Page 7 of Born to Run Back

Chapter Five

The Language of Silence

Wendy

The memorial had steadily transformed into something else entirely. Something that would’ve terrified me if I’d encountered it elsewhere, in daylight, built by any other hands but ours.

Stones arranged in concentric circles, like a mandala.

White flowers braided between the rocks; not just my weekly roses and baby’s breath anymore, but white lilies, sprigs of eucalyptus that filled the air with their sharp, clean scent.

Someone had carved initials into a piece of driftwood: “B.F.” and “D.L.”

Beck Foster. Delaney Lewis.

He knew their names. Of course he knew their names.

But it was the other details that made my chest constrict until breathing became laborious, until it felt like work.

A laminated photo of the night sky. And not just any night sky, but October’s sky, the constellations that had watched us kneel in the rain.

A small glass vial filled with what looked like rainwater.

Smooth stones painted with symbols I didn’t recognize but somehow still understood: spirals, infinity signs, two interlocking circles.

God, he said so much without saying anything at all.

This wasn’t grief anymore. This was devotion. This was the kind of elaborate ritual that people built when reality became too thin to hold them.

We were both losing our minds. That much, I knew for certain. Building this impossible shrine to thirty-seven minutes when we should have been sleeping, healing, moving on like normal people did after witnessing a horrific tragedy.

But standing there in the dark, surrounded by the evidence of our shared madness, I felt more connected to another human being than I had perhaps… ever.

We’d been in a relationship this whole time. Wordless, dangerous, built on stones and flowers and the terrible intimacy of parallel, mirrored breakdowns.

The nightmares had gotten worse. Beck’s face, twisted in agony. The sound of his strained and desperate breathing, that wet, wrong sound that haunted my sleep until I’d stopped trying to sleep at all. Three, maybe four hours a night, if I was lucky. The rest of the time I was in my head or—here.

Reliving that moment when I’d finally felt needed.

Theo

Thursday, 3:15 a.m., same week

I’d figured out her schedule weeks ago—pathetic as it sounded, even to me. Tuesday nights at 2:30 a.m., like clockwork. Which meant if I came on any other day of the week instead, I could see what she’d left without risking the encounter I wanted more than I wanted air to breathe.

Coward. That’s what I was.

Standing there, staring at the flowers she’d arranged with the dedication of a priest preparing for communion, I understood exactly how broken she was.

As broken as I was.

The realization should’ve been devastating, actually. Instead, it felt like recognition. Like coming home to a place I’d never been but had been searching for my entire life.

Our memorial had grown into something that would scare anyone unlucky enough to stumble across it during a day hike. Elaborate. Obsessive. The kind of shrine that made you think of people who’d lost their grip on reality.

But I couldn’t stop. Christ, I couldn’t fucking stop.

The panic attacks had started three weeks ago.

Sudden, violent episodes where my chest seized up as the world tilted sideways, leaving me gasping on my kitchen floor at two in the morning, clutching my shirt like I was experiencing a heart attack.

My doctor wanted to prescribe me something for the crippling anxiety, but I couldn’t explain that the only thing I wanted, the only thing that really helped me, was—this.

Being here. Maintaining this sacred space we’d built in our shared trauma.

Because that’s what this really was, wasn’t it?

Not just grief for those kids, but something deeper.

The terror of being alone with what we’d witnessed.

The way Beck’s pulse had fluttered and nearly stopped over and over under my fingertips.

The sound Delaney had made when they’d loaded her into the ambulance, that keening wail that still echoed in my dreams.

We were being haunted.

Both sleepless. Both building elaborate coping mechanisms that any sane person would immediately recognize as unhealthy.

But standing among the evidence of her devotion, of the white roses placed with the reverence of a mourner at a grave, I understood something that should’ve absolutely terrified me:

I didn’t want to be sane anymore.

I wanted to be broken in exactly the same manner she was broken, wanted to match her madness with my own until we became something new together.

Something that could only exist in the space between trauma and healing, in the dark hours when the world slept and left us alone with our ghosts and our demons.

I could have come Tuesday night. Could have finally faced her again, spoken her name if she’d been willing to give it.

But every week I chose another day instead, chose the cowardly distance of seeing her work without risking the conversation that might shatter whatever this was we’d built over the last few months.

What if she was disappointed by the reality of me? What if thirty-seven minutes of shared trauma wasn’t enough foundation for whatever beautiful dreams I’d been constructing in my mind?

Coward. We both were.

We’d built this elaborate love letter out of stones and flowers and shared insomnia, too afraid to write our names at the bottom.

Tomorrow night I’d be back, probably. And next Tuesday, so would she.

The garden would grow larger, more elaborate, more beautiful and terrible and maddening with each passing week.

Until something gave. Until one of us finally broke completely.

Or found the courage to speak.

I didn’t know which was better, which was worse. I didn’t know anything anymore.