I set the mug down, hands still trembling.
There’s a tightness behind my eyes that I’ve been holding off for hours. Days. Maybe years. But watching her on the other side of the glass—phone pressed to her ear, one hand braced on the patio railing—I start to unravel.
She’s already pacing. I can’t hear the words, but I know that body language. It’s her surgeon voice. Calm but firm. Explaining things in just enough detail to make impossible things happen.
I press the heel of my hand to my eye, hard.
It’s too much.
Not just the fear or the blood-soaked memory my brain won’t let go of. It’s her. The fact that she didn’t even blink. That I whispered something raw and awful and she didn’t flinch or judge or try to soften the edges.
She nodded, said, “I’ll make a call.” That’s it.
I start crying before I realize it’s happening.
Not a sob. Just… the kind of crying that leaks out when your body gives up on dignity. Silent, steady tears tracking down my face and pooling in the hollow of my throat.
I used to cry like this at Callie’s house. After the funeral. When the casseroles and the side-eyed sympathy dried up and I was just a kid with a dead mom and a dad who couldn’t handle anything.
Dad’s withdrawal was worse in some ways. He didn’t hit me. Didn’t scream. He just… stopped. I learned how to microwave frozen dinners before I learned to drive. I did my own laundry, patched my own clothes. Taught myself how to look fine in the morning, even when I’d slept on the floor because I couldn’t stand the smell of her shampoo on my pillow.
Callie never asked.
She just started leaving the back door unlocked.
Sometimes I’d show up at ten o’clock with a backpack and a book and nothing to say. Her mom would pretend I was there for a sleepover. Her dad would make hot chocolate like it wasn’t the fourth time that week.
I learned how to breathe again in that house.
Callie never pushed. She never pried.
She just sat with me. Like she’s doing now.
She comes back in, eyes scanning me like she already knows I’ve been crying but won’t say it out loud. She kneels again, rests a hand on my knee.
“They can see you tonight,” she says. “It won’t be at a clinic. It’ll be private. Safe. You’ll be home in no time.”
I nod and try to speak, but my throat catches on the first word. So I just squeeze her hand instead.
She squeezes back.
“I’ll drive,” she says softly. “Whenever you’re ready.”
The sun’s setting by the time we cross Sepulveda.
Traffic’s light—it’s Sunday, and the city feels like it’s gone quiet on purpose. Westwood gets cleaner the closer we get to the medical district. Fresh paint. Wide sidewalks. Even the graffiti looks like an aesthetic choice.
It’s nothing like Westlake where Callie lives now.
Mason’s street is all sagging porches and iron fences, narrow lots crammed with history and deferred maintenance. You can still hear kids playing outside after dark, but only if you’re close enough to notice the security bars on every window. I’d only been there once, right after I found out Chris wasn’t dead.
“This area’s so different from yours,” I murmur, more to myself than to Callie.
She glances over. “You mean Mason’s?”
I nod.
She makes a soft sound in her throat. “He’s planning to renovate it and put it on the market once our new place is finished. If he can get his mom to agree.”
