Iwoke up choking on smoke that wasn’t there.
My body jerked upright before my brain caught up, lungs dragging for air like I’d just come out of a collapse. The scream followed me out of sleep—hers. That mother’s voice. High. Raw. Calling for a child I couldn’t get to fast enough.
The room was dark. Quiet. No fire. No sirens. Just the ceiling fan turning slow above me. And Sanaa.
She was asleep beside me, one arm folded under her pillow, her breath soft and even and unaware of the war still raging in my head.
For a second I couldn’t move. Couldn’t trust that this was real. Then the itching started.
My neck first. Then my arm. That deep, nerve-lit burn that never fully healed, no matter what the doctors said. I scratched at it without thinking, like I could claw the memory out of my skin. The sensation wasn’t pain exactly. It was heat. Phantom heat. My body remembering something it refused to forget.
I swung my legs off the bed and sat there, staring into the dark, trying to slow my breathing.
You’re home.
You made it out.
She’s alive.
Behind me, the mattress shifted.
“Tariq?” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep.
Her hand reached for me.
I turned before she could touch the worst parts of me.
“I’m good,” I whispered, leaning down to kiss her shoulder. Then her temple. “Go back to sleep.”
She blinked once, studying me even through exhaustion. Sanaa always saw more than I wanted her to.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
I kissed her again until she settled, until her breathing deepened, until she drifted somewhere peaceful I couldn’t follow.
I stayed there a moment longer, watching her. Memorizing her. Because some part of me already knew I didn’t deserve to keep this.
The shower ranhot enough to fog the mirror and sting my skin.
I stood under it longer than necessary, letting the water hit the back of my neck, replaying the night before. The way she’d touched me. The way she always touched me—like she was learning me, not just wanting me.
And how I’d held back. I hadn’t meant to. But every time she tried to pull me closer, really closer, something inside me locked down. Like if I let her all the way in, she’d see the things I saw. Hear the things I heard.
Smell the smoke still living inside my lungs.
Her eyes had searched mine afterward. Quiet. Asking questions she was too kind to say aloud and I couldn’t answer them. Hell, I couldn’t answer myself.
The department therapist had tried to keep me off duty.
“You’re not ready,” she’d said, hands folded like she was bracing for impact.
I told her I was fine. Told her I slept. Ate. Functioned. But I didn’t tell her about the dreams. Didn’t tell her I still heard that woman screaming when things got too quiet.
Didn’t tell her that work was the only place my brain stopped replaying the fire.
I knew how to say the right things. I knew how to make my voice steady.
