Page 7 of Coming Home

I blinked, wiping my eyes. "Your aunt is Dr. April?"

"Unfortunately. Family dinners are just her lecturing us about our sodium intake. Look, do you want the oat milk latte or not? I can't do dairy. It's a whole metabolic saga."

I took the coffee. Without an invitation, she'd climbed straight into my passenger seat, introduced herself as Nadia, and spent the rest of her lunch break convincing me that throwing a solo pity party in a medical plaza parking lot was a perfectly valid use of an afternoon.

Eighteen months later, she was still the only person in my life who hadn't left, hadn't been pushed away, and hadn't taken the hint when I tried to self-destruct in her general direction. Everyone else got the message. Nadia just kept bringing oat milk.

"The pipes are finally clearing, Em," she said now, pulling me back. "That's all the crying is. You spent three years with the tap rusted shut, and now the water's running. Stop treating basic emotional hygiene like a felony."

"I'll add that to the list of things people keep telling me are healthy but feel exactly like waterboarding."

"Good. Write it down. Laminate it."

I smiled, but the motion felt strange on my face. My cheeks had forgotten how to hold it.

Even as her voice washed over me, my mind kept drifting back to the sterile lobby of the clinic, to the encounter I hadn't mentioned to her.

Excuse me. Can I get past?

He'd said it the way you'd say it to anyone in your way, some stranger you'd already half forgotten. I had stepped back like a well-trained dog, and he had pushed through those glass doors without a second glance.

Ralph Brandt hadn't recognized me.

I'd spent years bracing myself for the wrong kind of pain. I had anticipated the shame, the agonizing horror of someone from my golden past seeing the heavy, swollen wreckage of my present. Running into him, of all people, with my face ruined and medication weight clinging to my frame. I used to lie awake at night rehearsing what I'd say if I ever ran into someone from the old life. I'm great. Doing something new. Yeah, I missed it for a while but I'm past that now. A whole prepared speech, packaged and designed to prove I wasn't drowning.

I never needed it. He didn't even ask.

What took its place was so much worse. He had looked directly into my face and seen a nobody. I was invisible to the boy who used to know the rhythm of my breathing from three lanes over.

Or maybe he had known it was me. Maybe he'd looked at the disaster I'd become and decided I wasn't worth the breath it took to say my name.

"Em? Hey. Did I lose you?"

"Sorry. I'm here." I swallowed. "I need to tell you something else. I'm going to James's place tonight to get the rest of my things."

The silence that followed was different. Nadia's playful quiet and her serious quiet lived on separate continents.

"Tonight," she repeated, the warmth vanishing from her tone. "Emma, you don't even have an apartment yet. You're still living out of a suitcase at a motel."

"I have the money from that voiceover gig. I'll find a place next week. I just… I need my life back, Nadia. I can't leave my boxes there anymore. Every day they're still in his apartment feels like a tether. I need to cut it so I can breathe."

"You could stay in my spare room. It's literally just collecting dust and unfolded laundry. It's not doing anything noble."

"You've already done enough."

"That's not how friendship works. There's no ledger, Emma. There's no tab."

"I'm not going to be another person's project." The words slipped out with a bitter edge. James used to tell me that was my natural state. Dead weight. A broken thing someone else always had to manage. He'd say it so calmly, with that small, sympathetic smile, his hand on my knee, like he was comforting a child who kept making the same mistake. 'No man is going to want to carry a messed-up woman like you, Em. You'll come back. You always do.' Three years of that, and the lie had fossilized inside me. It wasn't a voice in my head anymore. It was bone.

"Accepting a safe place to sleep isn't the same as being a burden. You're confusing the two."

"I'll think about it."

"Which is your polite way of saying no."

"It means I'll think about it. I have to go, Nadia."

She sighed. More love than frustration in it. "Fine. But you text me the second you are out of that apartment. I don't care if it's midnight. You text me."