He pauses, his expression turning more solemn.
“I’ll note that this is a rather extreme illustration of the stress management concerns I raised three weeks ago. The prescription hasn’t changed, Alec. If anything, it’s more urgent.”
Right. The meditation app. The vacation. The lifestyle modifications. The irony is so rich I’d laugh if I didn’t also want to scream. I’ve wasted two days in this hospital for no reason. Two days I should’ve spent trying to win Ella back.
Dr. Vaughn tells me I’ll be discharged within the hour. He gives me instructions for minimizing stress and monitoring my vitals at home on a daily basis. I nod at everything because the alternative is lying in this bed for a third day, and I need to get out of this room.
He leaves. The door closes. I’m alone with the monitor and the fluorescent hum and Ella’s scarf on the table.
I reach for my phone.
The call I made to Ella on the first night is a blur. I remember the phone in my hand. I remember finding her name. I remember the effort of holding the screen still while the medication pulled me under.
I don’t know if my call connected for three seconds or thirty. I don’t know if I tried to speak or if the line just rang and I couldn’t hold on. What I know is that I called her from a hospital bed after she left, and whatever reached her on the other end wasn’t enough. It wasn’t anything.
I try again now. Her number. The screen blinks once and goes straight to voicemail. No ring. No connection.
I try a text. Type three words, hit send. The message sits on my screen with no delivery confirmation. Nothing goes through.
She blocked me.
The realization arrives cleanly. Not a gut punch. Just a fact I can observe from the outside, the way I observe systems when they fail. I built a company on connecting endpoints. Securing communication channels. Ensuring that no signal gets lost between origin and destination. I can link a server in Frankfurt to a terminal in Singapore in under four milliseconds. Yet I can’t reach a woman two seconds away by phone because she pressed a button on her end and made me disappear.
My eyes drift to the scarf on the table. The turquoise silk catches the overhead light, the painted turtle bright, absurd, the exact color of the water over the reef where she held my hand under the surface and I knew I was in trouble.
My phone is still in my hand. Ella’s contact still on the screen, the blocked number a wall I can’t talk my way through or buy my way over.
I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a strategy. I don’t have anything except a phone that can’t reach her, a diagnosis that says my body broke because she left, and the same meditation app I’ve been failing at since the day I met her.
I open it. Not out of hope. Out of the absence of anything else to do. The icon is still on my home screen where it’s been since Dr. Vaughn first prescribed it, a small blue lotus that I’ve come to associate with forced relaxation and abject failure.
The narrator’s voice fills my earbuds. Same hushed tone. Same funeral-director cadence. The voice of a man who has never once had a crisis he couldn’t soothe with whale sounds and good intentions.
“Close your eyes and allow yourself to settle. Clear your mind. Now, imagine a place of comfort and calm. A place where you feel safe, where you are utterly at peace. Perhaps a cherished memory. A favorite retreat. Somewhere that brings you rest.”
I close my eyes.
Nothing materializes at first. Nothing ever materializes. My brain is not built for peaceful sanctuaries, evidently. It’s built for threat detection and problem-solving and running five scenarios simultaneously, and the one scenario it can’t compute is the one where everything stops and I just exist somewhere without.
And then… her face is there.
Ella on the plane. Seat 2B. The dark hair and the enormous tote bag, the smile that should have come with a warning label. The first time I saw her, the moment before she opened her mouth and dismantled my entire plan for a quiet flight. Her blue eyes sparking with enough enthusiasm to power a small city, aimed directly at me, a man who believed he didn’t like energy that couldn’t be quantified or contained. But Ella didn’t care about that. She dragged me into her orbit anyway.
The image shifts.
Now I see Ella in the turquoise water of the secret snorkeling spot she took me to. Her laugh muffled through the mask, bubbles rising around her face, and the reef below us glowing like something from another planet. I recall looking over and she was floating beside me, her body loose and still, completelypresent in a way I’d never seen her before. Joy without performance. And I matched it. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I was as calm as she was, suspended in quiet blue water with the only person who’s ever made silence feel like enough.
Another shift moves before my mind’s eye. My chest is starting to hurt, but not the way it hurt on the floor two nights ago.
I see Ella in bed next to me. Morning sunlight on her skin, in her hair. The morning the resort informed us they had a second room. Ella with hair wrecked from sleep and sex, wearing nothing except the look she gave me when I glanced at her for an answer. The new room, the out we’d been waiting for since we were forced into the same suite. Her eyes on mine across the room. The small shake of her head. No. One word she didn’t even say out loud. She chose to stay. With me. In that bed. In that room. In whatever we were becoming. The most honest thing either of us did in Barbados, and she did it without a single word.
The next image comes slower.
Ella beneath me. Our last night. Her eyes open, her hand on my face, her thumb tracing my cheek while I was inside her. No laughter. No deflection. Just her, unguarded, looking up at me like I was worth trusting with everything she had. And I looked back and knew. I knew then. I loved her and I hadn’t earned the right to say it because I was still lying to her, and the knowing was so heavy and so complete that I almost said it anyway.
One more image forms on the inside of my closed eyelids.
Her hand on my chest. The image I carried to the hallway floor after I called 911. Her palm flat over my heart, fingers spread, the way she fell asleep against me every night in that suite. Trusting the thing underneath her hand to keep beating.Trusting me to be the man she thought I was while the truth sat in my chest like poison I gave myself.
