Chapter 23: The Walk Away
The door clicked shut behind her with a finality that echoed in her bones. She walked. The corridor was a tunnel of fluorescent light and muted blue, her heels striking the polished tiles with a rhythm that felt both frantic and hollow. She passed a nursing station, a cart of linens, a man in a gown staring blankly at a wall-mounted television. She saw none of it.
His voice—cracked, desperate—followed her. ‘Dasha, please.’ It ghosted through the door, a whisper she felt more than heard. She didn’t stop. She couldn’t.
The automatic doors at the main entrance hissed open, releasing her into the damp, grey afternoon. The air was cool, thick with the promise of rain and the distant grumble of city traffic. She made it ten paces across the concrete plaza before her legs gave out.
Not a graceful collapse. A crumble. She stumbled to the side, her shoulder connecting with the rough, cold brick of the exterior wall. She slid down it, her tailored coat scraping against the surface, until she was crouched on the pavement, knees to her chest. The first sob was a silent, wrenching thing that locked her diaphragm. The second tore through her with a gasp, ugly and loud.
She cried like she was being dismantled. All the composure, the efficiency, the dry wit—it all dissolved into saltwater and shuddering breaths. She cried for the fear of a blue line that never appeared, for the humiliation of being unseen, for the profound, stupid hope she’d nursed in secret. She cried for the man broken in the bed inside, who’d broken her first.
Time blurred. The cold from the concrete seeped through her trousers. A pigeon cooed from a nearby ledge.
“Well,” a familiar voice said, calm and low. “That doesn’t look like the ‘all sorted’ face.”
Elliot, Matt’s driver, lowered himself to the pavement beside her with a slight grunt. He didn’t look at her, instead focusing on lighting a cigarette he’d pulled from behind his ear. He was in his late fifties, built like a retired boxer, with a face that had seen everything twice.
Dasha couldn’t speak. She hugged her knees tighter, trying to stifle the hiccupping breaths.
He took a long drag, exhaling smoke that was quickly shredded by the breeze. “Heard the shouting,” he said conversationally. “All the way from the car park. Impressive lung capacity, the pair of you.”
“Go away, Elliot,” she managed, her voice wet and shattered.
“Nah,” he said. “This is my favorite smoking spot. You’re in my booth.”
A weak, involuntary laugh hiccupped out of her, morphing halfway into another sob. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, a profoundly un-Dasha-like gesture.
He offered the cigarette. She shook her head. He shrugged, took another pull.
“He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” Elliot said, not unkindly.
“You have no idea.”
“I’ve been driving him for eight years. I have some idea.” He tapped ash onto the ground. “Seen a parade of people come and go. Managers, publicists, girlfriends of the month. You lasted longer than most. Hit him harder, too.”
She rested her forehead on her knees. “It doesn’t matter. I quit.”
“Yeah, I got the memo. Munich.” He said the word like it was a dubious culinary ingredient. “You like it there?”
“It’s… orderly.”
“Sounds thrilling.” He paused. “He fired Chloe, you know. The one from the couch. Day after you left. Told her it was ‘professionally inappropriate.’ Paid her out her contract. She was furious.”
Dasha lifted her head. That was a new, sharp piece of data. It changed nothing, and yet it shifted something inside her, a heavy, locked door groaning on its hinge.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because,” Elliot said, stubbing out the cigarette carefully on the sole of his shoe before pocketing the filter, “you’re sitting on wet concrete crying over a man you just quit. Seems like you might be missing some key intel.”
“The intel is that he’s a selfish, emotionally stunted idiot who uses people as props.”
“Correct,” Elliot agreed cheerfully. “Also brilliant, funny when he’s not being a bastard, and pathetically in love with you.”
The world screeched to a halt. The traffic noise faded. The words hung between them, simple and devastating.
“He doesn’t know how to do it,” Elliot continued, standing up and brushing off his trousers. “He’s spent his whole life pretending to feel things for a camera. Real feeling terrifies him. So he does stupid, destructive shit. Reads stupid notebooks. Stages stupid scenes with stupid girls.” He looked down at her, his expression gruff but not unkind. “It’s the logic of a panicked animal. Not an excuse. Just… intel.”
He fished his keys from his pocket. “I’m going to get the car warm. You look frozen.” He began to walk away, then stopped. “When he read that notebook… he didn’t sleep for two days. Just sat in that big, empty house. He called me once, middle of the night, asked if I thought you were scared of him. I told him he was being a drama queen. But he wasn’t. He was just… lost.”
Elliot walked towards the parking garage, leaving her alone with the brick and the cold and the seismic shift in her understanding.
Pathetically in love with you.
It didn’t fix the hurt. It didn’t erase the fear or the invisibility. But it cast every stupid, cruel thing in a different, more tragic light. The performance with Chloe. His clumsy, violating attempt to reach her. The wreck on the autobahn—was that just another, more final piece of destructive panic?
She pushed herself up, her muscles stiff and protesting. The tears had stopped. Her face felt tight and raw. She looked at the hospital’s sliding doors, a gaping maw leading back to the sterile heart of the mess.
She thought of Munich. Her orderly, quiet sublet. The lavender scent in the sheets that didn’t smell like him. The profound safety of being no one’s problem.
Then she thought of the hollow, ruined look in his eyes when she’d said ‘The assistant is no longer required.’
Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. A single, incoming email. The flight confirmation for tomorrow. Munich. 10:15 AM.
She stood there for a long minute, the damp cold wrapping around her ankles. A light rain began to fall, a fine mist that beaded on her wool sleeves.
Then, slowly, she turned her back on the parking garage, on Elliot and the warm car, and walked toward the sliding doors. Her heels clicked, once more, on the clean, hard floor. But the rhythm was different now. Not a retreat. A decision.
She didn’t know what she would say. She didn’t know if there was anything left to say. But the intel had changed. And Dasha Waldorf never made a final move without all the available data.
The hospital air felt thicker the second time, warmer, heavy with recirculated breath and lemon-scented cleaner. Her heels, which had echoed with finality minutes before, now made softer, more uncertain sounds on the tile. She stopped just before the bend leading to Room 407, her body thrumming with a static of fear and a terrible, clawing hope.
Pathetically in love with you.
Elliot’s words were a key turning in a lock she’d thought welded shut. They didn’t erase the two weeks of silence, the visceral panic of a missed period, the sight of Chloe’s laugh in his living room. But they framed it, turning a narrative of casual cruelty into one of staggering, self-sabotaging incompetence. He was an idiot. A lost, panicked animal. The intel was critical.
She leaned against the cool wall, pulling out her phone. The screen was blurry from her earlier tears. She opened the airline app, found the booking, and tapped through the prompts without letting herself think. A confirmation screen appeared. Your flight to Munich has been cancelled. A refund will be processed to your original payment method.
A simple, digital click. It felt less like a decision and more like a surrender to gravity.
She put the phone away. The weight of the Munich sublet, the lavender sheets, the orderly silence, all lifted. It left her terrifyingly light. Now there was only this corridor, this door, and what lay behind it. She walked the final steps.
Room 407 was quiet. He was turned toward the window, his silhouette a tense line under the thin hospital blanket. The monitor beeped its steady, meaningless rhythm. He didn’t move as she entered, but she saw the muscle in his jaw tighten. He’d heard her.
“You came back.” His voice was scraped raw from shouting, from everything.
“I cancelled the flight.” She said it plainly, staying near the door, a hand on the frame.
He turned his head slowly on the pillow. His eyes were red-rimmed, the bruise a spectacular, ugly map of his mistake. He looked wrecked. He looked young. “Why?”
“New data.” She took a tentative step into the room. The ghost of her perfume from before was gone, overtaken by antiseptic and sweat. “Elliot… provided context.”
Matt flinched, closing his eyes. “He shouldn’t have.”
“He should have.” Dasha’s own voice gained strength. “Because I was operating on a flawed premise. I thought you were just an asshole. It’s simpler that way.”
He opened his eyes, a bitter smirk touching his mouth. “I am an asshole.”
“Yes. But you’re a specific kind of asshole.” She moved closer, now at the foot of his bed. She didn’t touch it. “The kind who stages a pathetic scene with an available woman because he read a private thought he wasn’t meant to see and had no functional way to process it.”
He stared at her, his defiance crumbling. “It sounds so stupid when you say it like that.”
“It is stupid. It’s phenomenally stupid.” She hugged her arms around herself. “The pregnancy scare… you really didn’t know?”
“I would have noticed,” he whispered, the words thick. “I notice everything about you. The way you organize my script pages by the color of your paperclips. How you breathe when you’re concentrating. The exact pitch of your sigh when I’m being particularly difficult.” He swallowed hard. “But for those two weeks… I was trying not to notice. Because what I read… it scared the hell out of me.”
“You read that I had feelings. That’s not a capital offense.”
“It is when you’re me!” The words burst out, quiet but fierce. “When your whole life is negotiating fictional feelings. Real ones… they’re a liability. They’re a vulnerability you can’t control. So I tried to prove I didn’t care. To you. To myself. The performance was for me, Dasha. To convince me I was still in charge.”
The hum of the monitor filled the silence. She could see the pulse jumping in his throat.
“Did it work?” she asked finally.
A single tear escaped, tracking through the stubble on his cheek. He didn’t wipe it away. “What do you think?”
She took the last steps to the side of his bed. She looked down at his hand, the one without the IV, resting palm-up on the sheet. It was a beautiful hand, now scraped and bruised. She remembered the feel of it.
“The crash,” she said.
He let out a shaky breath. “I don’t remember much. Just the feeling of… letting go. Of the wheel, of everything. It felt like a solution.” He looked up at her, his gaze unbearably direct. “Then I woke up here. And you weren’t here. And it wasn’t a solution at all. It was just the next, worst mistake.”
Dasha slowly, carefully, lowered herself to sit on the edge of the mattress. The plastic cover crinkled under her weight. She reached out and placed her hand over his. His skin was warm. His fingers trembled, then curled, gripping hers with a sudden, desperate strength.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, the words choked. “For the scare. For Chloe. For the notebook. For being a coward. For every single second I made you feel invisible. I’m so sorry I broke us.”
She nodded, accepting the words, feeling them settle. They didn’t fix it. But they were a start. “You broke the car, too. It’s totaled.”
A wet, ragged laugh escaped him. He squeezed her hand tighter. “Priorities.”
“Always.” She looked at their joined hands, then back at his face. “We have to talk about the notebook. All of it. And we have to talk about what happens when you’re discharged. And we have to… learn a new way to be.”
“I don’t know how,” he admitted, the confession seeming to cost him.
“I’ll schedule it,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “We’ll figure it out.”
He brought her hand to his lips, pressing his forehead against her knuckles. His shoulders shook silently. She leaned forward, resting her other hand on his chest, feeling the solid, living beat of his heart under the rough hospital gown. They stayed like that for a long time, in the quiet, beeping room, holding the broken pieces together between them.