The silence after was so heavy it felt like an object in the room.
I could hear him breathing, shallow before he finally whispered, almost to himself: "You must have been really sad."
"Yeah. Sad..." I nodded and dragged in a breath. "Sad doesn't cover what it feels like when your own mother, theperson designed by nature to protect you, to love you unconditionally, doesn't. When everything about you is an irritation and you're scared of every thought you ever had because it's always wrong. When even your victories, like ballet trophies that broke your toes, are recast as flaws in front of the doctor because you held your spine wrong. That doesn't make you sad. That threads into your bones and makes you wish you were never born."
He bit into his lip and shook his head hard. "I'm so sorry, Emma."
My head dropped, and with a broken voice, I admitted that I hated her. I hated her for all the ways I missed her that year and for how I hoped she'd missed me back.
Then I broke into an avalanche—not ugly crying, but something darker, coming from that part that can steal your breath.
Ben's hand pressed against my back as he tried to hush me while I started making pathetic sounds.
He kept wiping the smudges on my face with his sleeve, and said, "I'm here for you. I'm here, Emma."
Then he turned his face away. I wasn't sure why but he wouldn't look at me.
"I'm sorry—" I started.
"Don't apologize," he cut in, voice firm, and turned back. "Not ever. You hear me?"
"I hate crying about it. I hate how it still gets to me."
"How could it not?! Your mother... she wasn't a mother. You don't do that to a child. You don't do that—shit—toyou!" His last words struck like flint and I felt him on the edge of breaking something.
I knew him well enough by that time to know he wasn't always great at holding his own emotions, just like me.
Then I asked the thing that had been burning a hole through my chest for years. "Do you think there's anything after death?"
He frowned at the question, like he couldn't understand why my mind wandered there, but answered anyway. "Mom says there's heaven. As a doctor, I'm trained to think there's nothing." His forehead creased. "Why?"
I wasn't sure I was ready to say the next thing, but when shame lives in you too long, it starts carving hollow paths that make you feel isolated, and that loneliness feels like death.
And for some reason, my soul chose Ben to know.
"I never said this to anyone," I whispered, barely audible. "Not even Lucy. She doesn't know."
He paused. "Okay?"
"One night, it all became too unbearable that I drank too much and took some sleeping pills. I swear I didn't want to hurt myself," I said quickly, desperate for him to believe me. "I just... wanted to stop feeling for one night, that's all. I took the pills and soon after my heart started racing, and then, it ignited and the fire melted through me. The pain was so unbearable that I convulsed, barely made it to the corridor, and then, everything went dark."
There was silence—chilling and palpable.
Ben frowned and took a moment to process everythingbefore he spoke. "Are you saying you had a cardiac arrest? Did you—?"
"Die?" I cut in. "I blacked out, unconscious. They couldn't find my pulse, said it was hypo—"
"Hypoxia?" he cut in, shocked.
"Yeah." I nodded.
"Shit. That's close to dying," he said, his mouth slack for a beat. "Did you have brain damage?"
"Just temporary memory loss. Unfortunately, not the stuff that I wanted to forget. I technically must have died because I felt myself leaving my body." I swallowed heavily. "And there was no heaven for me. Just a black void, pressing in, suffocating me, shredding me into pieces. I've never been more scared in my life. I screamed, cried, but no one came because they couldn't hear me. It felt like I was trapped outside time." I shuddered at the memory of it, trying my best not to break again.
"Shit, shit, shit," he said, his arms tightening around me.
"I think it was hell. It was the worst place I've ever been."
