POV: Jasmine
Nora let herself in.
I heard the front door, then the small low conversation she had with the nanny, then her steps in the hall. She did not knock. The door opened. The light from the hallway crossed the bed.
She came in. She closed the door behind her. She sat down on the edge of the mattress. I did not turn over.
She put her hand on my back. "Jas."
I managed a sound. "Mm."
Her voice shifted into the careful, even tone she used when she was about to ask questions she already knew the answers to. "Have you eaten today?"
"No," I said, and the word came out of me like something scraped off the bottom of a drawer that had been emptied days ago.
"Have you had water?" She asked it the way a doctor asked it — not because she did not know the answer, but because she needed me to hear myself give it.
I stared at the wall. "I do not know." The honest answer was worse than no. No meant I had chosen. I do not know meant the choosing part of me had left the building.
"Have you been out of this bed since this morning?" Nora's voice was steady, but I could hear the thing underneath it — the careful scaffolding she had built around the question to keep it from sounding like what it actually was, which was: are you still in there.
"No," I said again. The word arrived flat and dead in the room, and I listened to it land the way you listened to a coin hit the bottom of a well that was deeper than you thought it was.
She let her hand rest on my hip through the duvet. Her hand was warm. Liam's hand was warm at the start. His hand cooled. Hers will cool too. Everyone's does.
She waited a beat. "Tell me what you need."
I pressed my face deeper into the pillow. "Nothing. I do not have a list. I do not have a request. I do not have anything for you. I am sorry."
She was quiet for a beat.
"Okay," she said, and her voice got firmer. "Then I am going to be the one with the list. Jasmine. You have to get up. Aurora needs her mother present. She told me at the door that she has not had a hug from you today. She told me she did not get one yesterday, either. She is four. She has had a week that would break a grown adult."
"Nora," I said. "Stop."
She did not stop. "I am not stopping."
"Stop," I said, and my voice cracked. "Please."
"Jas, you have to —"
"I do not have to do anything." I heard the voice come out of me, and it was not a voice I would have used on a friend. "I do not have to get up. I do not have to be present. I do not have to listen to you tell me what my child needs in my apartment when my fiancé just died on a road in Italy four pews from his father. So stop."
Her hand on my hip did not move.
"Jas," she said quietly. "You need a therapist."
I shook my head into the pillow. "No."
She pressed on. "You are not getting out of this bed. You will not eat. You snapped at your daughter. You are running on the same fuel that broke Leo for years."
"Do not compare me to my brother," I said, and felt the words land like a slap I had thrown across the room.
"I am not comparing you to him," Nora said. "I am telling you what I am watching."
I rolled away from her. "Get out of my bedroom, Nora."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she stood.
She walked to the door. She paused with her hand on it.
"I love you," she said. "And I am going home. And I will come back tomorrow."
She closed the door behind her.
I lay there with my face toward the wall. The shame rose up under the nothing and joined it, and I had been wrong before — there was room underneath the nothing for more shame. There had always been more room.
The front door opened and closed maybe thirty minutes later.
I heard Aurora's footsteps in the hall, and then her voice, not the contained one she had used all day, the loud one.
"Uncle Asher. Uncle Finn." She was at the door, full volume, reporting. "Mama was in bed all day. She did not hug me. She did not have breakfast with me. She did not play. She was rude to Auntie Nora and Auntie Nora went home and now Auntie Nora is sad too."
I had come out of the room without deciding to. I was in the hallway, three steps in, arms crossed across my stomach.
They had not seen me yet. She was reporting to them with the full, calm seriousness of a small witness who had decided that the adults needed to know.
Asher knelt down to her level. "That sounds like a long day, baby."
Aurora nodded, grave. "It was."
He put his good hand on her shoulder. "I came to watch cartoons with you. Specifically with you. Can you find me the right blanket? The one with the stars on it."
She turned. She saw me in the hallway.
She did not run to me. She gave me one careful look — not hurt, not angry, but watching the way she had watched the doctor in the corridor — and then she went into the living room with Asher behind her, his hand on the back of her head.
He did not look at me as he passed. He had read the corridor. He had decided to be the one who took her.
Finn stayed.
He shut the front door. He took his coat off. He hung it on the hook the way he had hung it on that hook for years now.
He came down the hall toward me, the way a person walked toward a horse that had not yet decided whether it was going to bolt.
He stopped a step away.
"Hi," he said, quiet.
"Don't." I held my arms tighter across my stomach. "Don't be careful with me. I cannot stand it."
He did not move. "Jas."
"You are not Liam," I said, and the words came out before I could choose lighter ones. "Stop trying to be. You walk in here and you make her ponytails and you sleep on my couch and you put your hand on my shoulder and you are not him. So stop."
The words landed.
I watched them land in his face. He did not flinch. He took the hit clean, the way he had taken the news in the corridor. I had not meant to throw a thing that heavy. The energy required to choose lighter ones was still not in me.
He did not leave.
He looked at the floor. Then he looked at me again.
"You're right," he said. "I'm not. I am not trying to be. He was my brother."
I gripped my own arms. "Finn —"
"Listen," he said, and his voice had a new edge to it, something I had not heard from him before. "I will tell you what I am doing here. I am here because there is a child in your living room who has lost her father and is now afraid of losing her mother. That is the only sentence I have. You can throw me out for it. I am asking you to come back."
I did not say anything.
He was breathing harder. He was angry. Good.
"You are doing to her," he said, quietly, "what your mother did to you and Leo. I have heard you say it. You said you would never do it. You are doing it."
The words went all the way in.
I heard, for the first time all day, the loop in my head break.
Aurora at the door telling them I had not hugged her. Aurora on the kitchen tile picking up scattered toys. Aurora climbing onto the bed at sunrise with the rabbit under her arm. Aurora careful with the volume of the apartment at four years old.
I put my hand over my mouth.
Finn did not move toward me. He did not touch me. He waited.
"Fine," I said into my hand. "Fine. I will go to a therapist."