Because there was nothing to say.
Because there was everything to say.
Chapter Thirteen
One Week Later
One week.
One week had passed since we’d silently eaten the best food of my life in one of my favorite places on earth.
None of the warmth from the restaurant, from Lukas, from the past, seeped back into us. No, if anything, it chilled Heath more. He was more withdrawn than usual, if that was even possible.
He was still accompanying me to the homeless shelter four times a week. To the children’s hospital. But he barely spoke. And then I spoke too much. About where I was going. Who I was seeing. How Tim, the young man who’d been living on the street for three years had gotten a job, an apartment, and a girlfriend.
I didn’t say that I’d gotten him two out of the three.
I spoke so I didn’t have to hear the roar of the silence. Not that it changed. Not that Heath responded.
I wasn’t speaking now, though. Hadn’t since I walked out of the doors of St Mary’s. Heath hadn’t come in this time.
He had ‘shit to do’ in the car.
I was glad. So fricking glad that he wasn’t in there when…it happened. When I’d had to witness the single most ugly thing I’d ever experienced.
Though I’d come to crave the pain of his presence, there was no way I could’ve wished him standing inside a hospital room watching a little girl quietly and devastatingly leave the earth.
Ella had been holding my hand when she died.
I’d sat there, frozen, unblinking and holding onto a dead little girl’s hand for a long time before I moved. Before I reacted. And I didn’t cry, throw up or sink to the floor.
No.
I laid my lips to her cold forehead and leaned over to press the call button.
Then the nurses came.
I left quietly before Ella’s parents could arrive.
No way I could handle that.
I’d walked straight to the car, needing Heath’s empty stare, his cold indifference.
I needed the agony of it. Something to distract me from the horror I’d just witnessed. Just lived.
If he noticed my change in demeanor, he didn’t mention it, not while he walked me from my car into my building and up the stairs.
I stopped abruptly in the hallway, two doors down from my apartment.
He didn’t slam into the back of me, though he’d been close behind. He had good reflexes.
Then again, that I was kind of the point, I supposed.
I didn’t turn to face him and he didn’t utter anything about my abrupt stop.
“I can’t tonight,” I whispered to the hallway in front of me and the ghost of a man and his love behind me. “I know you’re going to have something to say, something to accuse me of, something to shout at me about, but just not tonight, okay?” I sucked in a breath. “I just…” I trailed off. “I just can’t.”
Silence hung heavy in the hall but heavy was what I was used to now, my light, carefree life a thing of the past, and when I thought about it, a thing of fiction.
Pressure at my elbow turned me around.
I jerked at the contact.
My ghost was touching me.
Willingly touching me. And not to drag me around to face him and then let me go like my skin was fire. No, it was a gentle probing for me to turn, and when I did so, he kept his hand there and his eyes were on mine.
I sucked in another strangled breath.
They weren’t empty, or cold or cruel.
It was like the utter hopelessness in my voice had somehow chipped away at something I’d considered immovable.
He didn’t say anything.
He didn’t need to.
“Everyone expects me to be Polly all the time,” I whispered. “To be happy, to be cheerful, to see the world through rose-tinted glasses. And I am. And I do. As long as I’m not looking in a mirror. I’ve created this image for myself that gives me no room to be the opposite of Polly. Like I am now. The nothing. The blow-up doll version of me that’s deflated, flat, sad and up close, not at all living up to what was promised. I’m just so tired.” My voice hitched then cracked.
A tear trailed down my cheek.
“I’m so fucking tired, Heath, and I know if I sleep for a year I won’t be rested. And I ran away for a year because I thought if I was somewhere where I don’t have to ‘be Polly’ for everyone around me, maybe I’d be able to find some rest.”
Another tear trailed down my cheek.
“But I didn’t realize that the person I had been killing myself being Polly for was me,” I whispered. “I can’t fall apart because that’s not what Polly does. And if I’m not her, I’m no one.”
That’s when another tear fell.
And other.
And my body started to shake with sobs so powerful I wondered if they’d shatter my teeth.