Chapter 22
Jul 18, 2025
The beeping of the monitor was the only sound in the room. Soft. Steady. Too calm for what it was tracking. Chase sat upright in the hospital bed, eyes trained on the wall like it had answers. His wrist—bandaged. His expression—unreadable. The nurses had just left, and the silence they left behind was sharp enough to cut.
I didn’t know where to stand, so I didn’t move. Just watched him like I might break the moment by breathing wrong. He hadn’t spoken since I walked in. Hadn’t looked at me either. Like if he did, everything would collapse in on itself.
“I’m not here to fix you,” I said finally. “I just… didn’t want you to feel like you had to do this alone.”
He blinked once. No reaction. Not even a twitch of his mouth. The silence between us buzzed like an exposed wire.
“Say something. Please.”
He shifted, like the weight of the sheets suddenly became unbearable. His voice, when it came, was quiet. Fractured.
“Again, Zoey, you shouldn’t have come.”
I swallowed. “That’s not fair.”
He laughed, but it sounded more like a cough. “Nothing about this is fair.”
The silence stretched again, but it was different now. Thicker. Like we were standing on top of something unstable, and one wrong word might shatter it all.
Then he finally looked at me. Really looked. Eyes hollowed out by something darker than sadness. “I never told anyone,” he said. “Not even you.”
My breath caught. “Told me what?”
He stared at his lap. “About Eli.”
I took a slow step closer.
“He was my brother. Older by two years. Brilliant. Impossible. Everything I wasn’t.”
I nodded, barely moving. I didn’t trust myself to speak.
“He always got into trouble. Not serious stuff. But enough to keep my parents exhausted.” His voice broke around the edges. “I was the good one. The golden one. Until the night that flipped everything.”
My hands curled at my sides. “What happened?”
He inhaled like he didn’t want to answer, then said it anyway. “There was a party. Junior year. Someone brought pills. I was stupid. High. Sloppy. I drove home. Crashed my mom’s car into a mailbox. Nothing major, but cops came.” He paused. “I would’ve lost my license. My scholarship. Everything.”
My pulse raced. “So what did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. Eli did.” His voice cracked. “He told the cops it was him. Said he stole the car. That he’d been drinking. I was too wrecked to stop him.”
He leaned back against the pillow like the memory weighed a thousand pounds.
“They arrested him. Charged him as an adult because of some prior warnings. My parents tried to fight it, but it moved fast. He got sent to juvie.”
I swallowed hard, but the knot in my throat didn’t budge. “And?”
“He didn’t make it six months.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Some fight over food. A chair. I don’t know. They told us he died in the infirmary.”
Everything in me recoiled. “Oh my god.”
Chase looked like he wanted to vanish. “My parents spun the story. Said Eli had been spiraling for years. That it was only a matter of time. No one knew the truth. Not even his friends.”
I moved closer, until I was right beside the bed. “You’ve been carrying that alone?”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t think I’ve been carrying it. I think I let it crush me.”
I sat in the chair beside him. Close enough to touch, but I didn’t reach. “You’re not a murderer, Chase.”
His eyes flashed. “Aren’t I?”
“No.”
“He’s dead because of me.”
“He made a choice. A terrible one, yeah. But a choice. You didn’t ask him to do it.”
“I didn’t stop him either.”
His voice broke completely on the last word. Like saying it shattered something in his chest. I saw the boy beneath the bravado, the pain hidden under every smirk and shrug. The kind of pain you don’t survive alone.
“I think about it every night,” he whispered. “Every single night. What if I had said something? What if I had confessed? Would he still be—”
I reached out, fingers brushing his wrist gently. “You can’t live in the what-ifs.”
He looked at our hands. “I think I deserve to.”
Tears stung behind my eyes, but I blinked them back. “I wish I could say something to make this better.”
“There’s nothing.”
“Then I’ll just be here while it hurts.”
We sat like that for a moment. The monitor kept beeping, steady and cruel. His breaths were uneven. Mine weren’t much better.
“I’m the reason he’s gone,” he said again, quieter now. “And I can’t take that back.”
My voice shook as I answered. “You don’t have to take it back. You have to live with it. That might be worse.”
