I stood in the middle of my apartment, the space I'd chosen and paid for and lived in before any of this, and I felt the silence close around me like water.
Not Xavier's silence. Not the comfortable, inhabited quiet of a house that held two people and often Doc and the faint hum of a coffee maker and the distant sound of someone breathing in the next room. This silence was absolute. Depthless. The silence of a space that contained only one heartbeat, and that heartbeat was mine, and it was racing so fast that I could feel it in my templesand my wrists and the hollow of my throat where Xavier's lips had pressed not two hours ago.
I locked both locks. Deadbolt first, then the latch, then I checked them. Then I checked them again. Then I stood with my back against the door and my palms flat against the wood and I breathed—in for four, hold for four, out for four—except the breathing didn't work the way it worked when Xavier counted with me, because the rhythm was designed to sync with another person's voice and without that voice it was just me, alone, counting to four in an empty apartment that smelled like paint and polyurethane and the absolute absence of cedar.
The panic came on fast.
Not the gradual, building kind that Doc had taught me to identify and intercept. The ambush kind. The kind that detonated without warning, a flashbang in the center of my chest that sent my heart rate into triple digits and turned my breathing into something shallow and useless and wrong. My vision narrowed. The apartment walls pressed inward, and for one terrible, disorienting second I was back in the room with the fluorescent lights, and the silence wasn't empty, it was waiting, and someone was going to come through the door with a clipboard and a needle and that flat, clinical smile that meant—
No. No. I was here. I was in my apartment. The tulips were yellow. The locks were locked. Boris's locks. Two of them. Steel.
I slid down the door until I was sitting on the new hardwood floor with my knees pulled to my chest and my phone in my hand, and my thumb was already hovering over Xavier's name in my contacts, automatic, gravitational, the path of least resistance between terror and relief and I was ten seconds away from pressing it. Maybe five. Maybe two. One tap and he'd answer before the first ring finished, because he always answered before the first ring finished, and he'd hear my breathing and know, and he'd be in his truck before I finishedthe sentence, and he'd be here in minutes, and he'd hold me and the panic would stop and I'd be safe and I'd havefailed.
I called Anna instead.
It rang three times. Each ring lasted approximately one interminable time distance, and during each one, my thumb drifted back toward Xavier's name with the helpless, magnetic pull of a compass needle seeking north. I physically moved my thumb. Pressed it against my knee. Held it there like a prisoner.
"Molly?" Anna's voice was calm and warm and completely insufficient. It wasn't the right voice. It wasn't the voice that called melittle one, that dropped into the register that lived somewhere between my ribs and my spine and made the world stop spinning. It was a professional voice attached to a professional woman who was very good at her job and who was not Xavier and therefore could not fix this with the simplicity of her presence.
"I'm in my apartment," I said, and my voice came out in pieces, the words tumbling over each other like they were trying to escape my mouth before the panic swallowed them whole. "I moved back. Tonight. I'm sitting on the floor, and I locked both locks and I can't—Anna, I can't breathe, and I almost called him, I almost—"
"You called me instead." She said it like it mattered. Like the distinction between the call I'd made and the call I hadn't was significant enough to be noted, cataloged, entered into evidence. "That was a choice, Molly. You're making choices right now. Can you tell me five things you can see?"
The grounding exercise. I knew it. I'd done it countless times in her office, sitting in the leather chair with the box of tissues on the side table and the window that looked out onto a parking lot that Anna had once described as "aggressively mundane, which is therapeutic in its own way." I'd done it while crying. I'd done it while shaking. I'd done it while describing things I'd neversaid out loud before and watching Anna's face remain steady and open and utterly without judgment, and every time, every single time, I'd walked out of that office and gotten into a car that took me back to Xavier's house, back to his heartbeat, back to the weighted blanket and the chamomile and the gravitational certainty of his presence.
There was no car waiting this time. There was no heartbeat at the end of the exercise. There was just me and the five things and the floor and the silence.
"Yellow tulips," I said. My voice was shaking so badly the words barely held their shape. "New window. My—my suitcase. The kitchen counter. The—" I couldn't find a fifth thing because my vision was blurred with tears and the apartment was small and everything in it was either new or unfamiliar, and nothing, nothing in this entire space carried the imprint of the man I loved, and the absence of him was so total and so physical that it felt like a wound—not metaphorical, not poetic, but an actual wound, a place in my body where something had been removed and the nerve endings hadn't gotten the message yet and were still firing signals to a limb that was no longer there.
"The floor," Anna said gently. "You're sitting on the floor. That's your fifth thing. What does it feel like?"
"Hard," I whispered. "Smooth. New. Boris had it refinished."
"Good. That's five things. You're here, Molly. You're in your apartment. The locks are locked. You are safe."
"I don't feel safe." The admission cost me something—a chunk of the determination I'd carried out of Xavier's bedroom like a shield, the same determination that had let me look into his wrecked, beautiful face and say no when every molecule of my being was screaming yes. "I feel like I'm going to die. I know I'm not going to die, obviously I know that, I can hear you about to say it—but my body doesn't know it, and my body is louder thanmy brain right now, and the only thing that makes my body quiet is—"
"Xavier." Anna said his name without judgment. Without the clinical distance I'd expected. She said it the way you said the name of something you understood, the way Clare understood, the way Emily understood, the way anyone who'd ever been held together by another person's presence and then had to learn to hold themselves understood.
"I want to call him." The tears were coming freely now, soaking into the knees of my jeans, and I pressed my forehead against them and breathed the salt and the denim and the nothing-smell of my own clothes. "I want to call him and tell him to come get me, and I want to go home except this is supposed to be home, this apartment is supposed to be home, and it doesn't feel like home because home isn't a place anymore, Anna. Home is a person. Home is his chest and his heartbeat and the way he says my name, and I know that's the dependency talking, I know that's what you're going to say, that I can't distinguish between love and need right now, and that's the whole point of being here, that's why I'm sitting on this floor instead of in his bed, but knowing the reason doesn't make the floor less hard and it doesn't make the silence less—"
"Molly." Anna's voice cut through the spiral with the precise, practiced incision of someone who'd talked people off ledges enough times to know exactly when to interrupt and exactly how much force to apply. Not sharp. Not harsh. Just present. A hand on the steering wheel of a car that was veering. "I want you to listen to me very carefully. Can you do that?"
I nodded, which was useless on a phone call, but Anna waited as if she could hear the motion anyway.
"Yes," I managed.
"What you're feeling right now is real. The panic is real. The grief is real. The wanting is real. I'm not going to sit here and tellyou that any of it is a symptom or a malfunction or something to be corrected. Do you hear me?"
I pressed my phone harder against my ear, like proximity to the speaker could substitute for proximity to a person. "I hear you."
"Good. Now. The fact that your body is in distress right now does not mean you made the wrong decision. It means you made a hard one. Those feel the same from the inside—wrong and hard are almost identical in the body. The cortisol spike is the same. The adrenaline dump is the same. The desperate urge to reverse course and return to safety is the same. Your nervous system doesn't have a category for 'difficult but necessary.' It only has 'threat' and 'not threat,' and right now, being alone in your apartment is registering as threat because for the past eight weeks, being alone meant—"
"Don't." The word came out sharper than I intended. "Please. I know what it meant. I don't need to right now. I can't go there right now."
"Okay." No pushback. No redirection. Just acceptance, clean and immediate, and I was grateful for it with a gratitude that sat right next to the ache and didn't diminish it at all. "We won't go there tonight. Tonight is just about getting through tonight. Can we agree on that? Not tomorrow. Not the week. Just the next few hours."
The next few hours. I could almost hold that. Almost wrap my hands around it the way I'd wrapped my hands around the green pencil that first day with Clare and Emily—trembling, uncertain, but willing. The next few hours was not the same as forever. The next few hours had an end point, and end points were survivable.
