This is different.
This isn’t collapse.
It’s release.
Her fingers keep moving, absentminded, tracing and grounding and reminding me that I don’t have to disappear to survive this. That I don’t have to solve it tonight. Or tomorrow.
I don’t need answers right this minute, I just need to stay.
Eventually, the words come anyway. I keep thinking there should be one perfect sentence. One clean truth I can hand her that explains everything without making it uglier.
But that’s not how pain works. Pain isn’t tidy.
It’s layered. Contradictory and it holds two things at once. I feel betrayed, and I feel guilty for feeling betrayed because part of me still doesn’t want to villainize Sierra.
I feel anger, and I feel pity, and I hate that pity exists at all because it feels like it softens something that shouldn’t be softened yet.
I feel grief, and I feel relief, and that relief makes me feel like an asshole because why should any part of me feel lighter after a truth like that?
I want to fix it, and I want to burn it down. Mostly I want to go back in time and grab my own shoulders and shake myself and say,I keep choosing what makes sense instead of what feels right.
Sarah shifts slightly, her fingers still moving in slow patterns like she can sense my mind running laps.
I press my nose to her hair, breathing her in again.
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
Her head lifts. “For what?”
“For today,” I admit. “For… not making it worse.”
She doesn’t pretend she doesn’t understand. “I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s the point,” I murmured. “You didn’t push me toward anything or try to make it easier. You just stayed and let me find my footing.
Sarah’s hand pauses, then resumes. “I just want to be here for you when you are ready, and I’ll continue to be.”
Something inside me twists at that, tender and sharp. Because I spent years accepting solutions that weren’t real.
I swallow again, my throat tight and the truth is right there, waiting. Maybe not the whole truth, just the part I can finally say out loud.
“I keep thinking about what my life would’ve looked like,” I admit into the space between us. “If I’d known.”
She doesn’t interrupt, she remains quiet, listening to me.
“I don’t hate her,” I continue. “And that almost makes me angrier. Because it would be easier if I did.”
Her fingers trace slow lines down my arm. “You don’t have to hate her to acknowledge what she took from you.”
I swallow. “She took my choice.”
“She took mine too.”
“And time I can’t get back. Time that should have been spent with you.”
What hurts most is realizing how close the truth came to being buried forever under everything else.
But sitting here with Sarah, feeling how steady she is, how deliberate her forgiveness was, I understand something I didn’t before. She doesn’t move through the world looking for absolution. She moves through it protecting herself.
