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When Zarek found me sitting on the kitchen floor bleeding from a shattered glass—I’m fine.

It was a shield. A lie. A fucking survival mantra I didn’t know how to quit.

“Chloe, don’t hang up,” Trenda said. I heard the scrape of keys, the slam of a door, the roar of an ignition. “I’m already in my car. Just talk to me. Honey, please. Talk to me.”

Talk.

What an impossible ask.

How do you talk when grief feels like a fist stuffed down your throat? How do you talk when the future you’d built entire years around—when the nursery you’d chosen paint colors for—when the names you’d whispered into the dark⁠—

How do you talk when that future has been set on fire and nobody sees the smoke but you?

Another sob ripped through my chest, harsh and animal.

“It’s not fair,” I hissed, tears streaming hot and relentless. “I did everything they told me to. I took the vitamins. I ate the stupid kale. I stopped drinking coffee. I prayed. I bargained. I begged. And it didn’t matter. None of it mattered, Trenda. I’m broken inside.”

My vision tunneled. “I won’t get to hold a baby that has my smile or Zarek’s eyes. I won’t get to braid hair or pack lunches or stand at graduations. There won’t be cousins. There won’t be Christmas mornings with a pile of kids sleeping on the floor. There won’t be⁠—”

My voice shattered. “There won’t even be Zarek. There won’t be…anything.”

All the tiny futures I’d imagined flickered like dying stars in my mind—Bella bossing my kids around, little boys learning how to be sneaky from Evie’s kids, the swarm of Avery children growing like a forest around my sister’s kids.

And me and Zarek.

Always in the center of that chaos. Always holding each other’s hands. Always part of something bigger than just the two of us.

That was gone now.

“Chloe,” Trenda said, voice wet. “Baby—I need you to keep talking to me,” she begged.

“I’m fine,” I rasped again, because I didn’t know any other response. “I’m always fine. Zarek’s the one in trouble.”

There was a long beat of silence. Then very softly, “it’s okay not to be fine. It’s okay to break.”

Her permission undid something in me—some internal stitch I’d yanked tight for years.

My breath stuttered. My throat burned. I fumbled with the phone, vision blurred, nerves shredding.

“I need to go,” I whispered, and before I could talk myself out of it, I hit the red button.

The call disconnected. The phone slipped from my hand and thudded onto the rug.

Silence rushed in.

No sisters. No therapist. No husband. No audience.

Just me.

And the truth.

I curled onto my side, arms wrapped tight around my middle, knees pulled up like I could hold myself together by compressing all the fragments.

The grief came in waves. Not quiet ones. Not cinematic. It came like a storm—ugly, choking, heaving. I gasped for breath and fought for air and tried to remember how to exist inside a body that didn’t match the dreams I’d poured into it.

My chest hurt. My ribs hurt. My face hurt. But I couldn’t stop the tears. The sobs.

I didn’t know how long I stayed that way—minutes, hours, a small eternity—before a sound cut through the quiet.