Emma didn’t recoil or try to fix it.
She simply stepped closer, gently brushed her thumb along the edge of Olivia’s jaw, and pressed her forehead to hers, breath mingling in that small, sacred space between confession and acceptance.
“Then let’s be terrified together,” she said softly.
And in that moment, Olivia finally understood something she hadn’t been able to articulate in all her years of white coats and closed doors and held breath: she didn’t have to do this alone. She didn’t have to be strong in the way that required silence. She could be afraid and still reach for something beautiful. She could fall apart and still be loved.
She leaned into Emma’s touch, not to be saved, but to be felt.
And for the first time in her life, that was enough.
The hospital was quiet in that eerie, too-clean way only the deepest hours of night could bring, when even the most urgent corridors seemed to breathe slower, like the building itself was exhaling the weight of a thousand human stories. Olivia sat on the edge of a break room couch, one hand curled loosely around a coffee cup she hadn’t touched, her scrubs wrinkled and stainedat the wrist, her name badge turned backward on its lanyard like even it was too tired to declare who she was.
Her back ached from the last surgery, but it wasn’t the ache that kept her still. It was the conversation she’d had that morning. With her mother. With the board. With herself.
She hadn’t meant to stay this late, but she hadn’t wanted to go home, either.
She wasn’t sure where home even was anymore.
The door creaked open behind her, but she didn’t turn. She felt it in the way the room changed, in the soft thunk of boots against linoleum, in the scent of cedar smoke and wind and defiance that somehow always clung to her.
Roz.
“You look like shit,” her sister said, walking in and grabbing a chair with a scrape, turning it around before dropping into it backward, arms crossed over the backrest like she was settling in for something. Her tone wasn’t unkind, but it wasn’t coddling either. It was Roz—dry and sharp. Always slightly amused, always slightly guarded.
“Thanks,” Olivia murmured, her voice flat. “That’s exactly the pep talk I needed.”
Roz didn’t smile, but her gaze softened.
For a while, neither of them spoke. Olivia stared into the cup like it might hold an answer if she looked long enough, and Roz just watched her in that way she did—quietly, fully, without blinking.
“You don’t have to be strong for all of us, Liv,” Roz said eventually, her voice lower now. “None of us asked for that.”
Olivia’s throat closed up, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t even lift her head. That sentence—so simple, so dangerous—landed with the weight of an entire childhood behind it.
She blinked down at her lap. “Didn’t I, though?”
Roz sighed, and it wasn’t impatient; it was knowing. “You think just because Catherine ran to the operating room and I ran to rebellion that you were the only one holding the center. But we were all splintering, Liv. You just hid it better.”
Olivia finally looked at her.
Roz’s eyes, usually flippant, were steady now. “And I saw you come in last night,” she added. “Your face was wrecked from trying not to feel. Don’t do that shit anymore. Not after everything.”
A long silence stretched between them, and Olivia felt something start to move beneath her ribs, a slow, painful loosening. Like an old knot beginning to fray.
“I don’t know how to not be strong,” she admitted. “It’s all I’ve ever known how to be.”
Roz nodded, leaning back, her arms uncrossing for the first time. “Yeah. I get that. But sometimes being strong means letting yourself come undone where someone can actually see you. And if Emma’s that person, don’t shut her out.”
Olivia’s mouth parted slightly, but the words didn’t come. There was too much in her chest, too much in her eyes.
Roz stood then, walked over, and pressed a kiss to the top of her sister’s head without ceremony. “You’re not alone, Liv,” she said, voice quiet and gruff. “You never were. You just thought it was your job to pretend you were.”
And then she was gone.
The door clicked shut softly behind her, leaving Olivia surrounded by the low hum of the refrigerator and the silence feeling slightly different now, less hollow. Less cruel.
For the first time in weeks, she took a full breath. Not because she felt better. But because someone had seen her and hadn’t looked away.
