Page 8 of Creeping Lily

LILY

N o one warns you about the pain of after .

After the attack.

After the betrayal.

After the loss.

When the fog finally lifts, you don’t find light waiting for you.

You find the world stripped bare, every kindness ripped away, every lie exposed for what it is.

You see evil—its many faces, its many disguises.

It doesn’t always wear a snarl. Sometimes it smiles.

Sometimes it wears the skin of people you love.

And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.

My mind ricochets between yesterday and today. The images are sharp, merciless. But tomorrow? I can’t picture it. There’s no room for it. The idea of a future feels like a cruel joke. My life could end here, now, and there’s nothing I’d miss—because everything worth missing is already gone.

One moment took almost a decade of my life and smashed it to dust. Everything I thought was safe, solid, good—it vanished in a single, vicious blow.

Regret works through me like acid, slow and steady, burning from the inside. It comes with panic too—tightening my lungs until each breath is a shallow gasp, dragging me from shallow, fevered sleep into a darkness that isn’t much different from nightmares.

Depression moves in like an uninvited guest. It doesn’t knock. It just stays. And it makes me forsake everything else.

Days bleed together. I stop counting them.

My body stays in bed long enough for the mattress to hold my shape.

My clothes cling to me for days—weeks—until I can smell the rot of myself in the air.

I don’t eat. I don’t sleep, not really. I hover between waking and some kind of half-death, my mind stuck in looping scenes I can’t turn off.

When sleep does take me, it isn’t a kindness. It’s punishment. It drags me somewhere colder, quieter—somewhere dead. And there, in the black, I start to wish for death to find me for real.

Months drag by. The world keeps moving, but I don’t. School starts, and I can’t force myself to go. I skip a week. Then a month. Then the year. The thought of rejoining the world feels impossible, like trying to climb out of a well with no walls to grip.

I’m not just mourning what happened to me.

I’m mourning the Walker brothers. Losing them feels like losing two vital parts of my body—two limbs ripped away, leaving me stumbling, off-balance.

The pain doesn’t come from hate. I could never hate them.

I don’t even blame them. None of us were ready for the fallout.

We all survived the only way we knew how.

But God, I miss them.

Time passes. It doesn’t heal me, but it scours me down to something raw and clean enough to start over.

It’s Grandma Jo who finally cracks the ice. Not for lack of trying before—she’s been fighting for me all year—but one afternoon she walks into my room, parks herself in the middle like she’s staging an intervention, and snaps my name sharp enough to make me look at her.

She’s managed to talk me into showering once a week. She’s fed me in silence, tolerated my sullen stares. But now? Now she’s had enough. She’s watching me die by inches, and it’s killing her.

And I can’t lose her. Not her.

I get out of bed for her. My legs are wobbly, like they’ve forgotten what they were made for. Fabric hangs loose on me, my skin hollow beneath it. I shuffle into the kitchen and drop into a chair, my hands dangling between my knees like dead weight.

She makes tea—cinnamon, her favorite. The scent wraps around me in a way that almost makes me cry. She sets my cup down and doesn’t touch her own. She just stares at me, those sharp, steady eyes cutting through the mess I’ve become.

I try to hold her gaze, but the sadness pushes in. The guilt. The memory of how I tried to end it—how I thought that ending me would end the ache. How all it did was create more pain, more wreckage. How it shattered my mother. How it nearly broke my grandmother.

She tells me it’s time for therapy. It’s a long drive to the city, it’s money we don’t really have, but she’ll make it happen.

My mind is worth saving, she says, brushing back my tangled hair like she used to when I was little.

Without it, she tells me, I’ll stay here forever—frozen in this one ruined moment, letting it define the rest of my life.

I mumble something about whether life is even worth it, and she scoffs, fierce and commanding. The pity party is over, she says. It’s time to stand up and start living again—this time with the right help.

Then she moves closer, takes my hand, and smooths her thumb over the ridge of my wrist. The scar there is thin, pale, permanent. My failed exit. My stupid, desperate mistake.

Her eyes soften. Her thumb lingers .

For the first time in months, I feel the faintest spark of something I thought I’d lost forever.

“Welcome back,” she says.

I pull my hand away before the weight of her eyes can crush me. She lets me go without protest, but her gaze doesn’t move. She’s not going to let me fade back into the bed. Not today.

The tea between us has gone lukewarm. I lift the cup just for something to do with my hands, the scent of cinnamon winding up into my head.

It smells like safety. Like winter mornings years ago, before the world got sharp.

I take a sip and my throat tightens. My body wants to reject it.

Not because it tastes bad, but because it tastes like a time I can’t have back.

She starts talking about therapy again.

Her voice is steady, but I can hear the iron underneath it. This isn’t a suggestion; it’s an order.

I nod, because I can’t argue with her when her eyes look like that—flinty, stubborn, maybe the only thing holding me tethered to the earth.

But in my head, I’m screaming.

Therapy means talking. Talking means peeling myself open for someone to poke around in. It means giving language to things I’ve spent months locking in the dark.

I’m not ready.

You’ll never be ready, something inside me whispers. That’s why you have to go.

I pull my sleeves down over my wrists even though it’s warm. The building that houses the therapist’s office doesn’t look like a place where healing happens. It’s brick, faded red, with a metal door that sticks before opening.

The waiting room smells faintly of peppermint. There’s a potted plant in the corner that’s given up on life, a few stubborn leaves clinging to its stem. I sit in a chair near the wall while Grandma Jo fills out paperwork.

My therapist’s name is Rachel. She’s younger than I expect—mid-thirties, maybe. She doesn’t have that clinical chill I thought therapists were supposed to have. She’s warm in a way that feels deliberate, like she knows her job is to make me believe she’s a safe place.

She asks if I want water. If I’m comfortable. If the chair is okay.

I tell her it’s fine, because I don’t know how else to answer.

Then she asks me why I’m here.

The words jam in my throat.

Why I’m here? I’m here because I stopped wanting to be. I’m here because I tried to undo myself and failed. I’m here because my grandmother is afraid the next time she comes into my room, I won’t be breathing.

But I can’t say any of that.

“I don’t want to talk about what happened,” I finally tell her. My voice is steady, but my hands are shaking in my lap.

“That’s okay,” she says easily. “You don’t have to.”

I pause. Swallow. The breakfast I nibbled at earlier sits bitter in my stomach. “I just… I want to talk about what it made me.”

She leans forward just slightly. “And what’s that?”

The answer takes its time. It feels like I’m dragging it up from somewhere cold and deep.

“Empty.”

She doesn’t rush to fill the silence. She lets the word sit there between us like a living thing. And in that space, I realize it’s the first time I’ve said it out loud—to anyone.

Empty.

Rachel tells me we can start there. Not with the attack. Not with the people I lost. Just with this… hollow shape I’ve become. Sh e says we can figure out if there’s anything worth putting back in it.

I don’t believe her. But the part of me that wants to stop drowning listens anyway.

On the drive home, I lean my head against the window and watch the world blur past. It’s too bright. Too loud. But for the first time in almost a year, I feel something that isn’t just grief or guilt.

It’s small.

It’s fragile.

But it’s there.

And maybe—just maybe—it’s enough to make me come back again next week.