Page 73 of What You left in Me

If feelings were furniture, Mom would be the velvet rope that keeps you off the couch.

Her phone buzzes. She glances at the screen and stands. “I’ll be right back. Don’t—” She stops herself, smooths a palm over her skirt, and gives me a look I’ve known since childhood.Behave. She doesn’t have to say it for me to hear.

As soon as she steps away, my lungs expand like someone cracked a window in my chest. I flex my hands. The coffee cools into something undrinkable and relieved.

Finn shifts by the window, just enough to catch my eye. It’s not an invitation. It feels like gravity thickening under my feet. I look away first, because I am not fourteen with a diary and a highlighter anymore. I am twenty-four with two hands and a naked finger and a head full of things I regret and crave in equal measure.

What’s going to happen when she decides she did notice the absence of my engagement ring? She’s not stupid; she’s just selectively blind. And eventually even selective blindness trips over the furniture.

A nurse with a blonde bun comes out from the secure doors and calls out a last name that isn’t ours. My heart stilltries to leap through my sternum. A toddler starts crying. The mauve cardigan lady hands the child a cookie and goes back to whispering. I could write a paper on small-town crisis theater. Thesis: there is nothing we won’t rehearse if it keeps us from saying the messy thing out loud.

I stand because sitting feels like confessing. My legs are pins and needles. I tell myself I’m just stretching. My feet take me anyway, past the rack of outdated magazines, past the vending machine that offers four kinds of chips and exactly zero salvation, down the corridor where the lights are softer and the floor glows with those quiet safety strips you never notice until you need them.

I press my palm to the cool painted wall and breathe in for four, out for six. It’s a trick I teach my freshmen before exams. Works about half the time. The other half, you fake it.

Footsteps. Not rushed. Not hesitant. Certain. I don’t have to look to know it’s him. My body recognizes the pattern the way you learn to recognize a song after the first two notes.

“Shouldn’t be alone,” he says gently, pouring over the nape of my neck like warm honey. His breath fans over my skin, and goose bumps erupt all over me. I’d be mortified if I weren’t so consumed by too much else.

“I’m not,” I argue, tilting my head toward the waiting room. “There’s a whole crowd of us pretending it’s fine.”

He steps into the spill of light. His tie is loosened. There’s a crescent of shadow under each eye, like he hasn’t slept in a week. He probably hasn’t. I probably haven’t either, but I don’t wear exhaustion the way he does, like it’s a threat he’s made friends with.

“Tell me something good?” I ask. It comes out quieter than I mean for it to, a string pulled too tight.

He watches me like I’m an equation that keeps rearranging itself. I’ve almost given up expecting him to give me something when he finally says, “The surgeon really is excellent. He’s in the best hands he could be.”

“Good.” I nod. My throat is dry. My mouth says the adult things it’s supposed to say, but my chest is full of that other language—the wordless one that lives under your ribs and wants and wants and wants.

He glances at my hands. I brace for it. But he doesn’t say anything about the ring I’m not wearing. Maybe he already knows. Maybe he doesn’t need trophies. Maybe he understands that absence can be a louder announcement than presence.

“This isn’t… ideal,” I say, for lack of anything better. “I feel like I’m sitting inside a refrigerator display case.”

One corner of his mouth kicks, almost a smile if you squint. “You always did go for poetry.”

“I’m trying out observational comedy. New career path. Think I have a shot?”

“Terrifying,” he says lightly, and the word has this elegant bite to it that makes me want to take a step closer. I don’t. I’m not that brave. Or I’m too brave. One or the other.

“Mom’s going to ask,” I blurt, because silence is worse. “About the ring. About… everything. She’ll ask in that voice that makes you think she’s being pastoral when she’s actually performing triage on our reputation.”

His gaze drops to my bare finger again. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t have to. My skin remembers without help.

“What are you going to tell her?” he asks.

“The truth?” I try it on. It doesn’t fit yet. “Or a version that doesn’t end with her fainting gracefully because the world dared to make her sit down.”

“Ariane.” My name in his mouth is a vow and a warning. His hand, at his side, flexes like it’s having its own conversation.

“I know.” I swallow. “I know.”

He takes one step. The corridor shrinks in sympathy. The hum and click and whisper of the hospital fade down to the idea of sound. His shoulder nearly brushes mine. He smells like expensive soap and sleeplessness and something I shouldn’t name.

“You’re shaking,” he says.

“I’m a chihuahua in human clothing,” I tell him. “Very trendy this season.”

The almost-smile shows again. Then it’s gone. “You don’t have to do this alone.”