The drive home is silent, and once we make it back home, the silence is even heavier than before.
The house feels wrong without Pops in it. Empty. Echoing. Like something essential has been pulled out and the walls haven’t adjusted yet.
Sloane kicks off her shoes by the door and just…stops. Like she doesn’t know what comes next.
I guide her to the couch, grabbing a blanket and draping it over her carefully.
She stares at the floor.
“I keep thinking I’m prepared,” she whispers. “I keep telling myself I can handle this.”
“You don’t have to be prepared,” I say. “You just have to get through it one day, one night, at a time.”
Her shoulders finally cave.
She doesn’t cry loudly. Just quiet, shaking sobs that feel worse somehow. I sit close—not touching, but near enough that she knows she’s not alone.
“I’m here,” I say softly.
I mean it.
And that scares me almost as much as watching him hit the floor.
She doesn’t move for a long time.
Just sits there on the couch with the blanket pooled in her lap, staring at nothing like if she looks too hard at the room, it might fracture. The house is quiet; no Pops’s breathing from down the hall, no TV murmuring low. Just the hum of the fridge. The tick of the clock. My own pulse, too loud.
I stay where I am.
Close enough to matter. Far enough not to crowd her.
Eventually, she inhales like it hurts.
“I hate that he told me to go home,” she says softly.
“I know.”
“He always does that. Pretends he’s fine so I don’t—” Her voice catches. She presses her lips together, swallowing the rest. “So I don’t see how bad it is.”
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to fix. Nothing I can make better with words.
She turns her head slightly, eyes red-rimmed, exhausted in a way sleep won’t touch. “Did he scare you?”
The honesty of the question guts me.
“Yes,” I say. No pause. No lie. “A lot.”
She nods like that confirms something she already knew.
Silence stretches again, thicker this time.
When she shifts, it’s slow, careful, like her body finally remembered it’s been running on fumes for weeks. She tries to stand and wobbles.
I’m on my feet before I think.
“Hey.” I reach out, stopping myself just short of grabbing her. “Easy.”
She sways once more, then steadies—one hand braced on the back of the couch, the other fisted in the blanket.
