Tyler ends the moment with a sigh. He opens his door and climbs out.
“I’m grabbing a shower.”
I am already unbuckling. “I’ll be outside.”
His eyes snap to me, reflexive, constantly checking, before he dips his chin once and departs inside.
When I step through the front door, the house is wrapped in an ordinary, comforting silence.
I don’t stop until the back door slides open with a quiet rasp of metal along the track. Cool air washes over me at once, making me shiver. I step out onto the deck and let the door glide shut behind me, shutting the rest of the world away.
I stand there, caught between breathing and thinking.
And then it creeps in, the darkness, patient and inevitable, just as it always does.
It seeps in gently like an old friend, thick as smoke, winding through my chest, pressing in until it’s hard to tell where it starts and I end.
But then Tyler comes to the forefront of my mind, shattering the spiral before it can take hold.
Inside. Water running. Shower. Safe. Real. Here.
I repeat the facts to myself until the darkness is only tethering onto me.
He’s the only light I have left in a world that tried to swallow me whole.
We celebrated his twenty-first birthday a few weeks ago and next month we will celebrate mine.
A quiet humorless laugh leaves me as my gaze wanders into the night.
It doesn’t feel real. Any of it.
What happened to me didn’t break me; it revealed me.
The girl I used to be, she’s been gone.
Fearless. Adventurous. Innocent to the evil lurking in the world.
I buried her.
I clench the railing, centering myself as the memories gather at the edges of my mind. Nights I couldn’t breathe, days I couldn’t leave the house, and the phantom feel of hands that weren’t there anymore but still burned like they were.
It’s your fault. This would’ve never happened if you hadn’t gone down those stairs.
That voice used to live in my head, relentlessly.
Until everything went quiet. Not peace, just numb.
I let the waves crash over me, never fighting them, never caring if they pulled me under.
I swallow against the lump in my throat.
Tyler never let me stay there.
Not when I pushed him away with every sharp word. Not when I lashed out with every cruel edge I could find, hoping he would give up and finally leave.
He stayed through it all. The nightmares, the panic attacks, and even the long drawn-out silence that would last for days.
He stayed.
