***
I’m sitting on the bed in Nina’s guest room, wrapped in a towel, hair still damp, skin pruned from staying too long under the water. I haven’t moved much since I got out of the shower. Just pulled on the first pair of leggings and oversized tee I could find from my suitcase and collapsed onto the bed.
Hedgehog Bernard is on my lap. My hands keep smoothing over the soft fabric, grounding me.You're still here. You're still whole.
There’s a quiet knock on the door.
I don’t answer, but I don’t need to. Nina pushes it open with her hip and enters like she’s been doing this for years.
Which, to be fair, she kind of has.
She’s balancing a fuzzy lavender blanket over one arm and holding a paper plate with two slices of pizza in the other. The smell hits me immediately—cheesy, garlicky, warm. My stomach grumbles, but my appetite is slow to catch up.
She walks over, sets the plate on the nightstand, and drapes the blanket around my shoulders like she’s tucking in a child. I let her. I don't move or speak, but something in my chest loosens a little when the warmth sinks in.
“Eat,” she says gently. “You don’t have to talk about it, but you do have to eat.”
I glance at the pizza and manage the tiniest curve of my mouth. “You’re really good at this.”
She shrugs and flops down at the foot of the bed, pulling her legs up crisscross. “I’ve had practice. I attract emotionally unwell women like moths to a flame.”
That earns a soft, shaky laugh from me—more breath than sound, but it counts.
She smirks and grabs the remote from the nightstand. “No pressure, but I did queue upLove Island: Australia,and I feel like watching someone else’s trainwreck of a relationship might be exactly the brand of healing you need.”
I raise a brow. “Didn’t we swear off that show last season?”
“Yes,” she says. “But then we said the same thing about boxed wine and that one ex who owned a snake.”
I blink. “Oh my God. Ryan.”
“Exactly. Sometimes we make terrible decisions. But at least this time, it’s just TV.”
She turns on the show and leans back against the headboard.
Onscreen, a guy named Chad with too many teeth and not enough shirts tries to convince a girl named Maddie that he’s “really here for the right reasons,” even though he was just kissing someone else by the pool fifteen minutes ago.
Normally, I’d be screaming at the TV. Nina would be making snarky commentary with her mouth full of wine and crackers. We'd both be rolling our eyes and mocking their definition of “soulmate vibes.”
But tonight, I just stare.
And Nina doesn’t push.
She watches with me, occasionally muttering things like “oh honey, red flag”or “that’s not how you use the word integrity,”but mostly she just… stays.
The comfort isn’t in the pizza or the blanket or the bad TV. It’s in theabsenceof expectation. The silence that doesn’t demand I fill it.
I nibble at the crust of one slice and put the rest down.
Nina notices, of course. She always does.
But she doesn’t say anything.
She just reaches over, pulls the blanket a little tighter around my shoulders, and lets me lean against her side like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
***
The sun is barely up when I blink awake.
