“Of course I came.” I crossed the room and sat in the armchair beside his bed, close enough to touch him but not sure if I should. “Nico, I’m so—”
“Don’t.” He shook his head, a ghost of a smile flickering across his face. “Don’t apologize. I can’t handle another apology right now. Everyone keeps looking at me like I tried to—” He stopped, swallowed. “It wasn’t like that. I just wanted to sleep.”
I waited, not trusting myself to speak.
“I hadn’t slept in four days,” he continued, his eyes fixed on the thin hospital blanket. “Not properly. Not more than an hour or two at a time. And I was so tired, Théo. I was going out of my mind. So I took a pill. And then it didn’t work, so I took another. And then I just… kept taking them. I wasn’t trying to die. I just wanted it to stop.”
“The not sleeping?”
“Everything.” His voice cracked. “The noise in my head. The pressure. The feeling like I’m failing at the only thing I’m supposed to be good at.” He finally looked at me, eyes wet and red rimmed. “I just wanted to rest. I didn’t think—I wasn’t thinking at all.”
“But they’re treating it like—”
“Like a suicide attempt. Yeah.” He laughed, hollow and humourless. “Because technically that’s what it was, even if it didn’t feel like one. You take enough pills to stop your heart, they don’t really care about your intentions.”
I flinched. He saw it.
“Sorry. That was—” He exhaled, pressing his palms against his eyes. “I don’t know how to do this. I asked to see you and now you’re here and I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “I’m just glad you’re alive.”
His hands dropped. Something flickered across his face—not quite agreement, not quite disagreement. Something more complicated.
“I am too,” he said quietly. “Now. I think. It’s hard to explain. When they pumped my stomach and I woke up, I was so angry. That they’d found me. That they’d brought me back. But then my mom was there, and she was crying, and I realized—” He stopped, took a shaky breath. “I realized I didn’t actually want to leave her. I just wanted the pain to stop. There’s a difference, apparently. At least that’s what the therapists tell me.”
“There is.” I understood that more than I wanted to admit. “There really is.”
He looked at me then, really looked, and something shifted in his expression. Recognition. The awful kind that came from shared experience.
“You know what I mean, don’t you.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.” I swallowed hard. “I do.”
Silence stretched between us. Not uncomfortable, just heavy. The weight of everything we’d never said when we were together, all the ways we’d hidden our worst parts from each other while enabling them at the same time.
“Does it get better?” Nico asked suddenly. His voice was small, almost childlike. “Everyone keeps telling me it will. The doctors, my mom, the therapists. But they don’t—they haven’t—” He stopped, frustrated. “I need to hear it from someone who actually knows. Someone who’s been where I am.”
I thought about the last few months. About Chicago and Derek and the slow, painful work of rebuilding myself. About the nights I still woke up gasping, the mornings I had to convince myself to get out of bed, the constant low hum of anxiety that never fully went away. About sitting on Derek’s bathroom floor with a razor in my hand, wanting so badly to relieve the pressure.
But also—Derek’s voice in my ear, steady and sure. Aspen’s warm weight against my legs. Sabrina’s laughter through the phone. My mom’s arms around me at the airport. Bonding with Hana over bad reality TV and brutally honest feedback on her cooking. Even Avery, trying so hard to bridge the distance between us—learning how to be my brother again. And the first time I landed a clean triple axel in Chicago and felt, for one sharp moment, like myself.
“It gets different,” I said finally. “The bad days don’t go away completely. But they get further apart. And the good days—they start to feel real. Like something you can hold onto instead of something you’re just waiting to lose.”
Nico’s eyes were fixed on my face, drinking in every word.
“It’s not linear,” I continued. “Some weeks are shit. Some days I still want to crawl out of my own skin. But then there are moments where I think—okay. This is worth it. Being here is worth it.” I reached out and took his hand. “You have to fight for those moments. Even when it feels impossible. Especially when it feels impossible.”
“How do you do it?” he whispered. “How do you keep fighting when you’re so tired?”
“You find people who fight with you.” I squeezed his fingers. “You let them help, even when every part of you is screaming to push them away. And you take it one day at a time. Sometimes one hour at a time. Sometimes one minute.”
A tear slid down his cheek, then another.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” I said. “When things got bad. I’m sorry I left.”
“You had to leave.” He said it simply, without accusation. “You would have died if you’d stayed. I could see it happening. We were destroying each other, Théo. Slowly. Loving each other and destroying each other at the same time.”
