Chapter 38 #2
I push back from my desk and stand, pacing once across the office. I stop at the window again, palms braced on the sill. For a moment, I feel absurdly separate from it. Like I’m watching life happen from behind glass.
A quiet room.
That’s what Frank wrote. The image makes my throat tighten.
I’ve built my life to avoid pain, and somehow, I’ve still managed to end up sitting alone in a room that feels too empty.
I think of Melissa’s message.
I need someone who stays.
My stomach twists.
She wasn’t punishing me. She wasn’t trying to win. She wasn’t demanding more than was fair.
She was telling me the truth.
And I read it like an accusation because the truth is inconvenient when it points directly at your worst patterns.
I close my eyes briefly, the locker room flashing through my mind.
Her sitting there, trying to hold herself together. The way her shoulders shook slightly, quiet grief spilling out despite her best efforts to contain it.
The way I stood in the doorway and felt the floor tilt beneath me.
I remember the moment my body wanted to move toward her and the moment my mind made the decision to leave instead.
Because if you stay, you’ll break. If you break, you won’t come back. And if you lose control, you’ll become the version of yourself you promised you’d never be again.
The memory bleeds into another one before I can stop it.
A different hospital. A different hallway. My hands too young, too useless, clenched so tightly that my nails cut into my palms.
A doctor’s voice, calm and practiced, saying words that should never have to exist in the same sentence.
“We did everything we could.”
The sentence strikes the same way every time, like a door slamming shut.
The space in my chest seemed to shrink until no air can fit. My chest squeezes hard enough that I have to grip the window frame.
I don’t let the memory sharpen into a face. I don’t let myself hear the beeping, the hush of nurses, the shuffling of feet on tiles.
I don’t. I swallow it down, forcing my breath to slow.
That’s how I’ve survived.
That’s how I became this man who is controlled, precise, and unshakeable.
And I can’t pretend I don’t understand why. The past didn’t just hurt. It carved something into me.
It taught me that love is a vulnerability you don’t get to take back once you’ve given it. That grief doesn’t care how smart you are or that being needed and being helpless can coexist in the same breath.
Frank’s letter sits on my desk like an open wound.
I move back to it, sitting down again. My fingers smooth the paper once, as if I can flatten the truth into something manageable.
My phone buzzes.
For a second, my pulse spikes irrationally, as if my body expects it to be her.
It isn’t.
It’s a resident, asking a question about lab orders.
I answer quickly, professionally, and set the phone down again.
The irony is brutal.
I can manage everyone else’s fear, but I can’t manage my own.
I pick up my phone again anyway and open my messages.
Melissa’s last text thread is there. The one I haven’t responded to.
I scroll up.
I’m sorry.
I didn’t mean to hurt you.
Pathetic, in retrospect. Not because it wasn’t true, but because it was incomplete.
I said it like an ending, hoping it would close the door on a conversation I didn’t know how to have.
But she doesn’t want words. She wants presence.
My thumbs hover over the keyboard.
I type, then stop.
What do you even say when you’ve spent your whole life insisting you don’t need anyone?
What do you say when you do?
I delete the half-formed sentence. Start again. Delete again.
The truth is, I don’t want to talk yet. Not because I don’t want her … I do. In ways that have become deeply, dangerously entwined with my sense of calm.
But if I go to her right now, it will be for the wrong reason.
It will be because I’m cracked open and desperate for something to stitch me back together.
Melissa isn’t a bandage. She’s a person, and the last thing I will do, after everything she’s survived, is make her responsible for holding me upright.
Frank’s words echo again.
You don’t need to choose today, but you do need to stop hiding.
I stare at the screen, then force myself to do the first honest thing I’ve done in days.
I don’t ask her to fix this. I ask for time to face it.
My fingers finally move.
Me: I got a letter from Frank today.
I pause, heart thudding.
Me: I’m not okay. But I’m trying not to run.
I stare at the message for a long moment before sending it. My stomach twists, as if pressing that button might detonate something.
I hit Send anyway.
The reply doesn’t come immediately, and that’s fair. I set the phone down and lean back in my chair, staring at the ceiling.
The tightness in my chest remains, but it’s different now. It’s less frantic.
I don’t know what comes next. But I know I can’t go back to the way it was.
Because Frank is gone, and he left me with the one thing I’d spent my whole life trying not to face. The truth that surviving isn’t the same as living.
And if I keep choosing control over connection, I’ll end up exactly where he warned me I would.
In a quiet room. Alone.