Chapter 13 Riley
Riley
Some anniversaries mark celebrations. Others mark survival. This one was both.
Some dates you just survive. You don’t celebrate them.
I noticed the change in Mia before I could figure out why.
The withdrawal came first. Quieter dinners. One-word answers instead of rambling stories about Honey. Pushing food around her plate, picking at meals she usually devoured without thinking.
Then the silence spread. It seeped into the spaces her voice used to fill.
She stopped asking Liam questions about the horses. Stopped doing homework at the kitchen table. The moment she came home from school, she disappeared into her room, door shutting with a soft finality that felt louder than a slam.
Music followed—turned up just enough to block the world out. Loud enough to drown whatever was circling inside her head.
I knew that silence.
I’d lived inside it once.
I realized the nightmares were back the same way I always did—too late, and without her telling me. I heard her through the wall at night, the muffled crying she tried to smother into her pillow, the small, broken sounds she thought no one noticed.
I noticed.
The anniversary was a week away. Mia’s body still remembered even when her mind tried not to. It always did.
Grief doesn't follow schedules. But it remembers dates.
I tried to talk to her. Knocked on her door after dinner, asked if she wanted to watch a movie, offered to take her to see Honey before bed. Got monosyllables and shrugs and finally a slammed door that rattled the frame.
"She's shutting down," I told Liam that night, standing in the kitchen after Mia had gone to bed. "I can see it happening and I can't stop it."
"The anniversary?"
I nodded. Of course he knew. He paid attention in ways I was still getting used to.
"She did this last year too, and went silent for two weeks. Wouldn't eat, wouldn't talk, wouldn't let me near her. I just had to wait it out."
"You don't have to wait it out alone this time."
The words settled lower than I expected. I looked away before he could see what they did to me.
The nightmare that pulled me out of bed came three nights before the anniversary.
Mia’s screams pierced the house like broken glass, shattering the silence, dragging me out of sleep and onto my feet before my eyes were fully open. I ran down the hallway, bare feet slapping cold hardwood, my chest tight, breath already uneven.
Her door was open. The nightlight threw warped shadows across the walls, across Mia tangled in her sheets, kicking, sobbing, trapped somewhere between sleep and waking.
“She’s gone, she’s gone, she left us, she left us, why did she leave us—”
I climbed into bed and pulled her against me.
Her body shook hard enough to rattle my teeth.
I wrapped my arms around her and rocked, slow and steady, the way I used to when she was small—when Mom was passed out, when the house went quiet in the wrong way, when Mia couldn’t sleep and there was no one else left to keep things from falling apart.
“I’m here. I’m here, bug. I’ve got you.”
The words left my mouth, but they didn’t land. Her breathing stayed jagged, the sobs tearing out of her like something trapped. She twisted against me, fingers clutching my shirt, pulling like she might disappear if she let go.
I held on anyway. Rocked us back and forth. Let the same phrases repeat, low and steady, even as they started to feel thin in my own ears.
Her face pressed into my chest, wet and shaking. I could feel every hitch of her breath, every sharp pull inward that never seemed to fill her lungs.
There was nothing I could reach. Nothing I could undo.
I couldn’t bring Mom back. Couldn’t rewind the years. Couldn’t give her a version of childhood that didn’t wake her screaming in the middle of the night.
My arms tightened anyway. That was all I had.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway.
I looked up.
Liam stood in the doorway in a faded T-shirt and sweatpants, hair flattened on one side, eyes still heavy with sleep. They moved once around the room and stopped on us.
On Mia, shaking apart in my arms.
On me, holding what was left together.
I waited for the questions. For the careful words people reached for when they were afraid of saying the wrong thing.
They didn’t come.
He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress dipped under his weight, close enough that I could feel it. Close enough that the air changed.
Something in my chest loosened before I realized it had been clenched.
He didn’t hover. Didn’t rush. Just stayed there—solid, steady—like he understood that this was not a moment to fill, only one to hold.
He didn’t ask permission. Didn’t need to. He sat like he belonged there, like this wasn’t new, like waking in the dark to someone else’s grief was familiar ground.
I watched him from the corner of my eye, the way his shoulders settled, the way his hands rested on his knees, patient.
Whatever had been starting to fracture inside me went quiet. Not fixed. Just… held.
Then he spoke.
“When I was nineteen,” his voice low and steady, cutting through Mia’s sobs, “I got a phone call that split my life in half.”
Mia’s crying hitched. Not stopping, but shifting. Listening.
“My parents were working the north field. Tractor rolled. They told me later it was quick, that they didn’t suffer, but I don’t know if that’s true or just what people say.
” He paused, his hand finding Mia’s shoulder, gentle and warm.
“One minute, I had a family. The next minute, I was standing in a hospital hallway trying to remember how to breathe.”
His voice held the room. Mia’s sobs softened into hiccups, her body angling toward him like a plant toward sunlight.
“My grandmother saved me,” Liam continued. “Not all at once. Not with big gestures. She just kept showing up. Made me breakfast even when I couldn’t eat. Sat with me on the porch when I couldn’t sleep. Let me be angry and sad and broken without trying to fix it.”
Mia’s voice was small, cracked. “Does it ever stop hurting?”
“No.” Liam didn’t soften the truth or wrap it in false comfort. “It doesn’t stop. But it changes. It gets easier to carry. It stops being the only thing you feel.”
“I don’t want to forget her.” Mia’s words came out choked. “But sometimes I can’t remember her face. I have to look at pictures, and that makes me feel like I’m already forgetting, and then I feel guilty, and—”
“That’s normal.” Liam’s voice was steady, certain. “Forgetting details doesn’t mean forgetting her. It just means you’re human.”
“Mom wasn’t…” Mia trailed off, and I held my breath, waiting. “She wasn’t always good. Sometimes she was mean. Sometimes she forgot to pick me up from school. Sometimes she loved the pills more than she loved us.”
My throat closed. We’d never talked about this. Mia had never said it out loud—the truth we both knew but couldn’t name.
“You can love someone and be angry at them at the same time,” Liam said. “You can miss them and be relieved they’re gone. You can grieve someone who hurt you. None of that makes you bad. It just makes you honest.”
Mia was quiet for a long moment. Then, so softly I almost missed it:
“Riley never says that.”
The words landed like a fist. I opened my mouth—to defend myself, to explain, to fill the space—but Liam’s hand found mine in the dark, squeezed once.
“Riley’s been protecting you. That’s what she does. Sometimes protection looks like not saying the hard things out loud.”
“But you said them.”
“Yeah.”
His gaze met mine over Mia’s head. It didn’t linger, didn’t ask for anything. Just stayed. Soft in a way that made my throat tighten before I could stop it.
“Sometimes it takes someone outside the hurt to name it.”
In the dark, Mia reached out.
She found his hand first. Then mine.
Her fingers were small, damp, determined. Holding on like she’d decided something.
The three of us stayed that way, connected in the dark—no paperwork, no signatures, nothing official. Just weight and warmth and the quiet understanding that whatever this was, it mattered more than anything we’d agreed to around a firehouse kitchen four months ago.
“I don’t want to go back.”
Her voice was small, scraped raw, but steadier than it had been in days.
“To Todd. To before. I want to stay here.”
She didn’t say with both of you.
She didn’t have to.
Her grip tightened, linking us. She leaned into him for the truth of it, into me for the holding. She let us see her like this—split open, trusting.
“You’re staying.”
The words were calm. Final.
“We’re not going anywhere.”
We.
The sound of it settled in my chest, heavier than my name, steadier than sister.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t correct him.
I held on.
Something in my chest gave way and settled again, all in the same breath.
Mia’s eyes drifted closed. Her breathing slowed, smoothed out, deepened. The tension eased from her hands, her body finally giving in to the weight of it all.
Grief loosened its grip. Just enough.
We stayed like that.
Connected.
Watching her sleep.
Neither of us moving. Neither of us willing to be the one to let go.
Eventually, we slipped into the hallway, pulling Mia's door almost closed behind us.
I leaned against the wall, legs unsteady, heart pounding.
The adrenaline was fading now, leaving something raw and exposed in its wake.
I couldn't stop replaying it—Liam sitting on Mia's bed, talking about his parents, his grief, his grandmother.
Handing my sister truths I'd been too afraid to speak.
"You didn't have to do that." My voice came out rough, barely a whisper. "Sit with her. Tell her about your parents. You didn't have to—"
"Yeah." He was looking at me with that expression that made my chest ache. "I did."
"Why?"
The question hung between us. The hallway was dark except for the thin line of light under Mia's door. I could hear the house settling around us—the creak of old wood, the distant sound of wind against windows.