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Please let me help you.

The silence hovered between us.

“Okay,” he said finally.

“Okay? You’ll move in?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

I let out a breath. I felt simultaneously relieved and sad. Relieved that I’d be able to take care of him, that I wouldn’t get any more surprise ER visits, that him being with me would give him a better quality of life. And sad that a certain chapter was ending—for both of us. Because both of our lives had officially come to an abrupt stop. We were adults, regressing.

It was like the clock had just wound back twenty years. Suddenly I wasn’t grown-up, thirty-five-year-old married Briana anymore. He wasn’t bright, driven Benjamin working in IT, training for a 5K. I was the older sister again, in charge of watching a brace-faced Benny while Mom took night classes and worked a double. And I was going to have to watch him. Because I didn’t trust him with himself.

I got him home to his apartment and made him dinner. He barely touched it and went straight to bed. I drove home after starting a load of dishes and watering his wilting plants that still looked twice as alive as my brother did.

I was so mentally drained by the time I got back to the house I just plopped on the sofa wrapped in a blanket and passed out there until the cat unceremoniously walked across my body at two a.m. Then I dragged myself to my room and stared at the ceiling in the dark, unable to go back to sleep.

I was getting further and further away from the me I’d planned. Of the life I had planned.

In two weeks, I’d no longer be married. I would, from this day forward, be alone.

I was never doing this relationship stuff again. Any of it.

I’d always told myself that what happened to Mom with Dad was isolated. That most men didn’t walk out on their pregnant wife and eight-year-old daughter, leaving them homeless and destitute. I believed in love. And when I met Nick, I’d believed I’d found the one. I was almost snide about it. See? There are good men out there. I knew lots. Zander, Gibson, Benny—and now I’d found one to be the love of my life too.

But having men as friends and peers and family is very different than having them as partners.

Everything Mom had told me my whole life about being in relationships with men turned out to be true: They can’t be trusted. They can’t be relied upon. Men will always hurt you and leave you and let you down.

What Dad did cut even deeper now, because he’d given his son his rare blood type but didn’t bother to stick around to give him a kidney when he needed one. The bitterness twisted in my gut like a knife.

I was done. Done with men.

From now on I’d use them the way they used women. For entertainment. For sex. For convenience. I would never live with a man I was dating and I’d sure as hell never get married again. Ever. And kids? No. Not if it meant I’d be attached to their father for the rest of my life.

I was so disgusted, so severely disappointed by what Nick and Dad ended up being. And it was reinforced daily, with every battered woman who came into my ER and every idiot I met on Tinder. It didn’t even surprise me that I couldn’t even find one decent enough for casual sex. The only ones on the dating apps who seemed to have their shit together always turned out to be married, which only further confirmed my opinion of dating men in general.

Jessica was right. I was better off with the cat.

For the next three days I packed Benny’s apartment and moved him in. His best friends, Justin and Brad, came to help with the heavy lifting. They set up Benny’s treadmill in the den, put his furniture in storage, and got him situated. Having his friends over at least got him to shower and put on clean clothes, so that was nice.

I made arrangements for a home dialysis machine to be delivered. I spent a full day washing the trash bags of dirty clothes I’d packed up from his apartment while he depression-slept. Then I spent five minutes holding a cold cup of coffee and staring morosely at the giant hideous cat-scratching thingy that now lived in my living room next to the equally hideous pink floral sofa that Mom bought in 1994.

I currently lived in the house I grew up in.

When Mom married Gil, she refused to give up her house. Even when he retired and they moved to Arizona, she still wouldn’t sell it. Mom said, with men you always need a fail-safe. To never put all your eggs in their basket.

Looks like once again Mom was right. When I left Nick, at least I had someplace to go.

I’d never decorated Mom’s house when I moved in. I didn’t really plan on still being here a year later, and decorating it made my situation feel permanent. So I just lived here in the faded remnants of my childhood. The whole place looked like a time capsule from the 1970s. Macramé wall art, oak cabinets and brass hardware, brown shag carpet, peeling linoleum in the kitchen. It was depressing. And now there was a cat tree the size of a real tree in here too.

Why did I live like this?

I could afford an apartment. I could afford a house. But I felt paralyzed by the idea of it. Like I’d had just enough strength to leave the home I’d made with Nick, but not enough to make a new one for myself. So I just squatted here like a castaway trapped on a deserted island.

Maybe a part of me was afraid to leave the island. Because then this was all real.

I took an extra day off work to finish moving Benny in. By the time I went back to the hospital on Wednesday, I was a zombie. I felt totally numb. Like the Nick thing and the Benny thing and the house thing were a horrible third-degree burn, so severe the nerve endings were gone and I could feel nothing.