His fingers press into my hand. Desperate. Needing anything real to hold onto.
“He grabbed his chest. Just for a second.” His thumb traces the line of my knuckles, his touch heavy with the weight of the memory. “Then he went down.”
I can see it without him saying more. The hard, polished floor. The cart tipping sideways, groceries scattering. The sound it must have made.
“I thought he slipped.” He stares at the gravel beneath our feet. “I thought he tripped.” His shoulders draw in, his jaw tightening for a second before he continues. “But he didn’t get up.”
“I kept holding the list,” he says. A sudden, sharp shiver wracks his frame. “I don’t know why. I held it the whole time. Even when people started yelling. Even when they told me to step back.”
His jaw tightens as the memory pulls him under. “I remember looking at it,” he continues, gaze distant, unfixed. “Reading the same lines again and again. Milk. Bread. Eggs.”
His lips press together, the next part harder to get through. “I could hear them. I knew what was happening.” His brows draw together, frustration, guilt, confusion all tangled together. “I just… couldn’t make myself drop it.”
He swallows hard, his eyes squeezing shut for a brief second before opening again, still somewhere else. “It was still in my hand when the ambulance arrived.”
A tight ache spreads through my chest, heavy and unshakable.
His voice wavers, but he keeps going. “My dad passed away that day.”
My hand tightens on his arm without thinking.
He avoids my gaze, his mouth trembling. “I thought—” A jagged sound erupts from his chest, a ghost of a laugh that carries the weight of a sob. “I thought that was the end. The worst a person could endure. My first heartbreak.”
His shoulders drop, the tension bleeding out into a hollow exhaustion. “I truly believed the world ended there. That pain had reached its limit.”
His breathing comes apart, turning ragged, hitching in his chest between each attempt to keep going. Still, he pushes through it, forcing the words out, driven by the need to finish.
“And then…” His mouth opens, closes, then tries again. “A week later, my mom passed away. In her sleep.”
The confession breaks everything he had left.
His gaze drops. Then lower. Until his head bows completely, his chin almost to his chest, his shoulders following, folding inward under the weight of it.
He can’t hold it in anymore.
The first sound tears out of him before he can stop it. Then another. His shoulders shake, harder now, each breath coming in broken pulls that don’t quite settle. His chest rises and falls unevenly, struggling to keep up.
He stays bent forward, lost in it, everything he’s been carrying finally spilling over.
Through all of it, his hand stays where it is, resting over mine, his fingers curling in, seeking contact, grounding himself in it without pulling away.
My eyes fill before I register it. The sting builds, spills over, and suddenly everything blurs—the sunlight, the world around us—until all I can see clearly is him, breaking right in front of me.
I don’t reach up to wipe them away. I let them fall, one after another, unchecked.He’s crying. Leaving him alone in that feels wrong. I need him to feel it—that he isn’t the only one unraveling here, that someone is right here with him, seeing it, staying.
My other hand lifts on its own, drawn to him before I can think it through. I place my hand against his head, fingers sliding into his hair. It’s soft beneath my touch, warmer than I expect. I don’t move much after that. I just stay there, my hand resting, my touch present, offering what I can.
His reaction is immediate.
A broken sound leaves him, caught somewhere deep, pulled out of him before he can hold it back. He leans into me, pressing into my hand, seeking that contact. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t try to pull himself together.
He just gives in.
His weight shifts toward me, his body losing the rigid hold it had carried. Years of keeping himself upright seem to slip from him all at once, replaced by exhaustion that runs deeper than this moment, deeper than today.
I stay exactly where I am. Hand in his hair. Fingers resting. Letting him lean, letting him break, letting him have this without rushing it away.
“I lived with Maeve after.” His gaze stays lowered, fixed somewhere near our hands. “Her parents took me in.”
