Chapter 6: Chapter 6
The sleep was a black, shoreless sea. Aria didn’t dream. She didn’t float. She simply ceased to exist for eight solid hours, a gift of nothingness so profound she woke feeling physically rearranged.
She opened her eyes to a sliver of pale Saturday morning light cutting through a gap in the blinds. The guest room was still, familiar in its starkness. For a few disorienting seconds, she was just a person in a clean room. Then the memory of the previous night crashed in—the confession, the clinic, the small white pill—but it landed softly, like facts on a padded floor. The screaming static was gone. In its place was a hollow, tender quiet, the mental equivalent of a bruise.
She could hear the faint, precise sounds of movement elsewhere in the apartment. The click of a ceramic mug on granite. The soft hiss of a coffee maker. She lay still, listening. There was no urgency to move. The crushing weight that had made leaving her bed a marathon had lifted. It was just… gone.
After a while, she pushed back the covers and padded out to the living area. Levi stood at the kitchen counter, dressed in dark jeans and a grey henley, scanning something on his tablet. A fresh pot of coffee steamed beside him. He looked up as she appeared.
“You’re alive,” he said, his tone neutral.
“I think so.” Her voice was rough with sleep. “That was… different.”
“Chemical intervention tends to be.” He poured coffee into a mug. “Milk? Sugar?”
“Just black, please.” She accepted the warm mug, wrapping her hands around it. The heat was a sharp, pleasant anchor. She took a sip. It was excellent, rich and dark. “Thank you. For everything.”
He dismissed it with a slight shake of his head. “We have a schedule. Eat first, then we talk.”
The ‘schedule’ was both absurd and deeply comforting. He had scrambled eggs and toast ready within minutes. They ate at the island in a silence that wasn’t heavy. It was observational. She felt him watching her, not with pity, but with the analytical focus of a mechanic who’d done an emergency repair and was now checking for leaks.
“How do you feel?” he finally asked as she finished her last bite.
She considered it. “Empty. But clean-empty. Not… haunted-empty. The noise is gone.”
“Good. That’s the baseline. We rebuild from there.” He cleared the plates with his usual efficiency. “We have two priorities today. One: you will call your psychiatrist’s answering service and schedule the earliest possible appointment for next week. Two: we address the thesis.”
The word ‘thesis’ didn’t trigger the usual avalanche of dread. It felt distant, a problem on a whiteboard. “I don’t know where to start. It’s all… disconnected.”
“Then we don’t start with the thesis. We start with the art.” He dried his hands on a dish towel. “You haven’t sketched in weeks, correct?”
She nodded, a flicker of shame passing through her. Her sketchbooks were buried under the chaos in her apartment.
“Art is your primary language. The dissertation is a translation. You’ve been trying to translate a blank page.” He walked into the living room and returned with a plain, bound notebook and a set of high-quality graphite pencils he must have bought that morning. He placed them in front of her. “Forget words. Forget arguments. For one hour, you will sit here and you will draw what ‘kintsugi’ feels like to you right now. Not what the textbooks say. Not what your proposal promised. What it is, in your body, today.”
She stared at the blank, creamy paper. The pressure to produce something profound was immense, but it was a different kind of pressure. It was a challenge, not a verdict. She picked up a pencil. The weight of it in her hand was both foreign and intimately familiar.
Levi took his own book and returned to the sofa, giving her space but not solitude.
The first mark was the hardest. She pressed the lead to the paper and drew a single, shaky line. It meant nothing. It was just a breach in the whiteness. Then another, intersecting it. She began to shade, not thinking, just letting her hand move. She drew a vessel, but it wasn’t a bowl. It was angular, jagged, like a shattered geode. The fractures weren’t neat cracks; they were chaotic, violent ruptures. Instead of gold lacquer, she started drawing roots. Delicate, filament-like roots creeping through the breaks, weaving the pieces together not with a shiny adhesive, but with something organic, tangled, and alive. It was messy. It was unstable. It was growing back together wrong, but it was growing.
She lost track of time. The only sounds were the soft scratch of her pencil, the turning of Levi’s page, and the hum of the city outside. When she finally looked up, her neck was stiff, and her hand was smudged with graphite. She had covered three pages.
Levi stood and approached. He looked over her shoulder at the sketchbook. He studied the dark, rooted vessel for a long time. “Explain it,” he said, not critically, but with genuine curiosity.
“It’s not about gold,” she said, her voice soft with the effort of articulation. “Gold is for finished things. For display. This… this is what happens in the dark, in the dirt, after the break. The repair isn’t beautiful. It’s desperate. It’s roots finding purchase in your own broken pieces. It’s ugly growth. It’s… living anyway.”
He was silent. Then he pointed to a particularly dark cluster of roots. “That’s the overdose.”
She flinched, but nodded. “Yes.”
He pointed to another, thinner, weeping line. “The club.”
Another nod.
His finger hovered over a dense, knotted core. “The ongoing fracture. The one the pills are for.”
Tears pricked her eyes, not from sadness, but from the sheer relief of being seen. He had decoded her visual language instantly. “Yes.”
“This,” he said, tapping the page, “is your thesis. Not a history of art. A methodology of survival. You’re not analyzing kintsugi. You’re performing a contemporary, biological version of it.” He finally looked at her. “The gold leaf in your original work wasn’t the repair. It was a mask. A celebration of a healing that hadn’t happened yet. This,” he gestured at the rooted, messy drawing, “is the real work. This is your argument.”
A weight she’d carried for months, years, slipped from her shoulders. He had given her chaos a name, a framework. It wasn’t pretty, but it was true.
“Now,” he said, his tone shifting back to the practical. “You will call your doctor. Then, you will write one paragraph. Just one. Describe this drawing. Use the words you just used to me. That is your new introduction.”
The task felt possible. She used his phone, made the call, secured an appointment for Tuesday afternoon. The act was simple, monumental.
She spent the afternoon on the paragraph, while Levi graded papers. The words came slowly, but they came. They weren’t elegant, but they were honest. She wrote about dark-rooted repair. She wrote about ugly growth.
As evening approached, he closed his laptop. “You should go back to your apartment tonight.”
Her heart sank. The safe, clean silence of his space had become a cocoon. The thought of her dark, disordered rooms was a visceral dread.
He read her expression. “It’s necessary. You cannot use my home as a permanent retreat. The work of reassembly has to happen in the place where you fell apart. Otherwise, the repair isn’t yours.” His voice softened a fraction. “But we will not do it all at once. We will go together. We will accomplish three specific tasks. That is all.”
They drove the short distance. Walking into her apartment was like stepping into a museum of her own collapse. The smell hit her first. Levi didn’t comment. He walked in, surveyed the battlefield, and assigned objectives like a tactician.
“Task one: perishables.” He went to the kitchen and began ruthlessly dumping moldy food from the fridge into a trash bag. “Task two: linens.” He stripped her bed, bundling the sheets. “Task three: one clear surface.”
He chose her small desk. Together, they cleared it of empty cups, crumpled paper, and art supplies. They wiped it down. He placed her new sketchbook and pencils squarely in the center. A tiny island of order in the sea of chaos.
“Enough,” he said, seeing her energy wane. “You have a clean bed to make, a clear space to work, and no biological hazards. The rest can wait for tomorrow, or the next day.”
He was leaving her there. She understood the logic, but the loneliness of it yawned before her.
At the door, he paused. “Take the sleep aid again tonight. Establish the rhythm. Tomorrow, at ten, we meet for coffee at The Grind. You will bring the sketchbook. We will look at what comes next. Not the end of the thesis. Just the next three tasks.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice small.
He met her eyes. His steel-grey gaze was intent, unwavering. “You navigated the fracture. You survived the reset. The rest is just work. And you are not doing it alone.”
He left, closing the door with a soft but definitive click.
Aria stood in the quiet of her newly partial order. The apartment still felt sad, but it no longer felt lethal. She made the bed with fresh sheets. She showered in her own bathroom. She took the small white pill with a glass of water.
Before she turned out the light, she opened the sketchbook to a fresh page. She didn’t draw. She wrote a single line, a promise to herself in the quiet dark.
The roots are growing.
The roots are growing. She repeated it like a mantra through Sunday and Monday, through the strange, flat calm the new medication provided. The psychiatrist’s appointment on Tuesday was a brisk, clinical affair. They discussed the chemical nosedive, the nightmares, the adjusted dosage. They scheduled a follow-up. It was all very procedural. She walked out with a new prescription, a slip of paper for a therapist, and a hollow sense of having completed a task.
The clarity was brittle. She could see her thesis now, the ugly, rooted vessel of it, but translating that vision into academic prose felt like trying to carve smoke. She sat at her clean desk Wednesday evening, the blank document on her screen accusing in its whiteness. The silence in her apartment, once a relief, began to thicken again. It wasn't the frantic static from before. This was different. A heavy, soupy quiet where every thought moved slowly, too weighted to form.
She looked at her forearms, at the tracery of faint, old silver lines from a different lifetime of pain. The memory of that ancient relief, a sharp, clear signal in the noise, whispered up from the past. The thought was a quiet, cold intrusion. It felt less like a desire and more like a simple, logical answer to the suffocating inertia. A way to feel something definite. A way to make the inside match the outside.
She didn't decide. Her body simply stood up and walked to the bathroom. The process was methodical, detached. She ran the hot water, steam fogging the mirror, hiding her reflection. She took the razor from the shower caddy. It was not a dramatic gesture. It was a mechanical one.
The first cut was a clean, bright line of pure sensation. It wasn’t happiness. It wasn’t sadness. It was a breathtaking, undeniable reality. A red bead welled up, then another, tracing a path down her skin. The second cut followed, parallel. The pressure in her chest, the vague, formless dread, suddenly had a location. It was here, on her skin, something she could see and understand.
Then the adrenaline hit. The detachment shattered.
The reality of the blood, the depth of the lines, the sheer physical fact of what she had just done crashed over her in a sickening wave. Panic, hot and acrid, flooded her mouth. She fumbled for a towel, pressing it to her arm. The white cotton bloomed crimson, a shock of color against the sterile white tile.
Her breathing came in ragged, useless hitches. She slid down the cabinet to the floor, cradling her wrapped arm, the warmth of the blood seeping through. She was scared. Profoundly, childishly scared. She needed the one person who had seen her broken pieces and hadn’t looked away.
Her phone was on the sink ledge. She grabbed it with her clean hand, her fingers slippery, and hit his name. It rang once, twice.
“Aria.” Levi’s voice was alert, clear of sleep.
“I-I need you…here please…hurry.” She whimpered out, the words breaking.
“What’s wrong?” She heard the jingle of keys, the sound of movement.
“I…I did something…I…I need you, please.” The confession was a sob.
“Okay, sweet girl. I’m coming. Just stay on the phone with me.” His voice was firm, anchoring, but she could hear the strain beneath it, the controlled breath of someone moving fast.
“O-okay.” She whispered, pressing the phone to her ear with her shoulder, holding the towel tighter. The red was spreading.
“Are you safe right now? Are you in your apartment?”
“Yes. Bathroom.”
“Is there a lot of blood?”
She looked at the towel. “Yes.”
“Are you applying pressure?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Keep it elevated. Above your heart.” His voice was all instruction, a lifeline of pure procedure. “I’m in the car. Five minutes. Don’t hang up. Just breathe with me.”
She could hear the engine roar, the shift of gears. She tried to match her breaths to his, steady and deliberate through the phone. The fear was a live wire in her chest. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Later,” he said, the word cutting through the guilt. “Just keep pressure on. Tell me about the rooted vessel. The one you drew.”
He was keeping her conscious, keeping her in the present. She tried to form the words. “It’s… messy. The roots are thin.”
“But they’re growing,” he stated, not asking.
“I thought they were,” she cried softly.
The sound of a car door slamming. “I’m downstairs. I have my key. I’m coming up.” The connection stayed open. She heard the distant thud of the building’s front door, then rapid footsteps in the hall. A key in her lock. More footsteps, nearing.
He appeared in the bathroom doorway, dressed in a dark t-shirt and jeans, his hair slightly disheveled. His eyes swept the scene—the steam, the razor on the edge of the sink, the bloody towel, her tear-streaked face pale with shock. His expression hardened into a mask of pure, furious focus.
He didn’t speak. He crossed the room in two strides, kneeling beside her. Gently but firmly, he took her wrist and lifted her arm, assessing the cuts through the soaked towel. His jaw was tight. “This needs stitches. Can you walk?”
She nodded, trembling violently. He helped her up, keeping her arm elevated. He guided her out of the bathroom, grabbing her coat from a chair with his free hand. “We’re going to the ER. No arguments.”
“I don’t want—”
“This isn’t about want,” he snapped, his control thinning for a second. He saw her flinch and his voice dropped, grim. “This is about necessity. Infection. Permanent damage. It stops now.”
He got her into the passenger seat of his car, reclining it slightly. He passed her a clean microfiber cloth from his glove compartment. “Switch to this. Keep pressure.” He took the bloody towel, wrapped it in a plastic bag from the floor, and threw it in the back.
The drive was silent except for her hiccupping breaths. He drove with lethal precision, one hand on the wheel, the other periodically reaching over to check the cloth. “Look at me,” he commanded. She turned her head. His profile was sharp in the passing streetlights. “You are not alone in this. Do you understand? However dark it gets, you pick up the phone. You do not do this.”
She started crying again, soundless tears of shame and overwhelming relief that he was here, taking over.
At the ER, his demeanor shifted into that of a commanding officer. He used terse, precise language with the triage nurse. “Intentional self-harm, multiple superficial lacerations to the forearms, approximately ten minutes old, significant bleeding.” He presented her insurance card he’d taken from her wallet. He was efficient, unemotional, a stark contrast to the chaotic bustling of the late-night emergency room.
They were taken to a curtained bay quickly. A young resident came in, introducing himself calmly. Levi stepped back but remained within her line of sight, a solid, silent sentinel against the beige curtain.
“Can you tell me what happened?” the resident asked, gloving up.
She glanced at Levi. He gave a single, barely perceptible nod. She looked at the floor. “I felt numb. I wanted to feel something real. I used a razor.”
The resident nodded, his face professionally neutral. “Okay. Let’s take a look.” He carefully removed the cloth. The wounds were clean but deep, oozing steadily. “You were right to come in. These definitely need to be closed.” He prepped a tray with suture kits, lidocaine, saline. “This will sting for a moment.”
The pinch of the local anesthetic was a new, clean pain. She watched, fascinated and horrified, as the doctor began the meticulous work of stitching her skin back together. Each tug of the thread was a physical echo of the internal rupture.
Levi watched, too. His arms were crossed, his face a studied blank. But she saw the pulse jumping in his temple, the rigid set of his shoulders. He was angry. Not at her, she realized with a sudden, quiet clarity, but at the situation, at the pain, at the relentless mechanics of despair.
When the last stitch was tied and bandaged, the doctor gave instructions for care, for watching for signs of infection. He handed Levi a pamphlet on crisis resources and a follow-up form. Levi took them without a word, tucking them into his jacket pocket.
Back in the car, the silence returned, deeper now, filled with the aftermath. He didn't start the engine immediately. He just stared through the windshield at the glowing hospital entrance.
“Why didn’t you call before?” His voice was low, raw.
“I didn’t plan it. It just… happened. And then I was scared.”
He took a deep, measured breath, turning to look at her. In the dim light, his grey eyes were exhausted. “The new medication. It’s flattening you out too much. You’re not feeling the lows, but you’re not feeling anything. That’s a different kind of danger. We’re calling the doctor in the morning.”
She nodded, too spent to argue.
“You’re not going back to your apartment tonight,” he stated. “You’re coming home with me. And tomorrow, we start again. Not from the beginning. From here.” He finally started the car. “From the stitches.”
He drove them back through the sleeping city. The roots were growing, she thought, looking at the white bandages glowing in the dark. But sometimes they tore through the soil in the wrong direction. Sometimes, you had to guide them back, even if it hurt. Even if it left scars.
Even if it left scars.
The sterile smell of the hospital lingered in Levi’s car, a ghost in the plush interior. He didn’t speak during the drive back to his apartment. His silence wasn’t cold. It was a held breath. Aria watched the streetlights slide over his knuckles, white where they gripped the wheel.Ten minutes.They climbed the stairs. The familiar click of his lock sounded like a period at the end of a horrific sentence.He guided her inside, his hand a brief, steadying pressure on her back.
“Sit,” he said, pointing to the sofa.
She sat.He went to the bathroom and returned with a fresh first-aid kit, more comprehensive than any home version had a right to be. He sat beside her, their knees not touching. “Let me see the official work.”
She held out her arm. He carefully peeled back the emergency room bandage, his movements exact.The neat black stitches stood out against her skin, a brutal railway track mapping a single, terrible decision. His jaw tightened. He cleaned the area anew with an antiseptic wipe, his touch impersonal and feather-light.He applied a clean, non-stick pad and wrapped it with a roll of gauze, securing it with a clip.
“The resident did acceptable work,” he stated, his voice flat. “Keep it clean and dry. I’ll change the dressing tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I do.” He cut her off, closing the first-aid kit with a definitive snap. “You have compromised your capacity for self-care. Temporarily. So it defaults.” He stood and walked to the kitchen, filling a glass with water.He came back and handed it to her along with the new, smaller white pill from the pharmacy. “It’s time.”
She swallowed it obediently.He took the glass back.
“You should sleep.”
“I’m not tired.” She was, but her mind was a reverberating chamber, echoing with the snick of the razor, the tear of the towel, the doctor’s calm voice.
“You don’t have to be tired. The medication will induce sleep. That’s its function.” He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture tired. “The goal tonight is unconsciousness. Analysis can wait for morning.”
She looked at the guest room door, then back at the sterile, familiar comfort of his sofa. “Can I stay out here? Just for a bit.”
He studied her, then nodded once. He retrieved a blanket from a linen closet, shook it out with a sharp snap, and draped it over her. He turned off the main light, leaving only a small lamp glowing in the corner. He sat in his armchair, picked up a book, and opened it. He didn’t read. He just held it, a prop in the quiet.
“You’re angry,” she whispered into the dimness.
He didn’t look up. “I am.”
“At me.”
“At the situation.” He finally met her eyes. The lamplight caught the grey, turning it molten. “At the inelegance of suffering. At the fact that the solutions are so fucking basic—check the dosage, make the call, keep living—and yet the disease convinces you they’re impossible. It’s an infuriating paradox.”
“I didn’t call before because I didn’t want to be a burden.” The admission was tiny.
“You became a bigger one.” The words were harsh, but his tone was matter-of-fact. “A few stitches and pride is a lighter load than finding you in a pool of blood. Basic arithmetic, Aria.”
The pill began to pull at her consciousness, dragging her down into a woolly silence. “Will you be here when I wake up?”
“Yes.”
Morning came with the smell of coffee and the soft scratch of a pen. Levi was at the kitchen island, filling out a form. Her follow-up psychiatric appointment was now circled in stark red ink on his wall calendar. He’d made a calendar for her. She watched from the sofa, the blanket tucked under her chin.
“You’re awake. Good.” He didn’t turn. “Your appointment is at three. I’ll drive you.”
She sat up. The bandage on her arm was stiff. “I can take the bus.”
“You could. You won’t.” He finally looked at her. “How’s the pain?”
“It’s there.” She shrugged. “It’s… specific. Which is better than the other thing.”
“The numbness.”
“Yes.”
He pushed a bowl of oatmeal across the island toward an empty stool. “Eat. Then we change the dressing.”
The day passed in a series of small, managed tasks. The dressing change. The drive to the doctor. The clinical conversation about "medication adjustment" and "therapeutic intervention." Levi sat in the waiting room, a dark, patient sentinel. He drove her back. He made chicken and rice for dinner. It was all fiercely practical.
On Saturday, he placed her sketchbook on the table. “We work.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.” He opened it to the page with the rooted vessel. “This is still true. The roots hit a rock. They diverted. Now they need to find a new path.” He tapped the paper. “So find it. Not with words. With this.”
She drew for an hour. She drew the stitches. She drew them as stark, black threads, but instead of sewing skin, they were lacing together two pieces of rough, dark wood. It wasn't pretty. It was carpentry. It was repair born of pure necessity.
He looked at it. “Good. That’s the next paragraph. The utility of stitches. The aesthetics come later.”
A week passed. The stitches came out, leaving raised, pink lines. Her medication was subtly adjusted again. The flat numbness receded, leaving a landscape of sharper, more manageable feelings. She moved back to her apartment, but their schedule held. Coffee at ten. Work sessions. He was constructing a scaffold around her, and she was clinging to it.
The symposium deadline loomed, a storm cloud on the horizon. She had a draft now, a raw, unflinching thing that spoke of roots and stitches and ugly growth. It was nothing like her original proposal. It was better. It was alive.
On a Tuesday evening, she was alone at her desk, refining a section on "The Aesthetics of Scar Tissue." The words were finally flowing. She felt a fragile sense of competence. Then she reached for a highlighter and knocked over her water glass.
It wasn't the spill. It was the way the water bled across the page, blurring the ink, The way it darkened the paper in a spreading, uncontrollable stain. It was the shock of cold on her lap. It was the sheer, stupid mundanity of it.
A memory detonated. The grimy club bathroom. The cracked mirror. The feel of cold, wet tile under her knees. The scent of stale beer and terror. The gold flecks on her hands, mixing with the water, swirling down the drain. The overwhelming aloneness.
It wasn't a thought. It was a physical recurrence. Her chest locked. The air turned to syrup. The four walls of her apartment leaned in, the silence amplifying into a roar. She couldn’t breathe. She was back there, on that floor, drowning in the aftermath of a violence she still didn’t understand.
She fumbled for her phone. Her vision blurred, tunneling. She found his name and pressed it.
It rang.
And rang.
A sob broke from her throat. He wasn’t answering. The scaffold was gone. She was sliding back into the ditch.
On the fourth ring, he picked up. “Aria?” His voice was slightly winded.
The sound of it unleashed the panic completely. She couldn’t form words, just ragged, wet gasps that scraped her throat raw.
“Aria. Breathe. Where are you?” His voice was suddenly clear, sharp, all background noise gone.
“H-home. I c-can’t— It’s— The club, the water, I—” The sentences shattered.
“I’m on my way. Right now. I’m leaving the gym. Seven minutes.” She heard the muffled sound of a door, then the jog of footsteps. “Are you safe? Are you in your apartment?”
“Y-yes.”
“Is anyone else there?”
“N-no.”
“Okay. Listen to me. You are having a trauma response. It’s a memory. It is not happening now. Do you see the water? The glass?”
She looked at the spilled water, the ruined page. “Y-yes.”
“Is it blood?”
“N-no. Water.”
“Good. It’s just water. You spilled a glass. That’s all the data is. Keep your eyes on it. I am coming. Keep the line open.”
She heard his car door, the engine snarling to life. She clutched the phone to her ear, curled in her desk chair, watching the water drip onto the floor. Each drop was a tick of a clock. She matched her ragged breaths to them.
Five minutes later, she heard his key in the lock. He appeared in the doorway of her room, dressed in gym shorts and a damp t-shirt, his hair tousled. He took in the scene—the spilled glass, the weeping paper, her convulsing form—in a microsecond.
He didn’t go to her immediately. He walked to the kitchen, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and returned. He knelt and methodically sopped up the water from the desk and the floor. He blotted the ruined page. He set the glass upright. He disposed of the wet paper towels.
Then, and only then, did he crouch in front of her chair. He didn’t touch her. “Look at me.”
She dragged her eyes up to his. They were clear, present, anchored in this room.
“The club is not here,” he said slowly, each word a stone placed firmly on the ground. “I am here. The water is cleaned up. Your dissertation is on your screen, not on that paper. You are safe.”
A violent shudder went through her. The wave of panic began to recede, leaving her trembling and hollowed out. “I’m sorry,” she choked. “It just… came back.”
“It does that.” He finally reached out, his hands resting lightly on her knees, a grounding weight. “The triggers are idiotic. A smell. A texture. A spill. It doesn’t matter. When it happens, you call. That is the protocol. You did the right thing.”
“You didn’t answer right away.”
“I was running stairs. My phone was across the room.” He stated it simply. “I will always answer. If I don’t pick up immediately, I am moving toward the phone. That is a guarantee.”
The absolute conviction in his voice was the final anchor. The last of the tremors subsided. Exhaustion swept in, vast and deep.
“The thesis is done,” she whispered.
He glanced at the screen, his eyes skimming the lines. He read for a full minute in silence. He looked back at her, and something in his severe expression shifted, warmed by a degree. “Yes. It is.”
“I’m scared to submit it.”
“Naturally. You’ve just put your entrails on a page and called it scholarship.” A faint, dry flicker of a smile touched his lips. “It’s exceptional. Now send it before you can think about it again.”
He stood, offering her a hand. “Come on. You’re done here tonight. I’ll make tea. You’ll hit send. Then you’ll sleep.”
She took his hand, her fingers cold in his warm, sure grip. The roots had hit a rock. They’d diverted. But they were still growing, tracing a fragile, stubborn path through the dark.