Chapter 3: The Deep End
The second year was a study in contrasts.
On Sen’s end, it was a vibrant, sun-drenched collage. His texts were still frequent, but they were now studded with a new pronoun: “we.”
We aced the practical.
We’re grabbing boba after lab.
We found this insane taco truck.
“We” was Sen and Gabby. Officially, for four months now. The announcement had come through not as a grand proclamation, but as a casual, happy aside during a weekly video call.
“So, yeah, it’s a thing,” he’d said, rubbing the back of his neck with a shy grin that was equal parts thrilled and disbelieving. “Gabby and me. It’s… it’s really good, Aud.”
Audrey had nodded, her own smile so wide it made her cheeks ache. “That’s amazing, Sen. Really. I’m so happy for you.” The words had tasted like aluminum.
And she was happy for him. That part was true, a clean, sharp truth that lived in the rational part of her brain. He deserved sunlight. He deserved someone smart and present who could make him grin like that. Her love for him, in its purest form, wanted his happiness above all else.
The problem was the other part. The part that wasn’t rational. The part that was just a raw, animal wound. That part wasn’t happy for herself. And the guilt that followed—the furious, shameful guilt for being upset when she had no right, when she’d never spoken her claim—was a poison that worked faster than the heartbreak.
The calls continued. She became an expert. She learned to match his light tone, to ask the right questions about Gabby (“How’s her research project going?”), to laugh at his stories where Gabby was the co-star. She perfected the art of the supportive, disembodied voice from three time zones away. She was the best friend. She was the ghost.
But after each call, the silence in her room was different. It was no longer a waiting silence. It was a verdict. He had moved on. Clearly, concretely, joyfully. The dream of the oak tree was now a taunting artifact, a illustration of a path that had permanently closed. The phantom weight of him in her lap was just a neurological misfire, a stubborn memory her body refused to erase.
The thoughts, once a dull seep, became a torrent.
You didn’t tell him. You don’t deserve him. You’re a mess. This is your fault. This is what you get for wanting something you had no right to. He’s happy now. Your happiness is irrelevant. You are irrelevant.
She understood, with a grim, total clarity, the feeling he’d described years ago—that feeling of being the problem. That corrosive certainty that the fault lived in your own marrow. He’d been beaten to that conclusion by external rejections. She was building hers from the inside, brick by jealous, guilty brick.
The hyperfocus on him, on the loss of him, became a kind of mental prison. The only way out was to stop loving him. But you couldn’t just stop. Love wasn’t a faucet. It was a weed with roots tangled around every good memory, every instinct, every hope she’d ever had. To kill it would be to tear herself apart.
But maybe that was the point.
Maybe you could overwhelm one pain with another, more immediate one.
It started after a particularly easy, laughing call. Sen had been recounting a disastrous attempt by Gabby to cook dinner, something involving smoked paprika and a small, contained fire. Audrey had laughed until she cried. After hanging up, she sat on the edge of her bed, the echo of her own laughter still in the room, and felt absolutely nothing. A complete, howling void.
Her eyes landed on her desk. On a utility blade, its retractable steel edge, lying next to a half-opened package of photo paper. It was just a tool. Practical. Sharp.
She picked it up. The metal was cool. She pressed the pad of her thumb against the very tip. A pinpoint of pressure. A promise.
A single, swift slice, just below her hip bone, where no one would see.
The pain was a white-hot, shocking line. It was supremely, agonizingly present. It drowned out the psychic noise instantly. For those few seconds, there was no Sen, no Gabby, no future, no past. There was only the brilliant, clarifying signal of physical hurt. And then, as it faded to a throbbing ache, a strange, empty calm.
It was a reset button.
The next time she saw a photo he’d texted—of the two of them at some campus picnic, Gabby leaning into his shoulder—the jealous ache rose, thick and nauseating. She didn’t cry. She went to the bathroom, locked the door, and drew the blade once, twice, across her thigh. The pain was a scouring pad on her thoughts. Afterward, wiping the beads of blood with a cold, damp cloth, she felt clean. Punished. Quiet.
It became a logic. A twisted, flawless math.
Thought of him = pain.
Inflict a different, controllable pain = silence.
Therefore, the blade was necessary. It was a tool for forgetting. For management. She wasn’t suicidal. She was surgical. She was carving the obsession out of herself, strip by tiny strip.
She was always careful. Shallow, parallel lines. Always in places hidden by underwear, by shorts. She kept the blade clean with isopropyl alcohol from her first-aid kit. She used antibiotic ointment. It was a routine, as meticulous as her photography edits.
One Tuesday evening, her phone rang. Sen’s face filled the screen. She took a breath, the fresh, stinging lines on her outer thigh a grounding presence beneath her jeans. She answered.
“Hey, you. What’s up?”
“Not much. Gabby’s at the library, I’m procrastinating. Tell me something interesting. What does the world look like there today?”
She walked to her window, describing the twilight, the way the streetlights made halos in the damp autumn air. She told him about a stray cat she’d been trying to photograph for weeks. Her voice was light. Easy.
“You sound good,” he said, a note of relief in his voice. “The last few times we talked, you seemed kinda… far away.”
The observation was a tiny detonation. He’d noticed. He was three thousand miles away, building a new life, and he’d still noticed a faint dimming in her voice.
“Just tired,” she said, the lie smooth. “Work, classes. The usual. But I’m good. Really.”
“Okay. Just… you’d tell me if you weren’t, right?”
“Of course,” she said, and it was the easiest thing she’d ever said because it was so utterly false. “Hey, did you ever figure out that differential equation set?”
He launched into a technical explanation, his voice brightening. She listened, nodding, tracing a finger over the seam of her jeans, directly over the hidden, tender lines beneath. The physical sensation anchored her, kept her voice steady and warm.
They hung up. The silence returned.
She didn’t reach for the blade this time. She just stood at the window, watching the cat slink through the shadows. The calm from earlier was gone, replaced by a cold, metallic understanding. This was her life now. This was the equilibrium. His happiness on one side of the country. Her meticulous, private management of the fallout on the other. A friendship sustained by her careful performance, and a pain contained by her secret, precise violence.
It was sustainable. It had to be. It was all she had.
She applied concealer to the faint, shadowy circles under her eyes the next morning, her movements practiced. She picked out a long-sleeved shirt, even though the day was mild. She looked in the mirror and saw a girl who was fine. A little tired, but fine. She believed it, because the alternative was unthinkable. The chapter of wanting was over. This was the chapter of coping. And she was getting better at it every day.