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. Myhands 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 somethingmanageable.
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.
