“I’m okay,” Catherine said flatly, though her throat burned with the effort.
Roz’s mouth pressed into a thin line, but she nodded. “You’re lucky,” she said. “There was internal bleeding, a hairline fracture in your pelvis, and a concussion. But we caught it in time.”
Caught it in time.
Everything except the thing she wanted most.
“She hasn’t been by?” Catherine asked again, quieter now, her eyes still closed. Olivia’s hand tightened ever so slightly around hers.
“She…” Olivia’s voice trailed off. “We’ll give you some time.”
Catherine didn’t open her eyes to watch them leave. She didn’t need to. She knew what the silence meant.
Sloane was gone.
She’d chosen to walk away, and this time, she hadn’t come back.
Catherine turned her face to the side, into the cool pillow. Her body ached, but it was nothing compared to the hollow, echoing ache that opened like a sinkhole in her chest.
She had survived.
But she wasn’t sure she could survive this.
The room was quiet after Roz and Olivia left, too quiet. Catherine could hear her own breathing, slow and shallow, the rhythmic pulse of machines nearby measuring life in mechanical certainty. But all it did was remind her how loud the silence inside her had become.
Her fingers itched for her phone. For a message. For a call. For anything.
But there was nothing.
She stared at the ceiling tiles, counting the faint grid lines in them. Seventeen visible from this angle. She blinked. Sixteen. Her vision blurred. She blinked again. Her ribs protested the motion, a stabbing reminder that every breath was hard-won. Every heartbeat was a reminder she was still here. Still alone.
She tried to sit up, gritting her teeth as pain knifed down her spine and across her ribcage. She made it halfway before she slumped back into the pillows, exhausted by the effort.
The movement dislodged a small object from the sheets: her phone.
It must’ve been left on the tray table and got knocked loose when Olivia adjusted the bed. She stared at it for a moment, then slowly picked it up, her hand trembling.
The screen was dark. No missed calls. No unread messages.
No Sloane.
She opened the message thread anyway, staring at the last thing she’d sent, before the accident, before everything.
“Busy. Can we reschedule dinner?”
Sloane hadn’t replied. Not then. Not now.
And suddenly, all the strength she’d fought to build—the neat lines, the sealed-off compartments of her emotional survival—collapsed inward like a house with a rotted foundation.
She had pushed Sloane away. Repeatedly. And when Sloane stopped coming back, Catherine had no one to blame but herself.
Her throat tightened.
She set the phone aside with too much force, and it clattered against the bedside table.
Outside her window, the city lights blurred through a haze of early evening fog. Somewhere out there, Sloane was living in a world Catherine no longer had the courage to reach.
She pressed the heel of her palm to her chest, where the ache had taken root. No scalpel could cut it out. No suture could hold it closed.
