I stared at the faint crack in the ceiling above the bed. “I keep waiting for it to make sense.”
“For what to make sense,” he said gently.
“All of it,” I replied. “The bad days. The good ones. The way I can feel strong in the morning and wrecked by afternoon. Like I should be past it already.”
Wrecker exhaled slowly. “You don’t owe anyone a timeline.”
“I know,” I said. “But knowing it and feeling it aren’t the same thing.”
His thumb traced a small, absent circle against my side. Grounding. Steady.
“You don’t feel weak to me,” he said.
“That’s not what scares me,” I admitted.
He waited.
I took a deep breath. “What scares me is that I don’t feel broken all the time anymore. And part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like I’m doing it wrong by… being okay.”
Wrecker’s chest rose beneath my cheek. “Being okay isn’t a betrayal of what you went through.”
“I know,” I said again, softer this time. “I just don’t trust it yet.”
“That makes sense.”
No argument. No fixing. Just acceptance.
I shifted onto my back, staring up at him. “When I woke up last night, I thought I heard footsteps. I didn’t panic. I just… waited. Listened. Like I was bracing for something that didn’t come.”
His brow furrowed slightly. “And how did that feel.”
I thought about it. “Weirdly calm. And also exhausting.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “Hypervigilance does that.”
I blinked. “You know that word?”
A corner of his mouth twitched. “Doc talks. I listen.”
That made something warm settle in my chest.
We lay there for a bit, the room slowly brightening around us. Somewhere down the hall, a door creaked open. Footsteps passed. Normal sounds. Normal life.
“I heard Ghost was up all night,” I said eventually.
Wrecker went still in a way I’d learned to recognize. Not alarmed. Focused.
“Yeah,” he said. “He’s digging into new intel.”
“The ring,” I said.
“The ring.”
I closed my eyes briefly. Not because I wanted to escape the thought, but because I wanted to feel my breath moving in and out, steady and real.
“They’re not done,” I said.
“No,” he agreed. “They’re not.”
