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Her man. Who the fuck is he?
My stomach twists. “What did he look like?”
The nurse frowns, confused by all the questions. “Tall, dark hair, T-shirt stretched tight, driving a black sports car.”
It’s Maksim, the spitting image of our father. The name burns its way from my chest up into my throat.
Why is my brother back in Delaney’s life? Ending a bad engagement doesn’t entitle him to circle back around to her and play house.
“How was she when she left?” It comes out as a whisper.
“She looked worse for wear and needed rest, but she was cleared of any immediate danger.” Hearing it is a balm.
“What did her test results say?” My eyes flicker to her chart.
“I cannot disclose that.” She pauses, arms crossed tightly over her chest like armor, then adds, pointed, “Though I will say that you’re listed as Miss Cox’s emergency contact. The front desk called that number multiple times the night she came in.”
A flush of embarrassment erupts up my neck. I remember my phone buzzing across the hall, and silencing it twice without a single glance. I don’t stop her again, for fear that I will do something stupid.
I stand in the empty room like a man who’s lost and turn it over on myself. She’s one hallway away from me the entire time. She’s mine to answer for, she’s always been mine, and I never once knocked on that door.
The wrong digit that first brought her into my life, the mistake I used to find charming, finally reached me on the worst night of hers, and I looked at the screen and silenced it because I didn’t want the buzzing to disturb Yelena.
The truth of it sits heavier than anything I’ve carried, literally or metaphorically, in years. That wrong number brought me to her once, to a bleeding girl on a barroom floor, and when she needed me again, I let it ring.
Silence is a death sentence, and I handed it to her.
My phone buzzes. I expect Yelena, thumb ready to type, and instead it’s a company email. The subject line reads: Resignation.
My feet stop, my breath catches, and every sound in the corridor cuts out around me. The glacial, formal little email erases every moment that ever passed between the two of us.
I call her directly. It rings once, and then she hangs up on me, and a moment later her phone is off entirely. My lungs feel blocked, taut as wire.
I fumble with my phone and text her to pick up. The message fails to send, and it makes my blood pressure spike. My temple starts throbbing.
She left without confronting me, without one argument, and she gave me no chance to stop her before she chose to disappear, as if she has bought a one-way ticket out of my life.
This is nothing like when Yelena walked out on me twenty years ago. Yelena leaving made me angry. It made me proud and cold and determined to feel nothing. Delaney leaving feels like an organ has been cut clean out of me while I was looking the other way, and something I cannot name chews slowly through the last of my control. I don’t get angry at her. I only want her back, I want a second chance, and I have no right to want it.
I drive out of the hospital and straight into clogged traffic, where the city pulses, red and fretful. Every red light tests what little patience I have left, and my ruined pinky aches from how hard I’m gripping the wheel, until something grinds, something like bone.
It is Maksim’s name that bothers me more than the resignation itself, and I’m not proud of that. Delaney and my brother share a past, five months of her life that I was never any part of, months of him on her couch and at her table, his hands on her whenever he pleased. The thought does nothing at all to soften me.
The sea comes back at me without any warning, cold as the water that trickled from her hair. Yelena thrashing in the dark. Another figure past her, that the black water was swallowing, that I swam right by without stopping.
I keep running through the assumptions I made in the water that night. The crew would fish her out in a minute. She was strong enough to last. She could hold on longer than Yelena, whose heart could stop from the shock alone. Every single assumption was reasonable, a fatal mistake dressed as logic, and every single one of them makes me sound like an idiot now, a man who did his arithmetic while a woman went under.
At a red light, a social media notification from Yelena’s account slides down my screen. She set my phone to follow her page years ago.
I’ve looked at her feed now and then over the years without meaning much by it. Snowy mountain peaks, buttery pastries in cafés in foreign cities, and expensive gowns at galas I was never once invited to.
The notification is sitting over my GPS, so I open it to clear it away, and some part of me wants to know how she is doing.
The photo stops me cold, and I stiffen. Yelena is fully submerged in clear blue water, her whole body stretched out beneath the surface without a trace of fear.
I scroll, and there are more of them. Yelena diving for shells along the seabed, turning underwater with her eyes open and a smile on her face.
A chill spreads through my stomach, shooting a quiver of dread up my spine. The post is dated today, only hours ago, and the evocative caption says she’s healing herself by returning to the sea that frightened her so badly.
