I ended the call. A moment later my phone lit with a message.
"Meet me now if you need me. No need to talk first. Just come."
I stared at the words until they blurred.
Then I ordered a taxi because I did not trust myself to drive. In the back seat, while the city slid past the windows in streaks of light, I opened the notes app on my phone and began typing everything I could not say.
I hate that I don't understand why I'm this sad.
Why does something beautiful feel like pain.
Why on earth am I so angry?
Chapter 22: Malachite
I could not sleep that night.
Therapy had helped in the practical sense. I had written everything I could not say, and my therapist had read it all. She spoke gently about grief that does not always recognize itself, about how witnessing tenderness can awaken the pain of never having received it, about the body mourning things the mind learned long ago to dismiss.
"There is a name for some of this," she said softly. "Attachment grief. Sometimes disenfranchised grief as well, grief for something you needed but never truly had, which means people often do not recognize it as grief at all."
She turned one of my pages over and continued. "When people grow up without safe affection, seeing it later can trigger what we call emotional flashbacks. Nothing dangerous is happening in the present, but the nervous system responds to old deprivation, old fear, and old loneliness."
Then she looked at me with steady kindness. "You are not upset because their love was wrong. You are upset because it showed your body what was missing."
She paused before adding, "Sometimes the anger comes with it. Anger is often grief that has finally found enough strength to move."
I understood everything she said, but understanding did not soothe me.
By midnight the walls of my house felt too near. I put on a sweater, took my keys out of habit, then put them back down when I remembered I had nowhere to go. The night air was cool and clean.
I walked without deciding to, following the familiar path into the lightly lit woods I always ended up in when I needed quiet. It was close to home, safe, and familiar. I reached a clearing where an old fallen log rested beside the path, worn smooth by time. I sat there with my elbows on my knees, looking into the dark as though it might explain me back to myself.
I heard him before I saw him.
Not footsteps exactly, but a muttered curse followed by the unmistakable sound of someone trying to appear uninjured while being very much injured.
I turned.
Bramwell emerged from the trees with one arm still in a sling and his jacket hung open. His hair looked as though the wind had taken a personal dislike to it.
He stopped when he saw my expression.
"I'd like it noted," he said, slightly breathless, "that this was more graceful in theory."
I stared at him. He came closer, favoring one side despite every effort to disguise it.
"You vanish dramatically," he continued, "and I am left to either respect your need for space or ignore several medical instructions and limp into the woods after you. As you can see, I made the emotional choice."
He lowered himself onto the log beside me with a careful exhale that betrayed the effort.
For a while neither of us spoke.
The forest kept its own quiet around us. Leaves shifted overhead. Somewhere nearby, water moved over stone. Then he said, without looking at me, "I waited for you to come back. You didn't answer your phone."
I bowed my head.
"Sorry."
