Page 45 of Mine to Fear
“You be patient. You’re consistent. You show her through your actions that you’re not going anywhere, even when she’s pushing you away.”
But patience was a luxury I wasn’t sure we could afford. Every day she retreated further, every meal she skipped, every night I heard her pacing her room instead of sleeping, I felt like I was losing her by degrees.
The breaking point came the previous evening, when I found her standing on the balcony in the rain.
She was wearing nothing but a thin nightgown, her hair soaked and plastered to her head, staring out at the city like she was trying to memorize it. Or like she was saying goodbye.
“Willa.” I stepped outside, immediately soaked by the October downpour. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking,” she said without turning around.
“You’re going to catch pneumonia.”
“Would that matter?”
The casual way she said it, like her life was something disposable, sent ice through my veins. “It would matter to me.”
“Why?” She finally turned to face me, rainwater streaming down her face like tears. “Why would it matter to you if one more person disappeared from your life? You’ve survived it before. You’d survive it again.”
“Because I love you.”
“Love,” she said the word like it tasted bitter. “What good is love when everyone you love ends up dead or gone? What’s the point of caring about someone when caring just means you’ll eventually have to watch them leave?”
“The point is that the alternative is worse.”
“Is it? Because right now, loving people feels like the most dangerous thing I could do.”
I stepped closer to her, rain soaking through my clothes, desperate to reach her somehow. “Jude died doing what he believed in. He died protecting people who couldn’t protect themselves. That doesn’t make loving him a mistake.”
“Doesn’t it? He protected me his entire life. The moment I moved out, got married, and didn’t need him anymore, he enlisted. Like taking care of me was the only thing keeping him here.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can’t know anything. That’s the problem.” She wiped rain from her face with shaking hands. “I can’t know if you’re going to wake up tomorrow and decide this is too hard. I can’t know if caring about you is just setting myself up for another phone call like the one we got three weeks ago.”
“So you’re going to push me away before I have the chance to hurt you?”
“I’m trying to survive. I’m trying to figure out how to exist without needing other people to make me feel whole.”
“And how’s that working out for you?”
The question hung in the air between us, and for a moment, I thought she might actually answer honestly. Instead, she walked past me toward the door.
“I’m going inside before we both get sick.”
That night, I lay awake listening to her move around the guest room, and I realized that all my tactical training, all my experience protecting people from external threats, meant nothing when the literal enemy was grief and the person I tried to save was determined to save herself by pushing everyone away.
I built my entire adult life around the principle that love meant protection, that caring about someone meant standing between them and whatever might hurt them. But how do you protect someone from their own fear? How do you fight an enemy that lives inside the person you’re trying to save?
The answer, I was beginning to understand, was that you couldn’t. Some battles couldn’t be won through force, strategy, or sheer determination. Some battles could only be won by the person fighting them when they were ready to believe that victory was possible.
But that didn’t mean I was giving up. It just meant I had to find a different way to fight.
I decided to love her consistently and quietly and without expectation, to be the constant presence in her life that proved not everyone would leave.
Even when loving her felt like holding water in my hands.
Even when I went to bed every night, wondering if tomorrow would be the day she finally decided that staying was too dangerous and left before I could wake up to stop her.
