~ROMAN~
“Six months,” she repeats.
Her voice is quiet. Stripped. The Hazel Martinez cadence that I’ve known for over a decade—the competitive bite, the stubborn edge, the perpetual undercurrent oftry methat flavors everything she says—is absent. In its place: a voice that sounds like it’s been sanded down to the grain. Raw material. No lacquer. No defense.
“…to live,” she emphasizes.
As if I might have misheard.
As if there’s an alternative interpretation ofsix months to livethat she needs to eliminate before I accidentally file it in the wrong cognitive category. As if maybe she said it wrong the first time and needs to clarify that theto livepart isn’t a target but a limit. A ceiling. A number stamped on the remaining fuel in a tank that she’s been running on fumes since before I found her again.
She takes a nervous breath.
The inhale shudders at the edges—the respiratory equivalent of a hand trembling while holding something too heavy. And the exhale that follows is worse. Controlled. Deliberate. The breathing pattern of a woman who is forcibly managing her body’s response to information that her mind hasn’t finished processing.
I feel the tightness in my throat.
It arrives without permission—a constriction that starts at the base of my larynx and cinches upward, narrowing the airway with the slow, crushing precision of a hand closing around a pipe. My jaw locks. My molars grind. The monitoring equipment is still chirping its steady, clinical rhythm, measuring the cardiac output of a woman who just told me she’s dying, and the sound is suddenly the most offensive thing I’ve ever heard.
My girl has six months to live.
My girl.
The woman whose forehead is still touching mine. Whose lips still taste like the kiss we shared forty-five seconds ago. Whose face is still cradled in my hands because I haven’t moved them and don’t intend to move them because removing my hands from her face feels like an act of abandonment and I will not abandon her again.
Six months.
One hundred and eighty-some days.
The suppressants.
I knew it was dangerous.
Alaric mentioned it was dangerous.
And now dangerous has a number.
She lets out another breath.
This one attempts steadiness and achieves something closer to the controlled exhalation of a woman assembling her next sentence from parts that don’t want to fit together.
“W-We can talk about it later,” she says. “Or…maybe when the others are here. I don’t want to waste your guys’ time.”
A pause.
“Or money.”
Another pause.
“Or effort…you know…cause…”
She trails off.
The sentence dissolving like a road that runs out of pavement—the words losing their footing as the logic beneath them shifts, the argument she was constructing collapsing under the weight of its own premise. Because even Hazel—the most stubborn, self-sufficient, I-don’t-need-anyone woman I have ever met—can hear how the sentence sounds when she says it out loud.
Don’t waste your time on me.
Don’t spend money on me.
