Page 12 of Born to Run Back

Chapter Ten

Unraveling

Theo

The canvas bag sat heavy in my hands as I knelt beside what we’d built together in our beautiful, shared madness. Six months of thoughtful devotion spread before me in the moonlight tonight.

Concentric circles of painted stones.

Dried, dead flowers braided between rocks like offerings to gods we’d invented in our anguish.

Dr. Probst had been unrelenting during our last session: “You need to say goodbye to it, Theo. To the shrine, to the fantasy, to whatever you’ve been using to avoid your actual grief.”

Six weeks of therapy had given me words for what Wendy and I had done here.

Crisis bonding. Displaced grief. The way I’d projected all my unprocessed loss onto a stranger and called it love.

Mom’s death, my own crushing loneliness, the terror of finally being seen by somebody—I’d wrapped it all up in vanilla perfume and thirty-seven minutes of trauma and convinced myself it was destiny.

But sitting here now, surrounded by the evidence of our mirrored and parallel breakdowns, I understood something Dr. Probst’s clinical language hadn’t and couldn’t quite capture.

This place had been sacred, even if it nearly destroyed us both.

We’d poured our hearts into these painted stones, even if our hearts had been too broken to know what they were really saying.

I began the careful work of dismantling our shrine.

Each painted rock went into the bag with something approaching reverence—not because I wanted to preserve our obsession, but because I wanted to honor what it had all meant.

The clawing need to matter. The aching hunger for connection.

The way two strangers had somehow found each other in the darkness and built something beautiful from their shared terror.

Even if it had been the wrong move for all of the wrong reasons.

The sound of an approaching car made my pulse stutter.

It was that familiar Honda purr I’d know anywhere.

For a moment, the old electricity shot through my chest; that dangerous, intoxicating pull.

Then, Dr. Probst’s voice, easy and steady and calm: “Feelings aren’t facts, Theo.

You can acknowledge them without being controlled by them. ”

Her headlights shone like sunlight across the canyon as she rounded the curve, and I watched her park in the exact spot she’d always parked, where her car had been the night of the accident, and then again when we’d reunited weeks later.

But this time, she sat motionless for a long time, staring straight ahead, before finally cutting the engine, as if gathering the courage for what came next.

To face me.

When she finally emerged, I could see she had supplies of her own. A cardboard box. Work gloves. The practical tools of someone who’d come to the same difficult conclusion I had.

“Theo. Hello.” Her voice held none of that wild, electric agony that had defined every interaction between us. Instead, it carried something I’d never heard before: peace. Exhaustion, yes, but the kind that seemed to come from hard work rather than sleeplessness and obsession.

“Wendy.” I rose slowly, my hands full of painted stones that caught the moonlight like miniature stars. “I guess we had the same idea.”

She approached with the poised, delicate grace of someone who’d learned to walk steadily again after months of stumbling.

In the silver moonlight, I could see she looked…

different. Healthier. Like she’d actually been sleeping through the night, eating real food, living in daylight instead of haunting canyon roads at three in the morning.

“We were both drowning, weren’t we?” she said, her voice soft, gaze sweeping across the memorial we’d built together, stone by painted stone.

“Completely.” I placed another handful of rocks into my bag, each one releasing its painful hold on my chest as it disappeared. “That night… what we did… it wasn’t really about each other.”

“No,” she agreed as she began gathering the small trinkets with the same reverence I’d been showing the stones, as if we both understood this wasn’t destruction but liberation. “It was about not wanting to be alone with what we’d witnessed, right? We bonded over the crisis, not each other.”

The truth settled between us like early morning light, illuminating everything we’d been too desperate to see before.

We worked quietly in companionable silence, dismantling our shrine piece by piece, our movements synchronized in a way that felt both familiar and entirely new.

This time, there was no urgent edge, no frantic energy.

Just two people doing very necessary work together, finally clear about what they were really saying goodbye to.

Wendy

Six weeks with my therapist's patient guidance had taught me to recognize the difference between processing grief and feeding the hungry ghost of obsession.

“You can honor what you witnessed,” Lauren had said gently but firmly, “without building your entire life around it, Wendy.”

Moving beside Theo in the moon-washed darkness felt like a choreography we’d been rehearsing for months and months without knowing it.

But this time, the dance was about release rather than accumulation, about letting go rather than holding on.

The wild, frantic electricity that had characterized every moment between us had been replaced by something quieter, more honest. More real.

“I went to see Delaney,” I said as I carefully wrapped up the laminated star chart, the one that was of last October’s constellations, the night sky that had watched us kneel in the rain and do our best to help two kids who’d gotten into a horrific car wreck. “At the facility where she’s staying.”

Theo paused in his methodical stone-gathering, his heartbreaking blue eyes finding mine across our dismantled garden. “How is she?”

“Broken. But honest about it in a way I wasn’t ready to be.

” I placed the star chart in my cardboard box, planning to mail it to her later along with a letter of apology I’d been writing and rewriting for weeks.

“She called me out. Said I’d been using their trauma to build myself a shrine to feel important. ”

Theo glanced at me, his brows furrowed in thought. “Was she right?”

“Yeah.” The admission tasted clean on my tongue, a confession without the weight of shame. “I think I was grieving my own loneliness more than Beck’s death. And I used you… used us as a way to avoid facing that emptiness.”

Theo returned his attention to the stones before he spoke.

“I did the same thing.” His voice carried the particular exhaustion of someone who’d been excavating their own buried truths for months.

“I’ve been in therapy. Turns out I was using all this to avoid dealing with my mother’s death four years ago.

Every stone I placed here was like laying flowers on her grave. ”

We continued to work, watching months of devotion disappear into bags and boxes.

Soon, only the essential pieces remained—the driftwood carved with the kids’ initials, a handful of the smoothest stones we’d each brought on different nights, the small glass vial that had once held rainwater from that terrible October storm.

“I keep thinking about that first night,” I said, sitting back on my heels, my hands stilling for a moment. “Not the night we had sex, but before. The night of the accident. The way it felt to help someone. To matter to another human being in a life-or-death way.”

“I know,” Theo said, his voice thick with recognition, with this particular ache of understanding. “I felt it, too. Like I was finally necessary to somebody. Finally important enough because I could be the one to save someone. Fucking pathetic, right?”

I shook my head. “Of course it’s not pathetic, Theo. It’s human. You’re human.”

He looked at me. “You’re the first person who saw me in years.”

My eyes watered. “Y-You are, too. I was invisible before you.”

Without conscious thought, we moved toward each other across the diminished memorial.

When his arms wrapped around me this time, everything was different.

No desperation. No hunger. No frantic need to disappear in each other’s pain.

Simply two people who’d shared something terrible and were finally ready to carry it properly, together but not dependent. Still connected, yet not consumed.

I cried on Theo’s shoulder—not the wild, shattered sobs of that first October night, but the quieter tears of genuine grief finally allowed to flow in the right direction.

For Beck, who’d never become the pediatric surgeon he’d dreamed of being.

For Delaney, trapped in the long, uncertain journey of healing.

For the two broken strangers we’d been, so hungry for connection we’d mistaken a crisis for compatibility, and the intensity of it for intimacy.

His hand moved through my hair with infinite tenderness, and I felt his own tears fall warm against my temple. We held each other in this sacred place one last time, letting ourselves feel everything we’d been afraid to feel when we’d been too busy using each other as shields against the dark.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered into the wool of his jacket, breathing in that familiar scent of spicy aftershave and autumn nights. “For all of it. For using you to avoid my own broken pieces.”

“Me too.” His voice emerged muffled against my hair, rough with months of accumulated regret. “You deserved better than becoming someone’s escape from reality.”

We stayed rooted there until the tears gentled into something like tranquility, until the night air began to bite at our exposed faces and remind us we were still alive, still breathing, still capable of choosing what inevitably must come next.

When we finally pulled apart, Theo reached up and touched my cheek with his warm, calloused hand, his thumb tracing the salt tracks there like he was memorizing them.

“Could we…” he started, then stopped, his expression uncertain. “I mean, would you want to…”

“Start over?” I finished for him, understanding flooding through me like warm water. “Actually get to know each other this time?”

“Yeah. But slowly. Really slowly. Like people do when they’re not running from something.”

Hope bloomed in my chest, different from everything that had come before; this was quieter, more sustainable, rooted in possibility rather than pure desperation.

”I’d like that very much,” I said, smiling.

He leaned forward and kissed me then, soft and careful and completely different from that frenzied night against my Honda.

This kiss asked permission . This kiss had nothing to do with drowning and everything to do with learning to break the surface, to survive.

It tasted like tears and moonlight and the tentative promise of building something real from the ashes of our shared madness.

When we broke apart, we were both smiling tenderly at each other.

“Let’s do this right,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s.”

We finished dismantling what was left of the memorial together in comfortable quiet.

Everything disappeared except for the carved driftwood marker and two stones—one smooth river rock each, small enough to carry in a pocket, worn enough to fit perfectly in the palm of even my hand.

A reminder of where we’d been, but not a shrine to live inside forever.

When we walked back to our cars, Theo pulled out his phone, its screen glowing blue-white in the darkness as he opened his calendar app.

“So...” he said, and his smile was shy, hopeful, entirely without that painful edge that had characterized everything between us before. “Coffee? I mean, proper coffee this time. Somewhere we actually talk about ourselves instead of sitting there like weirdos on a bad blind date.”

I giggled. “I’d like that. But maybe somewhere with better lighting this time. And definitely somewhere that serves more than just coffee and awkward silence.”

“Deal.”

Driving away from mile marker eighteen for what I knew would be the last time as a ritual, I felt lighter than I had in years.

Not because the grief was gone—that would always be a part of me, woven in the fabric of the woman I’d become that terrible October night—but because it no longer owned me, no longer defined every choice I made in every step I took with every breath I drew.

In my rearview mirror, I watched Theo’s headlights follow mine down the canyon road, and for the first time since that fateful night, I wasn’t afraid of where we were going.

We’d finally learned the difference between honoring trauma and being imprisoned by it. Between the sacred necessity of grief and the beautiful, terrible trap of making our pain into a religion.

And maybe, just maybe, we’d found something real we could build together.

Something that could exist in the light of day, in coffee shops with good lighting, in the ordinary sacred space of two people who’d chosen to know each other slowly, deliberately and conscientiously, with all the patience that real love required.