Page 79 of Breakaway Daddies

The cold creeps in through the seams of my hoodie, through my jeans, up my spine. I let it. Maybe if I get cold enough, numb enough, I won’t feel this anymore.

Maybe my body will forget what it’s like to reach for someone who isn’t reaching back.

My chest squeezes so tight I can barely breathe.

Because the thing is, it’s not just missing her.

It’s that this pain, this hollow, echoing space where she was, it feels like home now. Like a second skin I didn’t ask for but can’t shed. Like I carry her absence the way I used to carry her, close, careful, constant.

I lean back, the chill soaking into my bones, and close my eyes.

Not praying. Not hoping.

Just waiting.

Waiting for Thomas and Rowan to head out, so I can sneak back in without more words that’ll shatter something already cracked. Waiting for the noise in my head to quiet. Waiting forsomethingto feel right again.

Waiting for her, even if I know she’s not coming.

The locker room’s mostly empty by the time I finally drag myself back inside.

The lights are too bright, humming like they’re aware of the tension in the air. My footsteps echo on the tile like I’m walking into something sacred and broken all at once.

The showers are still on. Steam clings to the corners of the ceiling, thick and ghostlike, and somewhere behind the frosted glass stalls, I hear voices, quiet, low, like confessions pressed between teeth.

Rowan and Thomas.

I don’t mean to eavesdrop. I don’t move closer, don’t lean in. But their words carry, bouncing off tile and stainless steel, and before I can stop it, they’re in my chest.

“…don’t think she’s okay.”

“She’s not okay, but what are we supposed to do if she won’t let us in?”

“I don’t know. I just… I miss her.”

That one hits the hardest.

Miss her.

Like it’s that simple. Like it’s not this bleeding thing inside me that won’t clot. Like it’s not waking up every morning and reaching for someone who isn’t there, feeling phantom touches, hearing phantom laughter.

Missing her doesn’t even come close.

Then Rowan, voice stripped bare:

“Feels like we had her. And then we didn’t. Just like that.”

Thatiswhat it feels like. A door slammed shut between breaths.

One moment, her smile. The next, silence. And none of us have figured out how to pry that door back open without hurting her all over again.

I hear them still, words and water and footsteps, but I tune them out.

Not because I don’t care. Because I care too fucking much.

I can’t keep doing this thing where I treat every fragment of a sentence like it’s a lifeline. Can’t keep riding the sharp edge of “maybe she’ll come back,” and “maybe she won’t,” and “maybe we broke something that was never ours to hold in the first place.”

I’m worn down to the marrow.

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