Page 31 of My Best Friend Is Broken

His face crumples slightly. “That’s not…”

“It is, though. Isn’t it? You look at me and you see how broken I am, how far gone.”

“I look at you and I see someone who’s been through hell and is still fighting. Someone who’s braver than he knows.”

“Brave?” I almost laugh, but it comes out more like a sob. “I can’t go shopping without having a breakdown. I can’t handle a stranger touching my shoulder without losing my mind completely. That’s not brave, Nicky. That’s pathetic.”

“That’s trauma.” His voice is fierce now, passionate in a way I haven’t heard since we were teenagers arguingabout football or music or which pub had the cheapest pints. “That’s what five years in prison does to a person. It doesn’t make you pathetic. It makes you a survivor.”

I want to believe him. God, I want to believe him so badly it physically hurts. But I can see the truth in the careful way he holds himself, in the distance he maintains between us, in the way he talks to me like I’m something fragile that might break.

Maybe I am.

“The doctor says it’s treatable,” I tell him. “The PTSD, the panic attacks, all of it. Says that with therapy and maybe medication, I can get better.”

“That’s good. That’s hopeful.”

“Is it? Or is it just something they tell everyone to make them feel better about being fundamentally fucked up?”

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “But don’t you think it’s worth trying to find out?”

The question hangs between us like a bridge I’m not sure I’m brave enough to cross. Because trying means admitting how bad things really are. It means facing the depth of damage that’s been done, cataloging all the ways I’m broken, working through memories I’ve been trying to bury.

It means accepting help from people who wear uniforms and carry keys and have the power to lock me up if they decide I’m too dangerous or too sick to be free.

But the alternative is staying like this forever. Suspended between the life I lost and the life I’ll never be able to build. Watching Nicky look at me with that careful fear-pity mixture until he eventually gives up and walks away.

“Will you visit?” I ask. “If I stay, will you come see me?”

“Every day,” he promises immediately. “As much as they’ll let me.”

“Even if I’m here for weeks? Months?”

“However long it takes.”

I study his face, looking for the lie, the moment when his certainty will crack and show me the truth underneath. But all I see is exhaustion and worry and something that might be love, if I’m brave enough to believe in it.

“Okay,” I whisper. “I’ll stay.”

Dr. Hassan returns a few minutes later with papers to sign and explanations of what comes next. Assessments, therapy sessions, medication reviews. A whole program designed to take apart the broken pieces of who I am and try to put them back together in some semblance of working order.

As she talks, I watch Nicky watching me, and I see the exact moment when he realizes this is really happening. That I’m really this broken, really this far from the person he remembers. I see him start to understand what he’s signed up for by choosing to stick by someone like me.

And I see him choose to stay anyway.

It’s not enough to fix me. Nothing is ever going to be that simple. But for the first time since I woke up in this hospital bed, I feel something that isn’t fear or shame or crushing despair.

I feel like maybe, possibly, there’s a chance I might survive this after all.

Even if surviving means admitting how broken I really am.

Even if it means letting strangers see inside my head and catalog all the ways prison changed me.

Even if it means accepting that the boy Nicky fell in love with is gone, and hoping he might be able to love whoever emerges from the wreckage in his place.

Because… Nicky did love me. And I think I loved him. And curling up in my bunk at night, dreaming about what might have happened between us if I hadn’t been snatched away, was the one thing that held together what little sanity I have left.

I take a deep breath and slowly let it out.