The kind who loved too carefully and arrived too late.
I shook the memory away, chest tight with the weight of it. I’d gone. I left. I made choices I thought were right, and maybe they were but they came at a cost. When I came back, there were already cracks between us—all of us—cracks I didn’t know how to seal. Cracks wide enough to lose someone in.
But I couldn’t lose them—him—again. Not like this. Not quietly. Not piece by piece.
So I stayed.
I kept knocking, even when I didn’t use my fist. Even when it was with soup bowls and folded clothes and quiet words in the dark.
Even when it looked like he wasn’t listening.
Even when it hurt.
Even when it felt like failure.
Because if Elliot was disappearing, I’d keep reaching for him—even if I had to follow him all the way to the edge of that cliff. Even if I had to hold his hand and teach him how to breathe again.
Later that afternoon, I found myself at the kitchen table with David. Two steaming mugs of coffee between us. Neither of us drinking. Neither of us speaking.
The silence was brittle, stretched thin like an old wire ready to snap. I was about to say something—anything—when we heard Elliot’s door creak open upstairs. His footsteps on the landing were slow and hesitant.
He came into view with his hoodie up, sleeves pulled over the palms of his hands, bag slung over one shoulder like it carried more than books. His head was down, jaw tight. He didn’t seem to have anywhere to go—only somewhere he needed not to be.
He didn’t look at me. He moved through the kitchen like a ghost, brushing past the edges of the light, barely disturbing the air. The urge to go to him, to steady him, to hold him close, slammed into me like a tide—and I had to bite it back, remind myself to stay still.
Behind him, the phone he’d abandoned on the counter last night blinked bright in the dimness. It was Madeline again. My chest clenched. I didn’t reach for it. I didn’t call out. I only watched.
Even as he passed me, fleeting, almost untouchable, I felt the familiar, unreasoning pull to shield him from whatever might hurt him, even from himself. My body remembered the weight of his absence and braced, quiet, tethered, waiting for the moment he might let me in again.
The vibration rattled faintly against the wood, like a nervous pulse. I watched it until the light died, until the screen went dark again. He didn’t look back. Didn’t slow. Didn’t reach for it.
Whatever was waiting for him out there—work, obligation, consequence—he was already running from it. And I didn’t know how long the world would tolerate that.
David glanced up as he swept past the table. “Madeline’s been calling.”
Elliot paused in the doorway, his shoulders bunching up like he’d been struck. His back stiffened, but he didn’t turn around.
“She said you’re not answering or returning her calls,” he continued, not giving either of them a chance to breathe.
Elliot slowly turned his head, just enough that we could see the outline of his nose and mouth beneath the shadow of his hood. Not hostile. Not angry. Just… blank.
“I’m not in the mood,” he said quietly, his words hollow.
“That’s not good enough,” David snapped, voice tight like a wire about to fray. “You don’t get to go silent. Not with her. Not with us.”
The words cracked through the room like thunder.
I looked between them, my heart thudding. David’s flushed face, Elliot’s clenched jaw, the thick silence hanging between them like smoke.
“You can’t just shut down every time you don’t want tofeelsomething, Elliot!” David’s voice rose, brittle with fury.
The irony scraped at the inside of my ribs. I pushed my chair back, slowly standing. “David?—”
“No, he needs tohearthis.” David stood now too, eyes burning. “You think you’re the only one grieving? You think this is just aboutyou?”
Elliot didn’t flinch. He justlookedat him. Still. Still in the way of someone who’s been hit too many times to brace for the next.
“You are not the only one who lost her!” David’s voice cracked like glass.
