Time stretched and folded in on itself. Nurses came and went. A doctor explained things I already half knew—hypothermia, shock, exhaustion, dehydration. They said words likerestandmonitorandtimelike time was something that could fix this.
I told them I was his emergency contact when he was brought in. The words left my mouth before I’d even thought about them.
“I’m his emergency contact,” I said when they asked.
They wrote it down without question. I didn’t call David. Not because I wanted to hurt him. Because I couldn’t bear to explain. I couldn’t bear to hear his voice say Elliot’s name like he still had a claim on him.
I was the one who had been here when Elliot stopped wanting to be. That made him mine. Not his. He’d washed his hand of the most precious person in his life like he was nothing.
My phone buzzed against my thigh. The sound startled me so badly I flinched. I hadn’t moved in hours. The screen lit up with Thomas’s name. My chest tightened. I answered without standing up.
“Where are you?” he asked immediately. No preamble. “I went by your place. Your truck’s not there. You’re not answering texts.”
“I’m at County General,” I said.
There was a pause. I could hear him breathing on the other end. “Why?”
“H-he jumped off the cliffs. Tried to kill himself.” The words still didn’t feel like they belonged to me.
A sharp inhale. A quiet curse. “I’m coming,” Thomas said.
He arrived less than an hour later. When he stormed through the door he didn’t say anything—just crossed the room and pulled me into his arms.
I let him. I hadn’t realized how tightly I’d been holding myself together until his hands pressed into my back and something in me finally slipped loose. My breath broke against his shoulder.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said into his shirt.
He held me for one second longer than he needed to. Then he pulled back. His eyes went to Elliot first. The bed. The machines. The lines running into him. The way his chest barely moved.
“This,” Thomas said. “This is what I was afraid of.” It wasn't an accusation. It was grief. That was worse.
My spine stiffened anyway. “What does that mean?”
“It means I warned you,” he said. “I told you getting this close would hurt him.”
My chest tightened like a hand had closed around it. “I didn’t do this.”
“I know,” he said. “You didn’t push him. You didn’t cause the fall.” His gaze stayed on Elliot. “But you became the thing he holds onto when everything else has gone dark.”
“I was all he had.”
“That’s the problem.”
I shook my head. “No. The problem is everyone else left.”
“That’s not a problem for you to fix. You can’t replace his parents.”
“I wasn’t trying to replace anyone.” My voice cracked. “I was trying to love him.”
Thomas looked at me then. Really looked. “That’s not love,” he said gently. “That’s trauma attachment.”
The words didn’t strike. They sank. Like something heavy dropped into my stomach. Heat rushed up my throat, anyway. My pulse jumped—fast and wrong. “What?” I said.
“If you trusted what you feel,” he said, “you wouldn’t keep pulling away when it starts to matter. But you do. And he feels that.”
The room didn’t move. I did. Something inside me tipped, just slightly—like a floor shifting a fraction of an inch. My fingers curled into the chair without me noticing.
“I don’t think I deserve something as pure as him,” I said. “But I can’t leave him.”
