44. If You Only Knew – Zack
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
IF YOU ONLY KNEW
ZACK
Imiss it the first time. I see her looking back at me and I know that my head isn’t where it’s supposed to be.
I don’t know how to allow myself to feel this when everything around us is crumbling.
My world isn’t whole unless she’s in it, and I have this innate sense of knowing when she’s not okay.
To know it’s my fault is probably the part that hurts me the most.
That’s the part that bothers me most.
The warehouse hums the way a place like this always does—old wiring, distant power, the faint vibration of something running longer than it should—but my attention keeps snagging on the wrong things.
The echo of our argument. The memory of Hazel’s voice in the dark last night, soft and unguarded, saying something I wasn’t prepared to hold.
I love you.
The words loop without permission, cutting through my focus like interference on a clean signal. I tell myself it’s irrelevant. I tell myself this is not the time. Cameron and Leyla matter. Lives matter. Feelings can wait.
They always can.
Hazel moves a few steps ahead of me; light, careful, posture alert. She doesn’t say anything, but I can feel the space between us the way you feel a change in pressure before a storm. She notices when I lag half a step behind. When I pause too long at nothing.
“You good?” she asks quietly.
“Yeah,” I say too fast. “Just thinking.”
She doesn’t respond. That’s worse than if she did.
I force my mind back to the building—angles, seams, load-bearing walls—but it keeps sliding sideways, back to the way she looked at me this morning in the car. Not angry. Not dramatic. Just…hurt. Like she’d offered me something fragile and I’d locked it in a box without meaning to.
I didn’t pull away because I don’t feel it. I pulled away because that’s what I do.
Love isn’t soft to me. It’s weight. Responsibility. A list of names I carry with me every day. My parents. Sam. People I didn’t save. People I was supposed to.
Hazel saying it makes it real in a way I don’t know how to protect.
“Zack,” Hazel says again, sharper this time. “You’re not listening.”
I stop walking.
She turns to face me, frustration flickering across her expression. “You keep saying you’re fine, but you’re somewhere else.”
I open my mouth with the right answer ready—mission, focus, timing—and then close it again because she deserves better than another deflection.
“I can’t afford to split my attention,” I say finally. “Not here.”
Her jaw tightens. “I’m not asking you to.”
“You are,” I reply, more sharply than I intend. “Not on purpose, but—”
I stop myself. Breathe. This is how people get hurt.
She studies my face, and for a second I think she might say something that cracks me open further. Instead, she nods once, controlled.
“Okay,” she says. “Then stay on task.” Her voice is hard, thrown at me like verbal knives that I had only given to her.
She turns away before I can respond, light sweeping the far wall, already back in motion. Professional, composed. Exactly what I asked for, and I hate every single moment of it.
It feels like a loss, anyway. I feel as though everything we’ve worked so hard toward, came crashing down around me, and I have no one to blame but myself.
I push forward, forcing my thoughts back where they belong, scanning the floor again, the walls, the way the sound shifts near the far corner. This time I catch it—a subtle inconsistency in the echo, a place where the warehouse doesn’t quite answer itself.
There.
My pulse spikes, clean and sharp, the distraction snapping into clarity at last. I gesture for Hazel, and she’s there instantly, all focus, all trust, like nothing between us is broken at all. Like I didn’t ruin absolutely everything.
And maybe it isn’t.
Maybe it’s just waiting.
As I kneel to examine the seam in the concrete, the thought slips in uninvited and dangerous:
If I don’t survive this, she’ll be the last person I hurt.
I shove it down and get to work.
Because Cameron and Leyla are still breathing somewhere behind this lie, and whatever I’m running from inside my own head will have to wait.
For now.
But the static doesn’t fade; it settles into my body and I let it settle over me, because there’s no more turning back, not for me, not for this moment. And that's when it happens. Hazel presses the floor and it opens up to another room, and all I hear is Hazel’s voice.
“Oh fuck.”