The room is very quiet.
Beckett is watching my face. “What is it?”
"He's awake," I whimper.
Beckett doesn't reply.
And that's when it hits me. Not gently. Just all at once, the way grief always arrives when you think you've already dealt with it. My eyes fill before I can stop them, and I press my hand over my mouth, and the sound that comes out is embarrassing in its rawness.
I don't want to go.
I don't want to walk into that hospital room and look at his face and perform the version of myself that existed before I knew. Before the videos and the laptop and the flowers and the card that saidcrying won't bring him back.Before I started sleeping with Cody’s teammate. Before I stood in a library and let a stranger read over my shoulder and felt more seen in twenty minutes than I did in two years.
I don't want to do any of it.
"I don't want to go," I admit out loud. My voice cracks on it. "I just want to stay here. I don't want to face him."
Beckett sits up fully. "Then don't."
I shake my head, wiping my face with the back of my hand. "I have to. If I don't show up—" I breathe through it, pulling myself back into the cold, calculating part of my brain that has been running quietly underneath everything else for weeks now. "If I don't show up, it looks wrong. It makes me a suspect. It upsets him, which upsets his father, which—" I stop. "I don’t have a choice, Beck."
I fall into his arms and cry. He holds me closely.
After I’ve cried for a few minutes, he says, "I'll take you."
"No." The word comes out before I've fully decided it. "I need you to leave right now. I can’t do this with you anymore."
Something moves across his face. Not hurt exactly. Something more complicated than hurt.
He nods once.
He finds his shirt from the floor and pulls it on with a quietness of someone choosing not to make something harder than it already is. He picks up his jacket. His keys.
At the door, he stops.
"Adela."
I look at him.
He seems like he wants to say something. Several things. He stands there for a moment holding all of them.
"Call me after," he says.
Then he's gone.
I sit on the edge of my bed for a long time.
Then I get up, turn the shower on, and stand under it until the water runs cold and I feel something closer to functional. I get dressed in my pajamas.
I sit on the bed again and pick up my phone.
I call Maeve.
She answers on the second ring, her voice shifting immediately from sleepy to alert when she hears mine. "What happened?"
"He's awake," I say. "Cody's awake."
The sound she makes is pure relief. Uncomplicated, genuine, and everything I can no longer afford to feel. "Oh, thank god. Oh, Adela—"
