I shake my head.
“I knew you wouldn’t,” I say. “And that was the problem.”
His brows pull together.
“I didn’t want you to love me through it. I didn’t want to owe you that when I didn’t even want to be in my own skin.”
My voice cracks slightly before I force it steady again.
“If I let you see that version of me… I didn’t know if I’d ever forgive myself.”
For a moment, neither of us speaks.
The water shifts quietly around us.
“I got help eventually,” I say after a minute. “Therapy. Medication. I built routines. I started eating breakfast again. Going outside. Taking walks.”
My fingers drift slowly through his hair again.
“I started feeling things again.”
Rowan watches me carefully.
“And by the time I got better,” I finish softly, “I’d assumed you’d moved on. That you’d found someone who wasn’t… falling apart.”
He shakes his head immediately.
“Fuck, Tessa.”
I let out a quiet laugh.
“That’s the worst part,” I say. “There wasn’t some huge tragedy. Nothing dramatic happened. I just… stopped functioning for a while.”
He looks up at me.
“It felt pathetic,” I admit.
“It wasn’t,” he says instantly.
I blink once.
“Then why did it feel like it was?”
He leans forward slightly until his forehead touches mine.
His voice is low when he answers.
“Because surviving something quiet can feel invisible,” he says. “That doesn’t make it small.”
For a second, I can’t say anything.
So, I just sit there with him.
Warm water around us.
His hand still holding mine.
And the quiet between us finally feels different.
