Chapter 24 #3
The soft scrape of them on the floor. She's turning toward the door. I keep my eyes on the window. The Strip. The desert. Anything except what's happening behind me.
Something plays softly from across the room—she's found the portable speaker, she's put something on, the opening notes of Familiar Taste of Poison filling the suite before she heads for the door—and that's when I hear it.
The crutches.
Not the sound of someone walking normally across a room.
The sound of someone working. The careful, effortful rhythm of someone managing a body that has been through something serious and hasn't finished healing.
Every step she takes is measured and deliberate.
Every step costs her something, and she keeps paying the price.
I turn around.
She's halfway to the door. Moving slowly, her right leg in a cast from thigh to toe, her jaw set, her eyes down. The bruising on her face and neck. The way she's holding her left side slightly. The way she is fighting, even now, not to ask for anything.
She came here like this.
She got on a plane or got in a car or got in whatever transport she could find and she came to this hotel and she got on an elevator and she walked down this hallway on those crutches to knock on my door—because she had something to say and she was going to say it regardless of what it cost her physically, and I stood at the window and told her the true thing too late, and now she's leaving anyway.
She's going to make it to that door.
She's going to walk out because she said she would—and Andi keeps her word.
She reaches for the doorknob.
I cross the room before I know I'm moving.
I come up behind her and slide my arms around her carefully—very carefully, aware of the ribs she’s favoring, aware she's injured in ways I don't know about yet, aware that she's fragile in ways she would never say—and I pull her back against my chest and hold her up and put my mouth against her ear.
"Please don't go, baby," I say. "Don't leave me."
She breaks.
Not the controlled fracture she's been holding herself in since she walked through the door—since she decided she could manage this by force of will alone.
This is different. This is the sound that slips out when the last brace gives way.
A sob, sharp and involuntary, finally tearing loose after being held back through the entire conversation.
Her hands tighten around the crutches, as if they're the only things keeping her upright, knuckles whitening as her body starts to shake.
I feel it immediately—the way the strength leaves her all at once, the way the tension drains so fast it's almost violent.
She folds inward, not collapsing but coming undone, and the sight of it hits me harder than anything she's said.
I move without thinking, dropping in front of her, my hands coming up to steady her because I can't stand watching her carry this alone for another second.
She doesn't look at me. She can't. Her breath stutters, uneven and broken, and every sound feels like it's being pulled from somewhere deep in her chest.
"I'm sorry," she tries, the words barely there, like she's still apologizing for needing something.
That's the part that wrecks me.
I shake my head, close enough now that I can feel the tremor running through her, the effort it's taking just to stay upright. I don't tell her it's okay. I don't tell her she's strong. I don't tell her any of the useless things people say when they don't know how to sit with someone else's pain.
I just stay.
Because this isn't a moment to manage or fix or contain.
This is the moment all the careful holding finally failed her, and she trusted me enough to let it.
And I realize, with a kind of quiet ache, that this is what she's been protecting me from—the cost of seeing her like this, broken open, raw, real.
Her forehead drops forward, resting against my shoulder, and I lift one hand automatically, anchoring her there. She exhales, ragged and exhausted, and for the first time since she walked in, she stops fighting it.
I feel it settle in my chest, heavy and unmistakable:
This is not weakness.
This is the price she paid to keep going.
And I hate that she ever thought she had to pay it alone.
"I've got you," I say. "I've got you, baby."
I hold her until the shaking slows, and then I take the crutches and lean them against the wall and lift her—carefully, carefully—and carry her to the bedroom, and I prop her leg with pillows the way you do when you don't know what you're doing, but you're trying.
I look at her face, and her neck, and the bruising that covers both, and something burns in my chest that has nothing to do with anger.
"Who did this to you?" I ask.
It comes out wrong—too sharp, too controlled. She looks at me with those tired, clear eyes.
"No one did this," she says. "I was in a wreck."
I look at her. The cast. The bruising. The way she held her side.
"That's not minor injuries and routine overnight monitoring," I say.
"No," she agrees. "It wasn't."