Seventy-two hours of watching the man I love fight a war inside his own skin. Every minute of it has carved something new and jagged out of my chest, leaving raw edges that bleed every time I breathe.
And since he won’t let me near him, I do what I always do when I’m inside my own head too much. I bake. And I’ve ruined the dough twice this morning.
By now, Andrei has started quietly intercepting the worst of it before it leaves the kitchen.
Yesterday, he scraped an entire tray of something that was supposed to be focacciadirectly into the bin without comment, just a look that saidlet’s pretend that didn’t happen.
Last night, Ian ate two of the lopsided cupcakes standing at the counter and declared them, with a completely straight face, “structurally ambitious.”
Between the two of them, they’ve quietly become the unofficial taste-testers of whatever comes out of this kitchen—eating things that don’t deserve to be eaten so I don’t have to throw away the evidence of my own hands needing somewhere to go.
Today, it’s bread again. A focaccia that’s gone too dense because I forgot the second rise, my mind somewhere upstairs with him instead of on the dough.
My fingers push into the mass that refuses to cooperate, and for a moment I imagine it’s something I can fix. Something I can knead and coax and make right. But it’s just bread. And I’m just a woman who can’t stop her hands from shaking, flour dusting my wrists like ash, the yeasty scent clinging to my skin in a way that feels both comforting and mocking.
The kitchen feels too bright under the warm overhead lights, the marble counters cool beneath my forearms as I lean into the work, trying to lose myself in the rhythm that used to ground me.
But nothing grounds me now.
Not the soft hum of the refrigerator, not the distant tick of the clock in the hall, not even the faint trace of his scent that still lingers on the collar of the oversized shirt I stole from his room—leather and smoke and that sharp winter edge that always made my pulse stutter.
The doctor was here earlier. He comes every day now, sometimes twice, and today his face had a different quality to it when he came down the stairs—not relief, exactly, but something adjacent to it. A cautious loosening around theeyes, the kind of expression professionals wear when they’re trying not to promise miracles to desperate people.
“The worst of the physical symptoms have passed,” he told us, standing in this same kitchen with his bag still in his hand, voice low and measured like he knew every word could either anchor us or shatter what little hope we had left. “The acute phase. Seventy-two hours, give or take—we’re past that now.”
I remember the specific, stupid hope that flared in my chest at that sentence. Bright and sharp and dangerous, like a match struck too close to dry tinder.
For one fleeting second, I let myself imagine him walking down those stairs under his own power, eyes clear, that rare half-smile tugging at the corner of his scarred mouth as he reached for me like he had in Paris, like the mountain house, like every stolen moment that had rewritten my understanding of what wanting could feel like.
“That doesn’t mean it gets easier,” he continued, and the hope contracted back down to something smaller, more fragile, curling in on itself like paper in flame.
“It means it changes shape. The body stops fighting as hard. But this next stretch—four days to a week—this is when the depression sets in. Real depression, not just exhaustion. Anhedonia. He may not be able to feel pleasure in anything, even things he used to love. Insomnia, but different than what you’ve seen—not the body unable to rest, but the mind unwilling to let him. And whatever guilt, whatever shame he’s carrying—” He paused. Chose his next words carefully, eyes flicking between me and Ian like he understood the weight of what we were carrying, too. “That tends to surface hardest right about now. When thebody isn’t screaming loud enough to drown it out anymore.”
I think about that conversation while I knead bread that’s already failed, my knuckles whitening as I press into the stubborn dough. The physical war is ending. The tremors, the sweats, the violent retching that had left him hollowed those first endless nights—they’re fading. But the other one—the one that lives in his head, in his heart, in all the places Valeria broke and left jagged—is just getting started. And I am so fucking terrified I won’t be enough to help him through it. That the woman who once wrote diary entries about wanting to be consumed by love might not be enough.
There are footsteps behind me, but I don’t turn around right away. I already know it’s Ian by the way he moves—quiet but deliberate, the way someone walks when they’re carrying too much and trying not to show it.
The soft scuff of boots on tile, the faint rustle of fabric, the exhaled breath that carries the exhaustion of a man who’s been standing guard at the gates of hell for days.
When I finally glance over my shoulder, the sight of him stops me cold.
A fresh black eye blooms across the left side of his face, dark and angry, the skin around it swollen and split at the corner, turning shades of purple and green that speak of violence barely contained. His lip is fat on that side too, cracked and glistening under the kitchen light. He looks like he went ten rounds with someone who hits like a freight train.
Because he did.
Reth.
Last night. The craving had hit him hard—harder than the night before. He’d woken up shaking, sweating, begging for something to make the pain stop.
I heard the chaos. The screams, the cursing, the thuds. I was on the other side of it, in the hallway just like I’ve been every night since they bought him back. When I knocked on the door and asked if everything’s okay, Ian just gave me a short, “Everything’s fine.”
And now I see that it’s not.
Ian catches me staring and gives a small, tired shrug, like a black eye is the least of his concerns.
“Morning, Crazy,” he says, voice rough, the words scraping out like gravel under tires.
He moves to the counter, pours himself a cup of coffee with the hand that isn’t bruised, knuckles swollen and raw.
