Chapter 12
TWELVE
olivia
It’s been weeks since I’ve spent a night here, and the room feels smaller than I remember.
The heat doesn’t quite reach the corners, and the air carries that faint chemical scent of old carpet and communal bathrooms. I stand just inside the door for a moment, arms crossed like a shield, before I set my bag down at the foot of the bed.
The window is cracked open, letting in the slightest evening chill.
Outside, the sun is already retreating, tucking itself behind the rooftops and leaving the sky streaked with pale blue and dull orange.
I sit down slowly, the mattress creaking beneath me, and press the heel of my hand to my chest. It still aches there—a dull, echoing pressure. A bruise beneath the skin.
Nathaniel meant well. That’s what unsettles me most. His insistence on taking me away for spring break wasn’t a power play or a trap—it was him trying to care for me the only way he knows how. He wanted to give me rest. To spare me another decision when I’m already stretched thin.
And yet, the moment the words left his mouth, I felt myself recoil.
Because I know that feeling too well—the ground slipping out from under me, my choices vanishing before I even get the chance to make them.
It’s what my parents engrained in me: to be useful before I was ever allowed to be whole, to take responsibility for everyone else while forgetting how to take care of myself.
For years, I was nothing more than a set of hands to fill a gap at the diner, a body to carry the weight they didn’t want to bear.
Even when I dreamed of more, there was always another demand waiting to smother it.
So when Nathaniel, with all his love and certainty, tells me he’s already decided for us, something inside me bristles.
Even his tenderness can feel like a threat to the fragile autonomy I’ve been fighting to keep.
I want him, I love him, but I can’t give up the part of me that still needs to stand on her own.
My phone buzzes once in my coat pocket. I don’t look. I don’t have to.
Instead, I slide it out, power it off, and set it face-down on the desk across the room. Far enough to keep me from reaching for it. Close enough that I still feel its weight pressing at the back of my mind.
The hours drag. I go down to the dining hall when my stomach growls, but the food tastes like paste in my mouth. I pick at a slice of dry turkey on white bread, the crusts curling at the corners. Someone I vaguely recognize from class says hi in passing. I smile and nod—pretend I’m present.
Back in my room, I brush my teeth. Pull the covers back. Fold a sweatshirt. Go through the motions.
I turn off the lights.
And then the dark starts to speak.
“You think playing house with some rich boy makes you better than us?”
I flinch automatically, the echo of her voice slicing through the silence of the room around me. My jaw clenches. I rub at the tight muscle as if I can knead the memory out of it. It’s old pain—well-worn, rehearsed. Muscle memory.
My mother never yells… But she doesn’t need to raise her voice to draw blood.
“Good daughters don’t abandon their families. They show up. They keep the lights on.”
She’s been texting more often lately, each message a little sharper than the last. This week, she’s resorted to phone calls. I ignored the first two, but I couldn’t ignore the third.
She asked again when I’m coming home for spring break. I said I’m not sure—again. That answer’s starting to wear thin.
She reminded me, like always, of the things that needed doing. Bills. Paperwork. Errands. It’s not really a question anymore. It’s a summons.
I know what I want. I just haven’t figured out how to say it. So I keep circling, hoping indecision will sound like consideration.
“You’re a novelty to him. Boys like that don’t marry girls like you. They marry their own kind.”
I turn over in bed, press my cheek to the pillow. The fabric is cold against my skin. My eyes burn, but I don’t cry. I won’t allow myself to.
She doesn’t know Nathaniel at all. But that never stops her from reminding me where she thinks I belong.
“Maybe you think you’re too good for us now. But when he leaves—and he will—we’re all you’ll have left. The people you turned your back on.”
I close my eyes and breathe. In. Out. Try to quiet the noise.
I know Nathaniel loves me. I see it every time he looks at me. In the way his hand always finds mine, even when I pull away.
But love like that is heavy, and I don’t know if I can bear the weight.
He asked to take me away. But all I could hear was my mother’s voice in my head, warning me there is no way we could ever last.
I toss and turn beneath the thin blanket, skin flushed one moment, chilled the next.
Sleep won’t come. Not with his beautiful face in my mind—that intense cobalt gaze, that low, coaxing voice.
The way his hand traces the length of my spine like he knows exactly where I’m fraying.
The way he always finds me, even when I don’t want to be found.
But what happens when he uncovers the parts I’ve kept buried? When he sees I don’t know how to exist without something to prove? That love, for me, has always meant doing too much and hoping it would be enough.
He’ll come for me in the morning. I know he will. He’ll knock until I open the door. Call until I answer.
And if I see him—if I see that look in his eyes—I might fold. I might fall back into him and forget why I came here in the first place.
Around five, the first hint of morning slips in, pale and muted. Knowing sleep is hopeless, I get up and get dressed slowly. Jeans. A sweater. Nothing that smells like him. I pack my bag carefully, with unsteady hands.
When I reach for my necklace to slip it beneath my shirt, the diamond catches a thread of early light. I press my thumb to it. The gold is cool against my skin.
I haven’t taken it off since the night he fastened it around my neck. I don’t now, either.
But I press my hand flat over it, as if I can muffle the part of me that’s still reaching for him.
It’s a quarter past nine when the train begins to slow.
The carriage sways beneath me, the landscape outside the window blurring into frost-laced fields and bare trees. We’re close now, just outside Fitchburg.
I turn my phone back on.
It vibrates almost immediately—sharp and insistent.
Incoming Call—Nathaniel Caldwell
The screen pulses. Once. Twice.
His name pulls at me like a tide—quiet, steady, inevitable. I should ignore it.
But my fingers move of their own accord, my thumb swiping across the screen. The call connects. And then I hear his voice—low, controlled, threaded with something frayed at the edges.
“Where are you, Olivia?”
I curl my fingers tighter around the edge of my seat, the leather strap of my bag caught beneath my palm.
“On the train,” I say softly. “Almost in Fitchburg.”
There’s a pause—long enough to amplify that ache in my chest.
“I didn’t mean to worry you,” I add. It feels like the truth, even if it isn’t completely.
The silence that follows isn’t cold, but it settles in the space between us like a held breath.
“I’m not running away from you,” I offer, trying to keep my voice even.
A beat. Then, “Aren’t you?”
The words don’t carry accusation, but they still land heavily. I press my shoulder against the cold glass of the window and close my eyes. He’s not wrong. But it isn’t that simple.
I shift slightly, tucking one knee beneath me. My coat bunches at the elbow, and I smooth it down out of habit.
“You promised that you’d let me move at my own pace,” I remind him, almost in a whisper.
He doesn’t answer right away. I think I hear him exhale, but it’s soft—like he’s turned away from the receiver.
“I remember,” he says finally, but it sounds strained.
“Then let me come back on my own time.”
This silence stretches. He releases a resigned sigh.
“You will come back…won’t you?” He says it calmly, but the tremor under the words makes my throat tighten.
He’s not really asking if I’ll return. He’s asking if I’ll come back to him—to whatever we still are, whatever we might be.
If I’ll let him love me, even then.
I press my hand to the spot just beneath my necklace.
“Yes,” I say, and my voice holds. I make sure it does.
Another beat passes. I imagine him sitting in the dim morning light, phone pressed tightly to his ear, jaw clenched. I worry whether he’s gotten any sleep.
“I’ll call,” I say softly. “And text. If that’s okay.”
The breath he lets out is sudden and ragged. “Jesus, Olivia.”
He doesn’t say anything more, but he doesn’t need to. I shift the phone to my other ear, blinking hard against the heat behind my eyes.
“I love you,” I whisper. It’s the only thing I can give him that doesn’t feel like a compromise.
There’s a low sound from his end, so soft I almost miss it, before he says “I love you too, Olivia. You…” Then there’s a pause, like he’s trying to hold something back. “You have become my whole life.”
It shouldn’t stagger me—Nathaniel has never held back with me—but the conviction in his voice leaves something trembling in my chest.
I miss him with a sudden, startling clarity, the kind that makes distance feel like a mistake. And for a moment, I can’t remember why I ever thought I needed to run.
The train slows. A soft lurch, a screech of metal on metal. The voice overhead announces the approach to Fitchburg.
“Promise me you’ll take care of yourself, baby,” he says.
“I will,” I murmur. “You too.”
I don’t say goodbye. I don’t think either of us could bear it.
I pull the phone from my ear and stare at the screen for a beat longer. Then I end the call with a swipe of my thumb, the sound of his voice still lingers in my mind like it’s stitched into the fabric of the world around me.
The train eases into the station, and I sit still, hand resting over my heart, holding the ache there where only I can feel it.