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I let my weight rest fully against him.

His body adjusts without thought, holding me upright without tightening, without retreating, and something inside my chest loosens in answer.

This isn’t a pause before the fall.

It’s a stand taken mid-storm.

Because he’s not asking to take me.

He’s asking to stay.

And I stay with him—awake, unhidden, and fully aware that when the world comes crashing back in, it will find me standing exactly where I chose to be.

XXVI

Static Screams

The rain doesn’t announce itself.

It detonates.

Fat drops slam into the roof all at once, a sudden, violent drumming that rattles the windows in their frames and makes the gutters scream like something is being dragged through them. The house groans under the weight of it, old wood flexing and settling as if it remembers what storms used to mean back when they tore roofs loose and left people praying into the dark.

The air inside smells wrong—stale and metallic, like dust that’s been warmed too long and forgotten. The kettle sits cold on the stove, a faint mineral tang hanging around it, and my mug is still where I left it hours ago, empty, ringed with a ghost of what used to be hot.

I’m alone.

The realization lands slowly—pressing down on my ribs, narrowing the space inside my chest. The quiet stretches too far, thinning until it feels fragile, like it might tear if I move too fast. The walls seem farther apart than they should be, the ceiling higher. Everything pulled just slightly out of reach.

I’m standing in the living room staring at the darkened window when the radio crackles.

A low, uneven hiss creeps into the room, crawling out of the speaker like breath dragged through gravel. Static pulses in short bursts, rising and falling, never settling—like a throat trying to remember how to speak after too long in the cold.

My skin prickles.

I don’t move. I don’t breathe. My pulse kicks hard enough that I can feel it in my teeth, in the soft hollow at the base of my throat. The rain keeps hammering the roof, each drop too loud now, too close, like the world is leaning in to listen.

The static spikes.

Sharp. Piercing. A sound that scrapes the inside of my skull.

And then my name tears through the room.

“SELAH!”

It isn’t sound so much as impact. The scream hits my chest and drives the air clean out of me, and I stumble back, heel slipping on the floor as my heart slams against my ribs like it’s trying to escape my body altogether.

This isn’t memory.

It isn’t fever.

It isn’t grief playing tricks with familiar sounds.

This is Cass.

Her voice explodes out of the radio, raw and panicked, stripped down to terror and breath, my name breaking in her mouth like it’s already costing her something to say it.

“SELAH—”