Page 1 of Coming Home

CHAPTER 1

Emma

"I failed at the only thing I was ever good at."

The words came out tired, worn smooth like shoes I'd walked in too long, all the give gone out of the soles.

Across from me, Camilla's pen hovered over her notepad. She didn't write anything down. For four weeks, I'd been sitting in this exact chair playing the hits: the weather, my generic motel room, the coffee shop down the street that consistently managed to ruin an iced latte. Safe, polite filler. Bus stop conversation, not the heavy stuff you're supposed to unpack when someone is billing your insurance fifty dollars an hour.

But today, the filter just failed. I hadn't planned it. I hadn't rehearsed some brave, heartbreaking monologue in the bathroom mirror this morning. I just sat down, stared at the stupid tissue box on the table between us, and the truth slipped out before I could bite my tongue.

"Tell me about that," Camilla said, her tone perfectly even.

I picked at a loose thread on my jeans. "Swimming. I was a swimmer."

Was. The past tense still stung, even after all this time.

"I won my first Olympic gold at sixteen." I focused on a tiny dark speck on the carpet near the leg of the coffee table. "Sixteen. I was practically a baby. My face was on cereal boxes, morning talk shows, magazines. I trained six hours a day, seven days a week. I was really, really good." I paused, and for half a second I could feel it again. The water. The roar of the crowd hitting me when I surfaced. The scoreboard flashing my name at the top. "I had the whole world telling me I was born for this."

My voice thinned out on the last word.

"Now, I can't even get in a pool," I whispered. "I look at water and my stomach turns. It's not nostalgia. It's not nerves. It's literal sickness."

Camilla didn't flinch. No pity, no shock. Just that steady, expensive attention. I guess that's the perk of paying someone to listen to you. They've always heard worse.

"You said you failed at the only thing you were good at." Camilla tilted her head. "Is swimming really the only thing?"

"The only thing that gave me a reason to wake up."

She jotted something down. I wanted to lean over and read it, but that felt too pathetic, even for me.

"I failed as a daughter, too. And a sister." I was talking now, and stopping felt a hell of a lot harder than letting it ride. "Three years ago, I packed a single suitcase and moved across the state just to prove I could. I cut off my parents. My brother. I convinced myself that their love was actually criticism, that if they were worried about me, it meant I was failing. So I just… ghosted them."

My brother, Theo.

The name felt bulky and foreign in my mouth. I hadn't spoken it aloud in months. We hadn't talked in over a year. He called, I watched the screen flash, and I let it go to voicemail. He texted. I read the messages from the lock screen and closed my eyes. I pulled harder at the thread on my denim. "Last Christmas, he sent a photo of his daughter. Gap-toothed grin, party hat still on from her birthday the month before. I've missed three of her birthdays. I'm an aunt to a little girl who wouldn't recognize me on the street."

The silence stretched, and shame filled every corner of the room. Somewhere in my phone, there were twelve unread messages from Theo. I was too guilty to open them and too stubborn to delete them.

"And I don't even know what I'm punishing him for. He didn't do a single thing wrong. He just kept showing up for me, and I couldn't handle being seen."

"What made you pull away from him, Emma?"

"Because I looked like this." I gestured vaguely to myself. All of it. The extra weight, the permanent shadows under my eyes, a girl who used to sprint a hundred meters in open water but couldn't handle two flights of stairs anymore. "And because I let a man erase me. Which is the grand prize of my failures."

Camilla rested her pen against her pad and simply waited.

"I stayed with someone who told me I was nothing. Every single day, for three years, until his voice became my internal monologue. He was an artist with it, you know? He knew exactly where the skin was thinnest. The weight gain. The swimming. The fact that my parents had stopped calling because I'd pushed them away first. He'd bring it up under the guise of sweet concern." I swallowed. "'I'm just being honest with you, Em. Nobody else loves you enough to tell you the truth.'"

Hearing it out loud made me want to crawl out of my skin. But the poison was out now.

"And I believed him. It had nothing to do with him being right. I was just so damn tired. And when you're that exhausted, you'll accept any lie as fact if it means you can stop fighting." My hands were fists in my lap. I forced my fingers to uncurl. "I'd left. But I still hated myself for what I'd become."

Camilla's pen scratched against the paper.

"It's the ambush of it all that kills me," I murmured, staring up at the ceiling. Nobody tells you that hitting bottom isn't one big breakdown. It's small. It's agonizingly constant. It's brushing your teeth at seven in the morning and your brain randomly playing a tape of something cruel your ex said in 2024. Word for word. Same smug inflection. It's standing in the grocery line holding a bag of frozen peas and scrolling through a highlight reel of every bad choice you've ever made.

I took a slow breath through my nose. "I don't invite these thoughts. They just squat in my head, and I don't have the strength to evict them."