled, and I closed my eyes. It had been so real.
Dalton leaned forward, brushed hair out of my face. “You’re ok. Just breathe.”
A nurse told me later that if he hadn’t broken down the door when he did, I’d be gone.
When I was moved from ICU, the room filled with too much love for one girl who’d nearly thrown her life away.