Page 44 of Mine to Fear
I gave her space. I gave her time. I gave her everything she asked for and watched her slip further away from me every day.
The woman who’d faced down her abusive ex-husband with a gun to her head, who’d fought back with courage that left me breathless with admiration, had been replaced by someone whocould barely make it through a conversation without her eyes going distant and empty.
She stopped eating regular meals, surviving on coffee and whatever I could convince her to pick at during our increasingly silent dinners. She stopped sleeping through the night—I could hear her moving around at all hours, pacing her room like a caged animal.
Most devastating of all, she stopped letting me touch her. No casual contact, no hugs, no hand-holding during movies we weren’t really watching. The physical distance she put between us felt like a wall I couldn’t scale, no matter how carefully I tried.
“You need to eat something,” I said that morning, setting a plate of scrambled eggs in front of her at the kitchen table. She was wearing one of my old T-shirts and pajama pants, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail that made her look younger and more fragile than ever.
“I’m not hungry,” she replied without looking up from the newspaper she wasn’t reading.
“You said that yesterday. And the day before that.”
“And it was true then, too.”
I sat down across from her, trying to catch her eye. “Willa, you’re going to make yourself sick. Jude wouldn’t want?—”
“Don’t.” The word came out sharp enough to cut. “Don’t tell me what Jude would want. You don’t get to use my dead brother to manipulate me into taking care of myself.”
The accusation hit me like a slap. “That’s not what I was doing.”
“Isn’t it?” She finally looked at me, and the emptiness in her eyes was worse than any anger would have been. “You think if you invoke his memory enough times, I’ll go back to being the grateful victim who needed you to save her?”
“You were never a victim to me. You were?—”
“I was what? The obligation you inherited when your best friend died? The responsibility you couldn’t abandon because it would dishonor his memory?”
Each word was delivered with surgical precision, designed to hurt in the way that only someone who knew you completely could manage. But underneath the cruelty, I could hear the pain—raw and desperate and looking for somewhere to land.
“You know that’s not true,” I said quietly.
“Do I? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like I’m just another problem you’re trying to solve. Another crisis to manage until you can figure out how to hand me off to someone else.”
“There is no one else. There’s only us.”
“There is no us.” She stood up from the table, leaving the untouched eggs cooling on her plate. “There’s you, feeling guilty about surviving when people like Jude didn’t. And there’s me, trying to figure out how to exist in a world where everyone I’ve ever loved either dies or leaves.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“You haven’t left yet. There’s a difference.”
She walked out of the kitchen then, and I sat there staring at her abandoned breakfast, feeling more helpless than I had since I was seventeen years old and watching social workers split up families because the system couldn’t figure out how to keep people together.
The worst part was that I understood why she pushed me away. Grief was a predator that convinced you loving people was dangerous, that caring about anyone was just setting yourself up for inevitable loss. I felt the same way after my parents died, after I learned that the adults who were supposed to protect you could disappear without warning.
But understanding didn’t make it easier to watch her destroy herself with isolation.
I tried everything I could think of. I brought her books I thought she might like, only to find them untouched days later. I suggested we take a trip somewhere, get away from the city and all its reminders of everything we’d lost. She looked at me like I suggested we colonize Mars.
I arranged for a grief counselor to come to the penthouse, thinking maybe talking to a professional would help her process what she was going through. She was polite but distant during the session, giving all the right answers while revealing nothing of substance.
“She’s protecting herself,” Dr. Margaret Fox told me afterward. “This level of withdrawal is common in people who’ve experienced multiple traumas. She’s essentially shutting down all emotional connections to avoid further pain.”
“How do I help her?”
“You can’t. She has to decide to let you help, and right now, she’s not ready to take that risk.”
“So I just wait? I just watch her disappear and hope she comes back.”
