We walk out to the faculty parking lot in silence. The late afternoon sun is low in the sky, casting long shadows across the asphalt. The air is cool and smells of impending rain. Maya stops beside her little blue car and fumbles in her bag for her keys, her movements slow and defeated. She looks so utterly spent, so overwhelmed, that my anger at Trevor solidifies into a hard, protective knot in my chest.
“Hey,” I say softly, stepping in front of her. “Don’t drive.”
She looks up, her eyes wide with confusion. “What?”
“Let me drive you home. You look exhausted. I can walk back and get your car for you later, or we can grab it in the morning.”
I can see the reflexive protest forming on her lips, the habitual insistence that she’s fine, she can handle it. It’s her default setting. But then, something in her seems to give way. The fight just goes out of her. Her shoulders slump and she gives a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
“Okay,” she whispers.
The acquiescence is so uncharacteristic that it worries me more than an argument would have. She’s unnaturally quiet on the drive to our apartment building, staring out the passenger window as the familiar streets of Pine Island roll by. The caris filled with a heavy silence, thick with everything we’re not saying. I don’t want to push her. I don’t want to ask if she’s worried about the biopsy, or if she’s freaking out about Trevor’s insane new project, or if she’s just tired. Forcing her to talk feels like another demand on her dwindling energy reserves.
Instead, I reach for the stereo and turn on the radio, keeping the volume low. A soft, instrumental piece fills the space between us, a gentle soundtrack to our shared, silent retreat from a world that asks too much.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Maya
The engine of Zachary’s car cuts out, plunging us into a sudden, weighted silence. The only sounds are the rhythmic ticking of the cooling metal and the faint, frantic thrum of my own heart against my ribs. Outside the window, the familiar brick façade of our apartment building looms, each window a dark, unblinking eye. Usually, it represents a sanctuary, a quiet place to shed the armor of the day. Tonight, it looks like a cage. A place where my thoughts can corner me.
I don’t move. I can’t. My hands are clenched in my lap, my knuckles white. The exhaustion is a physical weight, a lead blanket stitched into the lining of my muscles, a side effect of the new medication that’s supposed to be helping but mostly just feels like it’s stealing my energy and my focus. It leaves me in a fog, a haze that’s all too easily pierced by the sharp edges of anxiety.
The biopsy. The word itself is a stone in my gut. I’ve been so good at not thinking about it, at pushing it down beneath layers of grading and lesson planning and faculty meeting grievances. But now, in this quiet car, it floats to the surface, ugly andunavoidable. And bubbling right alongside it is the frothing, useless rage from this afternoon’s meeting. Trevor, with his condescending smile and his strategic delegation. As if Zachary and I have time to help our coworkers plan collaborative lessons while we try to plan our own. Our plates are full enough as it is.
The last thing I want is to walk through that door, turn on the lights, and face all of this alone. The silence in my apartment won’t be peaceful, it will be an amplifier, turning every whisper of fear and flicker of anger into a deafening roar. I don’t want to feel these things. Or, no, that’s not true. I want to feel them, I have to feel them, but I can’t bear the thought of feeling them by myself.
My gaze slides from the building to the man in the driver’s seat. Zachary. He’s just sitting there, his hands resting on the steering wheel, giving me space. He isn’t rushing me, isn’t filling the silence with pointless platitudes. He’s just…present. He turns his head, and his eyes, a deep and inviting brown, find mine in the dim glow of the streetlight. There’s a question in them, a gentle concern that undoes me.
The words are out of my mouth before I can second-guess them, before the part of my brain that calculates risk and consequence can clamp down. “Do you want to come in?”
A flicker of surprise crosses his face, but it’s gone in an instant, replaced by something I can’t quite read. He doesn’t hesitate. Not for a second. “Yeah,” he says, his voice a low rumble in the quiet car. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
The relief is so immediate and so profound that I feel dizzy with it. I nod, a single sharp jerk of my head, and unbuckle my seatbelt. My door is suddenly open and Zachary’s there, helping me out, then guiding me into the building with the heat of his palm on my lower back.
Inside, the air is still and cool. I flick on a lamp casting a soft, golden glow over the living room. I drop my keys and bag on the small entry table with a clatter that sounds impossibly loud.
“Make yourself comfortable,” I say, my voice sounding strained to my own ears. “I don’t really have… well, anything, for dinner.” My fridge is a wasteland of condiments and a half-empty carton of almond milk.
Zachary toes off his shoes and sets them neatly by the door. “Frozen pizza?” he suggests, a small smile playing on his lips. “I’m a connoisseur.”
I can’t help but laugh a short, sharp sound. “I think I have one of those. The fancy kind with the cracker-thin crust.”
“My favorite,” he says with a mock-seriousness that coaxes another, more genuine smile out of me.
While we wait for the ancient oven in my galley kitchen to creak its way up to four hundred degrees, a task that seems to require the concentration and effort of a space launch, the silence descends again. It’s not uncomfortable, but it’s present. I lean against the counter, wrapping my arms around my middle, feeling the day’s anxieties begin to crawl back up my throat.
Zachary opens a cabinet, then another. “Where are your mugs?” he asks.
“Uh, to the left of the sink.”
He finds one, then rummages through my pantry. He emerges holding a canister of hot chocolate mix, a relic from last winter. “Is this okay?”
I just nod, my throat suddenly tight.
He fills the kettle and sets it on the stove. He moves around my small kitchen with an easy, unhurried grace. He measures the powder into the mug, his brow furrowed in concentration. It’s such a simple thing. A cup of hot chocolate. A gesture of basic, human kindness. But it feels like a monumental act of care. No one has made me hot chocolate in years.
My mom used to when I was a kid and would come in from playing in the snow, my fingers and toes numb with cold. The memory is so sharp, so bittersweet, that it stings behind my eyes. And just like that, the dam I’ve so carefully constructed inside of me, the one holding back the flood of fear and frustration and fury, cracks.
