He pressed me even harder and started explaining everything with that calming-doctor presence.
"Listen, your brain was suffocating, Emma. Hypoxia messed with your limbic system, the part that controls fear and nightmares. It takes fragments of terror, exaggerates them, and distorts time. So it wasn't eternity. It wasn't punishment. It was your neurons misfiring in the dark. That's all."
"But it's branded in me, Ben. Forever," I said with my throat tight, because that's how it felt. "I have nightmares about it. It never leaves me alone. Especially when I'm weak.Sometimes I'm scared to go to sleep..."
"Shit," he breathed, brows pulled tight. "I'm sorry. But Emma... it wasn't hell. It feels branded because trauma carves deep pathways in the brain. It's just memory, and memory can be rewired."
He sat there, and I could see on his tensed chest that he absorbed all that stress into his chest.
Then he scoffed like he just realized something, and his fist clenched against his knee.
"Where the hell was your mother during that time?" he asked furiously.
I drew in a sharp breath. "When I woke up, she was sitting there, statue-still, watching me. Neither of us said a word. Then she held my hand and asked if I wanted chocolate waffles, as if none of it had happened."
"Chocolate waffles?!"
"Yeah. I think it was her kind of apology," I said. "The doctor told her everything, and my psychologist kind of forced her to come in for one session with me, but when she asked her if she thinks she had anything to do with my situation, she just got up and left. And since then, she's never brought it up. It's like it got erased."
"Silence doesn't fix shit," he bit out and scoffed. "How can you look at her after that?"
I shrugged slowly, my body feeling lethargic. "I don't know. Maybe because I do think she's sorry, just doesn't know how to be. She grew up the same way, and maybe without wanting to she spilled all that pain out on me."
"So that makes it okay? Just forgive her and silently carry that pain forever?" Ben's jaw flexed as he shook his head. "Fuck no. I couldn't do that. Never. I'd never forgive that."
"You are strong," I said, breaking a smile. "You are the strongest person I know, but I'm not you. I'm weak."
"You aren't weak at all, you survived all that," he corrected me firmly.
"I am. I'm too terrified to live like I don't belong anywhere."
He leaned closer so his chest pressed against mine and his thumb brushed my cheek with that faint clementine scent.
I smiled at how something so small could comfort me—not the clementine scent, but his finger, on me.
"You do belong somewhere," he said.
I searched in his face, trying to catch the unsaid words, and some reckless part of me thought he was about to say I belong to him.
Instead, he whispered, "You have me. You have Lucy. You have Mara. We need you."
And then he shifted, pulled back a little. "Have you ever done any drugs after that?"
"No." I shook my head, being honest.
Suddenly, I realized he hated all drugs, especially after working in a ward with drug addicts, so I hid my face in his chest, hand clutching his shirt.
"I'm scared I shouldn't have told you. Will you leave me now that you know I'm broken?" I asked, barely audible.
He moved my head up to meet my eyes. "Emma. I'm yourbest friend, forever. And you're not broken. You're..." He blew a long breath and then said, "You're everything."
?
The screen in my palm blurs with tears, lots of them. The clock reads 2:47 a.m. Twenty-five minutes lost in a memory.
From the other room, I hear Richard mumbling in his sleep, oblivious—then and now—to the wreckage beside him.
But Ben held me through it once and that imprint lives in these messages. So does everything else, however stupid or imperfect we are.
