Branch: First Cracks (Liesa, Marissa, Myra)

Manhattan after midnight, the city’s pulse tuned to the frequency of closing time: the rich and the **** orbiting each other at velocity, eyes glassy, knuckles pinked by cold or by drink. The street outside steamed with summer garbage, but the inside of the bar was icebox sharp, suffused with an expensive air meant to signal superiority over anything as mortal as weather or decay. Liesa paused outside, the door’s gold leaf “Gatsby” sign daring her to prove she belonged.

Inside, the noise was not so much loud as dense, as if every conversation packed a secret and no one dared let theirs slip out first. The light—brushed brass and perfect, pretending to be old when it was just expensive—smoothed everyone into a finer, more legible version of themselves. Liesa’s own reflection caught in the mirrored back wall: hair wound up and pinned, skin soft and pale, her body posed by some **** she could no longer resist into the posture of a woman expecting to be watched. Even the blue velvet dress, barely clinging to her shoulders, had been chosen by someone else. She told herself it was the Garden’s doing. It did not matter. She slid into the illusion as if it were a familiar lover.

Emily was everywhere. Behind the bar, dashing from table to table, bright and effortless in a short black skirt and a powder-blue blouse that flattered her shape without exploiting it. Her hair—no trace of pink, just gold and flax and clean New England girl—hung straight to her shoulder blades, bobbing with each step. The illusion of effortlessness was total, but Liesa could see the choreography underneath: how Emily angled her elbows to avoid casual gropes, how she laughed with her whole face while keeping her feet in a perfect defensive stance, how she wielded the drink tray as both shield and offering.

The regulars at Gatsby’s liked to believe they owned a piece of it. The best tables by the window always went to the same men—suits who peeled off their ties in the entryway so they could pretend to be rebels, expats who called themselves “creative directors” but never created anything, trust-fund ghosts with cashmere sweaters knotted over their shoulders, even in July. Liesa clocked them all as she made her way to the bar: not a single face she hadn’t already catalogued, either here or in the real world.

Tonight, Emily was behind the counter, pouring a measured three-count of gin over fat cubes of ice. Every line of her body broadcasted service—shoulders squared, arms toned and pale, chin up just enough to keep the smile visible from any angle. Her golden hair, straight and simple, was caught in a low ponytail, falling like a ribbon down her back. The effect was clean, unpretentious, almost childlike, except for the way her skirt bared her legs. There was nothing overtly sexual about her, but Liesa knew that, to these men, that was the entire point.

Liesa positioned herself at the far end, half-obscured by a column, and watched the room’s drama. Two brokers in cufflinks and slacks tried to outdo each other in ordering rare bourbons; a group of artists clustered at the corner banquette, their laughter a little too loud, their eyes a little too hungry. Between them, Emily moved with a practiced grace: she caught flying napkins midair, swept stray limes into her palm, ducked flirtatious hands with a laugh so perfectly tuned it could have been sampled and sold as stock audio. Each table seemed to get a slightly different Emily, as if she held a whole chorus of selves inside and switched between them as needed.

Liesa recognized this trick. It was how you survived.

The air was thick with everything. The whiff of mezcal and lemon zest, the heat of bodies pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, the promise of money changing hands. Every time Emily reached to set down a drink, she did so with a little flourish of her wrist, and every time she drew back, she left a trace of herself in the air, like the afterimage of a flashbulb.

A regular—a silver-haired guy in a golf shirt and blazer, one of those men whose wedding ring seemed to shrink with every round—sat at the bar, holding court. He waited until Emily drifted within his gravity and then made a big show of waving her closer.

"Hey, it's my favorite ray of sunshine," he boomed, just loud enough for his neighbor to hear. "How's the world's prettiest art major tonight?"

Emily kept her eyes on the pint glass she was drying. "Good, actually. We're doing figure studies this week," she said, a genuine smile briefly replacing her professional one. "I'm finally getting the hang of proportions."

He chuckled. "What's the plan after graduation, honey? Museum curator? Starving artist in a loft?" The word "honey" dripped off his tongue, sticky and slow.

"I don't know yet," Emily said, stacking the pint glass with its siblings. "There's this new guy showing at the Whitney—total prodigy. His perspective work is incredible. Makes me think maybe illustration could be interesting." Her eyes lit up briefly before she caught herself, the practiced smile returning as her shoulders tensed.

Frank snorted, unimpressed. "Art world's a circus," he said. "You'd do better selling your face to a modeling agency than trying to compete with those clowns." He winked. "Not that I'm complaining about your current gig."

Emily’s smile didn’t falter, but there was a micro-second—less than a blink—where her whole body sagged, as if she’d just absorbed a punch to the sternum.

Liesa felt it from across the room. That tiny ****, the way women learned to fold themselves smaller to make space for men’s egos, the way even a genuine spark—like Emily’s excitement about the Whitney show—was doused before it could catch. Liesa remembered nights exactly like this, in bars just like this, trading her own fire for the hope of a decent tip, or just for the lack of trouble.

Emily laughed, but softer now. “Let me know if you want another, Frank,” she said, and moved on to the next customer.

Liesa ordered nothing, just watched. She let herself be still, knowing even then her body was arranging itself into a pose, legs crossing at the knee, arms draping with a liquid, come-hither energy she couldn’t control. She hated it, but it was easier than pretending to be invisible. The HH had trained her to expect attention; the world outside demanded she never forget it.

After a half-hour, the brokers left, the art kids drifted to the back room, and the regulars’ volume dropped to a low simmer. Emily leaned on the bar and started polishing wine glasses with the mechanical devotion of a woman who had finally been allowed to exhale. For the first time all night, the cheerfulness vanished, replaced by an exhaustion so honest it almost looked like grief.

Liesa waited until the bar had nearly emptied before approaching. She moved slowly, hips swinging in that loose, catlike way her body defaulted to now, and slipped onto a stool across from Emily.

The girl looked up, surprised, then smiled with the reflex of someone who never let herself be caught off guard. “Welcome to Gatsby’s. Can I get you anything?” She said it in perfect English, but with a slight east coast flattening at the end.

Liesa shook her head, letting the motion send her strawberry-blonde hair over one bare shoulder. “No, thank you. I do not drink anymore. Not here, anyway.” Her voice was soft, deliberate—Belgian but smooth from years of passing. “You do good work.”

Emily laughed, for real this time. “You mean the glassware, or the smile?” She set the glass down. “If it’s the smile, I should warn you, it’s rented by the hour.”

Liesa’s lips curved. “I know the trick. Sometimes is all you have left.”

They sat in the hush, Emily fidgeting with the bar towel, Liesa resting her elbows on the wood in a way that invited confidence from strangers. It was a weird power, and for once, she wanted to use it for something other than self-preservation.

“Do you like it here?” Liesa asked. Not the bar, but the whole city, the whole story.

Emily thought for a long second. “Sometimes,” she said. “It’s not what I thought it would be. But it pays the bills, and nobody here gives a shit where you came from. I like that part.” She hesitated. “Why?”

Liesa said, “I lived in Chicago for a while. My English was worse then. I always thought I would be a painter, but it never worked out.” She shrugged, a slow, sensual roll of her shoulders that even she couldn’t help. “Sometimes I envy the girls who can just wait tables and not have to… perform, you know? For money, I mean.” She left the words hanging, knowing Emily would catch the subtext.

Emily’s mouth twisted, just a little. “If you do it long enough, it’s all the same performance,” she said. “The only difference is who’s paying, and what they want for it.”

A beat. The air between them grew denser, charged with the unsaid. Liesa’s cheeks warmed, but she didn’t look away.

“Do you ever wish you could just walk away?” Liesa asked, voice low. “Not from the work. From everything.”

Emily snorted. “Every shift. Every night, right before I go to sleep, I think—tomorrow, I’ll be someone else.” Liesa looked away briefly, jaw tightening, knuckles whitening as she gripped the bar edge. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax. “But tomorrow I’m always still me.” Liesa smoothed her expression back into composure. Emily bit her lip, almost shy. “Sorry. That’s stupid.”

“Isn’t,” Liesa said. “Is the only true thing in the world.” She leaned forward, and now her voice was all soft smoke and broken glass. “You know, I always thought you had to be special to be loved. That’s what they tell you, yes? That if you are beautiful, or talented, or clever, someone will come and find you and take you away from all this.” She laughed, hollow. “But is a lie. Nobody comes. You have to get out yourself.”

Emily’s face softened, and for a moment, her whole mask slipped. “You sound like you’ve been through it,” she said.

Liesa nodded. “I have. And so will you.” She let the words settle, then—“But you’ll be loved, too.” Her voice caught slightly on the word ‘loved’, and she cleared her throat. “Even if you don’t believe it yet.”

Emily’s eyes shone, but she didn’t cry. She reached out, fingers hovering above the bar top, then pulled her hand back with a nervous smile. “Do you ever miss it?” she asked. “The old life?”

Liesa looked at her hands, turning them palm-up, as if waiting to see what they would become. "Only sometimes." She stopped, swallowed hard—the admission cost more than it should have. "Usually when I am tired, or when the world feels too heavy to carry alone." For a moment, her fingers trembled against the bar, and she had to consciously uncurl them. When she glanced up, her eyes were too bright. "But it's lighter with someone, yes? I barely think about it anymore." The words came out softer than she intended, almost fragile.

For a minute, neither spoke. The bar had emptied almost entirely. Outside, the night pressed up against the glass, neon and hungry, but inside, the air was thick with the heat of confession.

Emily broke the silence. “Thank you. For saying it.” She didn’t ask who Liesa was, or why this conversation mattered so much, but Liesa could see that some small knot in her chest had loosened. Maybe not enough to save her, but enough to let her sleep better, at least tonight.

Liesa smiled, a real one this time, all her teeth showing. “You will be okay,” she said.

Emily nodded, and for the first time all night, looked her straight in the eyes. “You too,” she said. “Wherever you’re going.”

Liesa slid off the stool, legs long and bare beneath the hem of her dress. She let herself move with the sensual grace she couldn’t erase, hips rolling, every step a dare to the world to notice her. She paused at the door, looked back, and found Emily still watching, the glass in her hand forgotten, the towel bunched at her hip.

It was enough. Liesa turned, pushed into the cool of the night, and let the world dissolve around her.

The bar dissolved first—not all at once, but like watercolor bleeding into wet paper. The neon signs outside the windows lost their edges, their reds and blues bleeding into the darkness. Emily's face softened, becomes impressionistic, then abstract, then nothing. The floor beneath Liesa's bare feet—so solid a moment ago—became vaporous, insubstantial, as if she'd been standing on a held breath the whole time.

Liesa staggered forward into the void, her hands reaching out instinctively for something to grip, but there was nothing. She walked deeper into the darkness, each step splashing against what wasn't quite water, what wasn't quite air, her heels clicking against something that might have been glass.

When the liminal space resolved around her, Liesa stops dead. The fractured mirrors around her caught her reflection in a thousand shattered pieces, and for a moment, she saw herself fragmented the way she'd felt fragmented her whole life—beautiful here, broken there, professional in one shard, hollow in another. The pillars hummed their bone-deep frequency, and she realized with a sick clarity that the sound nearly matched the rhythm of her own heartbeat. A strand of fog curled around her ankle, and instead of recoiling, Liesa closed her eyes. She'd been touched by worse. She'd worn worse.

A girl’s voice echoed in the darkness, the only voice Liesa could distinguish, somehow, among the cacophony of whispers. “Don’t lie to me, Andy!” Liesa shivered. She didn’t recognize the voice, but could feel the hurt in it.

One of the larger mirror shards flashes nearby—a threshold, calling. Her hand trembles as she reaches toward it, and in that trembling, there's something she hasn't let herself feel in years: hope, fragile and terrifying, that maybe Emily was right. That maybe she can walk away. That maybe—impossibly—she's already begun to.

It was the silence that hurt most. Not the silence of an empty room, but the kind that lives in the walls of an apartment at night, dense with the memory of voices now gone, the refrigerator’s hum layered beneath the ticking of a thrift-store clock. Marissa hovered on the edge of Emi’s San Diego studio, the light from the streetlamp outside pooling gold across the floor and catching on the mess: art supplies scattered like seed, half-finished canvases leaning against sagging bookshelves, every surface a battleground between order and chaos. The air was thick with the sweet-sour ghost of acrylic paint, old jasmine tea, and something almost medicinal—maybe the dregs of last week’s oranges, fermenting slow in the trash.

On the bed, Emi sat cross-legged, phone pressed to one ear, her other hand limp in her lap. Her hair—dark, glossy, without a single stray highlight—hung forward in a curtain, hiding her face. She wasn’t moving, not even to breathe, and for a moment Marissa wondered if the world had simply stopped in this room, if time itself refused to pass for a girl who had nowhere left to go.

The silence was not total. It had a pulse, the thin whine of the streetlight outside, the click of the clock, the far-off rumble of a car accelerating up the block. But inside, the silence grew with each second Emi sat there, cross-legged on the coverlet, her thumb absently pressing and releasing the phone’s green call button. A dozen times she started to dial, only to stop, erase, start again. Her other hand, bandaged at the knuckles, trembled in her lap as though it was awaiting instructions from a more confident self.

Marissa waited at the threshold of the memory, letting the feeling of not belonging fill her the way a waiting room fills with anxious air. She’d never met this version of Emi, only its outermost edge early during The HH, never this full version—this smaller, quieter, more breakable version—but she recognized the posture of defeat, the need so sharp it turned the whole body rigid. She thought, for a brief, absurd moment, of all the clients who’d walked into her office with that same paralysis, the ones who needed permission to even want the thing they’d come for.

After several minutes, Emi inhaled, as if bracing for impact, and dialed the number. She pressed the phone to her ear, head bowed, the curtain of her hair shielding her from the room and from Marissa. For a long moment, nothing happened. The phone rang, once, twice, three times, each ring louder than the last.

Then the voicemail picked up, the automated voice of a woman who sounded nothing like the Emi in the room.

“Hi, you’ve reached the Cooper family—”

Emi’s thumb jabbed the red button, killing the call. She hunched forward, breathing in little gasps, and stared at her knees.

But after only a heartbeat, she dialed again. This time the phone rang just twice before someone picked up.

“Hello?” said the woman’s voice. It was older than Emi remembered, but instantly familiar.

Emi’s mouth worked for a few seconds, trying out several possible greetings before finally settling on, “Hi. Uh, it’s… it’s Emi. Kim. I don’t know if you—”

“Oh my goodness, Emi?” The woman sounded surprised, but in a bright, genuine way, like finding a favorite sweater at the bottom of a closet. “Emi Kim? Is it really you? Is everything all right? We haven’t heard from you in so long! Your family left Warrenville so suddenly, we weren’t even sure where you’d gone. How are you, dear?”

For a split second, Emi looked like she might hang up. Instead, she fumbled for her lines, the script she’d rehearsed a hundred times on walks to the grocery store. “Um. I moved to California. San Diego. For school, and… and just to get away for a while, I guess.”

“That’s wonderful! Your parents always said you loved the ocean, but I never thought you’d go that far,” said Andy’s mom, her warmth carrying through the old phone line like a blanket pulled from a dryer. “Are you all right out there? Do you have people?”

Emi made a noncommittal sound. “I, uh. It’s okay. Mom and Dad are good. They live in La Jolla. I, um, work freelance, so I’m alone a lot, but it’s fine.” She twisted a strand of hair around her finger, winding it so tight the tip of her finger went white. “How are you?”

“Oh, we’re fine,” Andy’s mother said. “Andy just graduated last month, can you believe it? Four years, just like that.” She chuckled, a little fond and a little weary. “He’s in Chicago now, has an apartment, lives with his girlfriend. Anyway, he’s doing great. I keep hoping he’ll come back home for a visit, but you know boys.”

The line was silent for a moment. Emi’s face, always soft, went slack. Marissa knew the signs—the way the body goes loose, the way the mind stutters and reboots when it can’t process the answer it just heard. She wanted to say something, but she was just a shadow in this memory, unable to touch or intervene. So she stood, watching, heart splitting.

“Oh,” said Emi, voice almost inaudible. “That’s… that’s really good. I’m so happy for him.”

“He’d love to hear from you,” Susan added, oblivious to the blade in her words. “Do you have his number? I know he switched phones, so it isn’t the same as in middle school, but—”

Emi stared at the patchwork quilt on her lap, the pattern of faded violets and leaves running together like ink in the rain. She shook her head, as if Andy’s mother could see it.

“I don’t have it,” Emi said. “But it’s okay. I just wanted to see if you remembered me. I didn’t want to be weird.”

“Oh, honey, you’re not weird,” Mrs. Cooper said, her tone as gentle as a hand on the head. “You’re still part of our family, no matter how long it’s been. Please, call any time. And I’ll tell Andy you reached out, all right? He’ll be so happy.”

“Okay. Thank you.” Emi’s voice was thready now, as if even speaking required enormous effort. “I’ll, um. I’ll call again soon.”

“Take care of yourself, Emi. We love you.”

The call ended. Emi stared at the phone for a long time, as if it might light up and undo the last two minutes. Her hands curled tighter around it, so tight Marissa wondered if the plastic would crack. Then Emi set it gently on the bed, covered it with both palms, and closed her eyes.

Marissa sat down beside her—not touching, but close enough that Emi's loneliness seemed to vibrate between them like a physical thing. She watched Emi's breathing grow shallow, saw the tears well and finally spill, felt her own chest ache in sympathy. This was the part that hurt the most: not the news, not the loss, but the way it had to be lived in silence, unshared, unseen. She waited, patient. It was what she'd always done, for clients and for herself—sit with the pain, let it settle until it was light enough to carry. But this time the room itself seemed to resist the comfort. The silence was a wall, pressing in from all sides, threatening to squeeze Emi out of the world entirely.

At last, Emi moved. She drew her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around them, and pressed her face to the space between. Her shoulders trembled, but she didn't make a sound. The pose was so complete, so total in its withdrawal, that Marissa felt tears prick her own eyes. She recognized it—the need to be invisible, the **** wish to leave no mark, to vanish so that nobody could miss or mourn you. It was a trick she'd perfected herself, in her office, her apartment, even her own family's home. Make yourself so small that the pain can't find you. Make yourself so absent that the world won't notice when you go. But watching Emi do it broke something in her that she'd kept carefully sealed.

Marissa reached out, very slowly, and placed her hand over Emi's. She expected a flinch, a recoil. Instead, Emi's fingers opened, just enough to let the touch register. They sat that way, Marissa's hand warm on Emi's, the phone caged between them. No words, no platitudes. Just presence.

For a long while, the clock on the wall was the only witness to the passing time. At last, Emi's tears slowed. She uncurled herself, just a little, and lifted her head. The rawness in her face was almost luminous; the streaks on her cheeks seemed to glow in the weak streetlight. Marissa wanted to say so many things—You did your best. You mattered. You are not alone, even when it feels like this is all that's left of you. But her throat had tightened, and the words felt too small, too rehearsed. So instead she squeezed Emi's hand, harder than she meant to, as if trying to transfer her own certainty through her palm. I see you. You're not invisible. Not to me.

“I really thought—” Emi started, then stopped. She drew a shaky breath and tried again. “I thought maybe, if he remembered me, it would mean something. Like, if I could just… I don’t know.” She stopped again, the words lost in the thickness of her grief.

Marissa nodded, not trusting her own voice. She thought of all the things she had let slip away before The HH—old friends, possible lovers, even the hope of finding someone who would see her beyond the mask of competence. She understood, in her bones, the way longing could hollow you out, and how easy it was to let the world shrink around you until you were nothing but a memory in someone else’s story.

Marissa considered breaking the silence. She let the seconds spool out instead, watched as Emi's composure fractured—first in the way her hands fidgeted with the phone, then in how her breath became shallow, then in the wet, glassy shine overtaking her eyes. The quiet in the room became almost a third presence: herself, Emi, and the growing certainty that the world did not intend for them to be loved as they were. And maybe that was the real horror—not rejection, but the possibility that they'd organized their entire selves around people who could never fully hold them.

Emi's body gave up fighting first. She collapsed forward, hands flattening against the coverlet, the phone sandwiched between her palms. Marissa remembered every client she'd seen do the same, every person who had clung to a symbol after hope had collapsed—wedding ring, picture, vial of pills, it was all the same. She watched Emi’s shoulders shake, but Emi did not cry aloud. She just pressed her face into the blanket and wept in silence, the way lonely people do.

Marissa waited, because that was the thing you did when someone needed comfort more than advice. She counted the seconds of Emi’s breathing, waited for it to steady out. She let herself feel it—truly feel it—what it meant to be abandoned by a story you had written your whole life around. What it meant to learn, in a single sentence from a stranger, that the version of love you’d cherished was already gone. She thought about how, for years, she had been so careful not to want anything from anyone; and now, watching Emi shatter over a long-dead fantasy, she hated herself for ever thinking distance could protect anyone. She felt, with ice-cold certainty, that this had been Emi’s last-gasp effort to find meaning. Lonely, in an empty apartment, Emi had exhausted all other possibilities and had turned to the very last one, the one she had never let herself grasp before. And in a few words, it was gone.

And Marissa had let it happen. Marissa was letting it happen. Marissa was sitting here, watching her sister dissolve, and doing nothing but bearing witness.

But then—and this was what broke Marissa's composure entirely—Emi's hand uncurled slightly, reaching blindly, and Marissa realized: she was reaching for me. She was reaching, and I was here.

Marissa's breath caught. Her eyes burned. She reached across the bed and gently pried the phone from Emi's fingers, her own hands shaking now, and placed it on the nightstand, as if by doing so she could also put away the bad news. Then she returned to the edge of the bed, close enough that their knees almost touched, and she did something she hadn't let herself do in years: she broke.

Not openly. Not with sound. But her shoulders sagged slightly, her throat constricted, and for just a moment, the therapist's mask slipped entirely. She was no longer Dr. Holt, the composed professional. She was just Marissa—a woman who'd spent so long protecting herself that she'd forgotten how to reach out, who'd watched her sister drown and called it "sitting with the pain," who'd let distance feel like strength when it was only cowardice.

She placed her hand on Emi's back, not therapeutically, but desperately. A touch that said: I'm here. I see you. I'm breaking too.

The minutes dragged, but Marissa didn't move. She watched Emi's breath slow, saw the shivers fade to a low, humming ache. After a while, Emi sat up, face blotched and raw, hair falling in front of her like a curtain she no longer had the strength to hide behind. She wiped her nose on her sleeve—Marissa noted, with her whole heart, the choice of movement, the way people never quite shed the habits of being human—and then looked at Marissa through the veil of her hair.

"I'm sorry," Emi said. It was the classic reflex, the apology for existing, for making someone else uncomfortable with your own pain.

"Don't be," Marissa said. She didn't inflect it as a command, or a platitude. She said it the way you might say "Don't move, you're bleeding," or "Don't touch that, it's poison." A simple statement of fact. And then, more quietly: "I'm sorry. To you, and to all the others. For all the times I should have reached out and didn't. For pretending that distance was the same as strength."

Emi looked away, eyes darting to the watercolor sketch propped on the desk: two girls in profile, one with wild hair and a laugh that threatened to burst from the paper. "It's not like we even talked, Andy and I," Emi whispered. "Not for years. I'm just… stupid, I guess. For thinking he'd care."

Marissa shook her head, slow. "You're not stupid," she said. Her voice wavered—she let it. She didn't try to steady it. "You loved him. That's not a flaw. And he does care, Emi. You’ll find out, someday. That's the only thing that matters."

"It is a flaw if it ruins you," Emi said, as if she hadn't heard the last sentences. She hugged her knees to her chest, shrinking herself, the bones in her forearms visible under the skin. "I thought if I left, I could stop thinking about it. That if I started over somewhere new, he'd just… fade."

"And did it?" Marissa asked.

Emi's laugh was wet, shaky. "It got worse," she said. "Every birthday, every Christmas, I thought about calling. I wrote emails I never sent. I stalked his old social media, like a creep, even after he deleted all the pictures." She bit her lip. "I told myself if he ever needed me, I'd know, and I could just… go back. Fix it. But he never did."

Marissa nodded. She understood this flavor of pain, the way grief was not the loss itself but the slow realization that no one was coming back for you.

"It's not your fault," Marissa said. "You were just a kid." She hesitated, then: "Most people, they never get over their first love. Not really. And the ones who do—" She stopped, because the rest of the sentence was too honest, too raw. "The ones who do learn to carry it differently. Not to forget, but to stop expecting it to save them."

"Do you think he remembers me?" Emi asked. Her voice was a plea, small and worn.

“I know he remembers everything,” Marissa said, and she meant it. She meant it in a way that went beyond psychology, beyond logic, into something that felt almost like faith.

For a long time, Emi just sat. The streetlight outside flickered, painting the walls with uneasy shadows. The hum of the refrigerator cut out, and the world went briefly still.

Marissa wanted to reach out again, but she knew not to **** it. Instead, she spoke softly, letting her words fill the space with something besides regret. “When I was in grad school, I used to take the night shift at the emergency hotline. Most of the time, it was students with panic attacks, or parents looking for missing kids, sometimes people just… lonely.” She paused, her voice rougher now, less like a therapist and more like someone confessing. “But there was this one woman, always called at two a.m., never said her name. She’d just sit there and listen to me breathe on the line. For hours, sometimes. She never wanted advice, or even to talk. She just wanted someone to exist with her in the dark.”

Emi turned her head, slow, as if moving underwater. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because sometimes that’s all anyone needs,” Marissa said. “Just to not be alone for a little while.” She paused, considered the hundreds of times she’d sat in offices just like this one, hands folded, voice modulated for maximum comfort. Suddenly, it all felt inadequate. This was Emi, here in front of her. Younger, a dream, but Emi nonetheless, and Marissa’s heart was breaking to see how utterly alone Emi felt. “It’s okay to let someone hold the pain for you, even if only for a minute.”

Emi stared at her, unblinking. “You really mean that?”

Marissa nodded. “I do.”

There was a beat. Emi’s lips parted, then closed. Then, with a breath so small it might not have registered if Marissa hadn’t been waiting for it, Emi reached out and took Marissa’s hand in her own. Her fingers were cold, but the grip was strong, almost ****. "Will you..." The words stuck in her throat, she blinked tears away furiously. "Will you hold me? For a moment?"

Marissa's heart broke. Of all the women she had met in The HH, Emi was among the most innocent, the kindest. Flighty sometimes, yes, but she was bright with an inner light that Marissa could only envy. To see her like this, to see what the world had done to her before Arabella chose her, was agony. What kind of world would crush innocents and dreamers like this? And so she hugged Emi, held her, telling herself that when the challenge was over, she would do the same to the real Emi, who deserved it just as much.

They sat like that for a long time, not speaking, not moving. The world outside drifted away, replaced by the slow, synchronized rhythm of two people breathing in tandem. Eventually, Emi’s head dropped to Marissa’s shoulder, tentative at first, then with the full, exhausted weight of someone who had finally stopped holding herself upright. Marissa didn’t move, didn’t break the spell. She simply held the girl, and let the ache move through her, out of her, into the air where it could no longer do any harm.

After a while, Emi sniffled and said, “Thank you.”

Marissa squeezed her hand. “Anytime.”

The silence returned, but it was different now—less like an emptiness and more like a space that had been filled, then cleared out for something new. The apartment didn’t feel quite so cold, or so small.

Marissa waited until Emi’s breathing evened, until her tears dried. Then, as gently as she could, she slipped her arm around the girl’s back and guided her down to rest. Emi didn’t protest. She just let herself be held, for once not fighting the need to belong somewhere, anywhere.

When Marissa finally stood, the room looked different. The walls glowed a little brighter in the streetlight. The piles of sketches seemed less like clutter and more like proof that someone, once, had wanted to leave a mark.

She glanced at Emi, sleeping now, her face soft and untroubled. Then Marissa let herself dissolve—let the memory fade, let the apartment, the city, the pain, all of it peel away and leave her standing, once more, in the Garden of Glass.

The apartment didn't so much vanish as hemorrhage. The walls began to bleed color—that soft gold streetlight leaking into shadow, the sketches on the walls dissolving into watercolor streaks, Emi's small sleeping form fragmenting like a photograph left in the rain.

Marissa felt it first as a pulling sensation, as if the memory itself was being gently unstitched from her bones. She reached backward, instinctively, but her fingers found only fog—thick, bluish, alive with a texture she'd never encountered before. The apartment's silence gave way to something else: a thrumming, a vibration deep in her sternum, and beneath it, voices—dozens of them, overlapping, incomprehensible, violent in their chaos.

The darkness folded in from all sides, and Marissa gasped, suddenly aware that she was no longer Dr. Holt, no longer the one holding steady—she was the one being held, suspended, by something vast and indifferent. The mirrors materialized around her like shattered teeth, each shard reflecting a fragment of her own face: red-eyed, trembling, seen.

One shard caught what little light existed and flashed, a high, clear musical note that cut through the noise. The humming of the pillars rose to meet it, and Marissa understood, in some wordless part of herself, that the darkness here was gentler than it should have been—that something, impossibly, had listened to what she'd done in that room. She stood still for a moment, breathing hard, her hand still outstretched as if reaching for Emi across an infinite void. Then, slowly, she turned toward the next threshold.

The first thing Myra noticed was the quiet.

It wasn’t the hush of an empty house or the after-hours hush of a hospital corridor, both of which she had known intimately. It was the special, charged quiet of a kindergarten room after dismissal: an absence so total it rang in her head, echoing off the cinderblock and linoleum, pressing her nerves tight. Myra’s fingers fanned out on the wall beside the door as she stepped inside, her cane tracing a slow arc just above the scuffed tile. There was no risk of tripping—this was a space built for safety, for little legs and smaller disasters—but she found herself hesitant anyway, uncertain what she’d find at the center of the emptiness.

It was easy to tell what time of day it was, even blind. Myra felt the warmth of late sunlight on her face, the slow tilt of its angle through the glass. Her other senses read the cues: the faint sweet tang of dry erase, the background tick of an ancient wall clock, the silence in the halls, the subtle damp of mop-water gone stale. Afternoon. She could almost see the shape of the classroom through her skin. The cane’s chime helped create an image, however ghostly and fleeting.

She moved inward, feeling her way by the image created by the cane, the grace of her Kitsune Step, and by the invisible lines that always organized these places: desks at the perimeter, carpet at the center, reading nook in the far corner with the fabric teepee and the bins of what she assumed must be hand-me-down picture books. She followed the silence to the center of the carpet, to the shape kneeling there. There, surrounded by a ring of tiny wooden chairs—each too small for comfort, each spaced with the mathematical precision that only a veteran teacher could maintain—was Chloe.

She was curled up at the heart of the room. Myra could sense it from the soft catch in Chloe's breathing, the way sound bounced differently around a hunched form. The subtle shift in air currents told her Chloe was small now, compressed. A faint scent of salt lingered—dried tears. No fresh sobbing, but the aftermath hung in the atmosphere, as tangible to Myra as a change in barometric pressure.

Myra felt the ache before she even sat down. The weight in Chloe's presence was so familiar, so lived-in, that it mapped perfectly onto Myra's own pain. She knew this posture from memory, from having held it herself countless times. It was the shape people made when grief and disappointment converged—when you had given the world everything, every scrap, and it still found a way to say "not enough."

She stood there a moment longer, at the edge of the carpet, letting the sensory reality of the room soak into her skin. The place smelled immaculate. Lysol and lemon cleaner. Her cane tapped against what must be perfectly arranged furniture. No scattered toys underfoot, no papers rustling in the breeze from the vent. Chloe had cleaned up before dissolving. Of course she had. Chloe always, always cleaned up first.

The smell in the room was a mixture of crayon wax and Lysol, with a bitter note of hand sanitizer. Underneath that, barely perceptible, was something softer, the faint residue of milk and apple slices and the morning’s batch of home-baked muffins. There was a taste of sweetness, but also of something unfinished, a sadness that lingered in the corners.

Myra’s first impulse was to leave, to slide back down the hallway and let Chloe’s private suffering remain just that—private. This wasn’t her territory. She was an intruder in the after-hours, and the idea of making Chloe perform comfort, after all Chloe had endured because of her, was enough to make Myra’s legs go weak. She thought about turning, about letting herself vanish, but something in the air stopped her: the memory of Chloe’s arms around her, days ago, in the Dance Hall. You were a shitty friend. But you’re not a shitty person anymore. So yes, I’ll try again.

Chloe had forgiven her. Chloe had forgiven everything. Myra’s brain still had not caught up to that fact, and it never would if she ran now.

So she moved. She used the cane to count off the chairs—one, two, three, four—and then she folded it, set it neatly by her ankle, and knelt on the carpet beside Chloe. The plush fibers scratched her knees through her jeans, but she ignored it. She sat with her hands in her lap, palms open, and waited for Chloe to notice.

A long silence. The clock on the wall marked the seconds with a click that sounded just like a patient monitor on the lowest volume, a sound Myra had grown to both hate and rely upon in the last few days before she had been taken. She waited, not breathing, until Chloe turned her head, just enough to register her presence.

“Hello?” It was a whisper, but even that felt too loud in the vastness of the empty room.

“I’m here,” Myra said, matching the hush. She wondered what this dream-Chloe was seeing. Was Myra, in her eyes, a foxgirl? Was she another teacher? Did it even matter?

Chloe sniffled, wiped her face on the sleeve of her dress. “I didn’t hear you come in.” Her voice was shaky, but she was trying so hard to make it even, so hard not to fall apart. Myra knew this, too. The performance of recovery.

“I can leave,” Myra said. “If you want.”

“No.” Chloe shook her head, hair falling forward again. “Just… stay. Please.”

Myra nodded. She settled back onto her heels, careful to make no sudden movements. The silence held for a while, both of them marinating in it.

“I’m not very good company right now,” Chloe said at last.

“That’s okay,” said Myra. “I’m not either.”

A flicker of something like a smile crossed Chloe's face. "Isn't that what people do?" She let out a sound that was not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. "Try to fix each other when they're broken?"

Myra shook her head. “No one fixes anyone. Not really.” She paused, feeling the words build in her chest, wanting to be careful. “Sometimes the best you can do is sit with them until the pain passes, or until it gets small enough that you can carry it together.”

Chloe was quiet for a long time. Myra could hear the effort it took for her to breathe evenly, could feel the low-level tremor in her hands as they gripped her legs. The urge to reach out and take those hands, to offer some kind of anchor, was nearly overwhelming, but Myra waited. She would not impose.

"I'm never going to have kids," Chloe said, sudden and sharp. The words hung in the air like something broken. "The doctor said it a month ago." Her voice fractured mid-sentence, and Myra heard the pinch in it—the way grief compresses speech into something almost unrecognizable.

Myra swallowed. The hurt that rolled off Chloe was so dense it made Myra's ears ring, her body go hot and then cold. It was the weight of a future unmade, a self that would never exist. Myra knew that weight. She'd carried versions of it her whole life. "I'm sorry," she said. She let the words hang, no attempt to lessen them.

Chloe gave a bitter laugh. "It's so dumb. I never thought I'd even get married, never even had a serious boyfriend. But I always wanted kids. And once I realized it wasn't possible, it became the only thing I wanted." She sniffed, and Myra heard the sound of her wiping at her eyes. "I spend all day with other people's children. I thought maybe… maybe if I was good enough at it, the universe would change its mind. Like I could bribe it."

Myra felt something crack open inside her—recognition, maybe, or kinship. This was what she did too. Pour herself into being indispensable, into earning validation through usefulness, as if effort could rewrite the rules of the world. She opened her mouth, closed it. Then: "You're the best teacher I've ever met," she said, and her voice trembled because she meant it in ways that went beyond this moment. "You make everyone who meets you believe they’re worth something. And you made a whole class of kids feel safe." She paused, gathering courage the way she'd learned to gather information now—by listening, by sensing the shape of things in darkness. "You made me feel safe. Even after everything I did."

Chloe was quiet for a long moment. Myra heard her breathing shift—not calming, but becoming more present, more aware. "I don't even know your name," Chloe said finally, voice low and wondering. "I don't know why you're here, but… thank you for staying."

Myra's throat felt tight, like she'd just finished crying. She swallowed hard. "My name is Myra," she said—and realized this was the first time she'd offered it freely in this memory, as if saying it made her real, made her accountable. "And I'm here because I couldn't not be. Because you're—" She stopped, unsure how to articulate what Chloe meant to her. What Chloe had always meant to her, even when Myra was too small and jealous to recognize it. "I'm glad I did."

Silence settled between them. Myra could feel it—not emptiness, but the kind of silence that holds space for breaking things to be held. The room's four walls seemed to lean in, offering quiet protection.

“I used to know a girl called Myra,” Chloe whispered, “a long time ago.”

Silence settled between them. The room’s four walls seemed to lean in, offering quiet protection.

Chloe's voice softened until it was almost a whisper. "Do you ever feel like no matter what you do, it's still not enough?" Her fingers made a sound against the fabric of her skirt—a nervous, repetitive motion. "Like there's always something missing?"

Myra thought of every accolade she'd chased—late nights at the office, endless to-do lists, relationships she'd end before they got complicated, patients she'd saved at the cost of her own breaking. She'd known that hollow ache. She'd lived in it. But something had shifted. Andy's forgiveness. The harem's tentative kindness. The possibility that maybe she didn't have to earn her right to exist. "I used to feel that way," she said carefully. "Like I was always falling short of something." She hesitated. "I don't know if it ever really goes away. But maybe—" She stopped, listening to Chloe's breathing, trying to sense where the other woman was in her own breaking. "Maybe it's different when you're not alone in it."

She reached out slowly, giving Chloe time to retreat, and placed a hand on her shoulder. The touch was feather-light, uncertain—Myra's own hand trembling slightly because she wasn't sure she had the right to offer comfort, wasn't sure Chloe would accept it from her. But Chloe shuddered once, then leaned into the contact, and Myra felt something in her own chest ease fractionally.

"I feel so empty," Chloe admitted, her voice barely audible. "All this time I've tried to be perfect, careful, and it still hurts."

Myra thought of the kindergarten classroom, of all the small hands Chloe must have held, all the scraped knees she must have bandaged, all the nightmares she must have soothed. She thought of the cookies left in lockers, of a girl named Laura who'd known Chloe's worth, almost two decades ago, before anyone else did. "It matters," Myra said. She spoke as if quoting a truth she'd only just discovered—because it was. "Everything you did—every kindness, every late-night text, every honest conversation—mattered to someone. It matters to me."

Myra kept her hand steady on Chloe's shoulder, warm and present. She could feel Chloe's breathing begin to even out, feel the tension in her shoulders slowly releasing, vertebra by vertebra. But Myra also felt the danger in this—the way her own need to be needed could poison the moment, could turn comfort into manipulation. She **** herself to simply be, to offer presence without agenda.

After a moment—Myra couldn't measure how long; time felt different when you couldn't see it passing—Chloe leaned forward, letting her head rest at the curve of Myra's neck. It was a small act of trust, but it opened something inside Myra that she'd kept carefully sealed. She closed her eyes (a useless gesture, but habit dies hard) and breathed in, anchored by Chloe's warmth, by the reality of another person choosing to be close to her.

"I wonder what my life would've been like if I'd taken more risks," Chloe whispered. "If I'd let myself fail."

Myra thought of her own life—of playing it safe, of never letting anyone see her struggle, of building walls so high that even forgiveness couldn't quite penetrate them. "I measured myself by success," she said. "Grades, titles, praise. When I finally stopped, when I lost my sight and couldn't perform competence anymore, I thought I'd lost everything." She paused. "Maybe I did. But you don't ever really lose yourself. You just have to find it again in different places."

For a long time they sat in the small, perfect silence of the after-hours classroom. Neither moved. Myra could feel the shape of the space around them—felt the wild disorder of color on the construction paper sun-catchers that hung, unevenly, from the window. Felt the hush of the reading corner, the silent clamor of a hundred tiny voices impressed into the carpet by years of circle time. Felt the faint pressure of Chloe beside her, not touching but so close that Myra could sense the shifting of her breath, the way her ribcage still trembled beneath the dress.

Time drifted. Outside, the long shadow of the building stretched across a deserted playground. Inside, the air got colder. Chloe didn't say anything, didn't even wipe at the tears that had dried on her cheek.

Myra didn't try to fix it. The words she'd already said echoed in her head, and she resisted the urge to fill the air with more. There was no comfort, not really, and any attempt to find one would only widen the emptiness. So she waited. The room smelled of wax and citrus and the faint, iron tang of sorrow.

Eventually, Chloe exhaled, her breath leaving her in a long, uneven shudder. "What do you do with it?" she asked, barely above a whisper. "The wanting."

It took Myra a moment to realize Chloe was talking to her, not to the void. She blinked, startled, then tried to answer honestly. "You don't," she said. "You live around it. You build a life on top of it and hope it gets buried. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. On the bad days, you make lists and you finish tasks and you teach yourself to breathe again. On the good days, you remember who you were before the wanting became everything, and you let yourself be that person for as long as you can."

Chloe let out a sound between a sob and a laugh. "You sound like a therapist."

"Not a good one," Myra said, surprising herself.

Chloe drew her knees tighter to her chest. "Do you think… do you think some people just aren't meant to be happy?"

Myra closed her eyes, searching for a memory that would fit. The countless hours she'd spent trying to make patients whole, the way hope always felt like a placebo, a thing prescribed out of necessity and not belief. The times she'd walked the hospital corridors in the dead of night, counting her own steps because it was easier than counting her regrets.

"I think everyone is meant to be happy," she said at last. "But not everyone gets the chance. Sometimes the world isn't fair. Sometimes the world doesn't care if you deserve more."

Chloe was silent again. But then, very slowly, she reached across the carpet. Her hand—small, cool, trembling—closed over Myra's, gripping it like a lifeline.

Myra startled at the touch. She hadn't expected it, not from Chloe, not from anyone. The contact was electric, not sexual but charged with a current that felt almost dangerous. She realized, with a sharp clarity, that she needed this as much as Chloe did. Maybe more.

They sat, hands knotted, the two of them anchored to each other by nothing but shared absence. In the silence, Myra could feel the animal panic in Chloe's pulse, the frantic hope that someone—anyone—would stay with her long enough for the loneliness to subside. Myra squeezed Chloe's hand harder, hoping to pass some of her own steadiness across the bridge of flesh and bone.

"I always wanted a daughter," Chloe said after a while. "Even when I was little. I wanted to be the kind of mom who made the best cookies, who let you stay up late to watch cartoons, who would braid your hair in the morning." She swallowed hard. "I don't know why I thought I could be that person. Maybe I just wanted to be needed."

"You are," Myra said. She felt her own voice catch, the raw edge of it scraping her throat. "You are needed. Not just by your kids. By everyone. By me." She wanted to tell Chloe about The HH in her future, the people she would meet, Andy and Riley and even herself. She wanted to tell her the truth, that in the future, the doctor’s diagnosis would be meaningless. But she didn’t know what this was. A dream or a memory or an alternate world. How could she give this Chloe false hopes?

She realized, then, that this was what forgiveness was supposed to feel like—not a sudden lightening, not a fairy tale reconciliation, but a slow, brutal acknowledgement that even the worst pain could be shared, if only for a moment.

Chloe's grip tightened. "Thank you," she whispered. "For staying."

Myra felt something inside her shift, a tectonic rearrangement that made the world briefly, impossibly new. She didn't want to let go. She didn't want to be alone again, not ever. She understood now, in the deepest part of herself, that survival was never a solo act. It always took two, at least. Sometimes more.

Myra listened to the silence, to the breathing, to the fragile music of two broken women holding each other together. Eventually, Chloe shifted, her joints cracking softly as she stood. Her hand found Myra's elbow.

"Let me walk you to the elevator," Chloe whispered, helping Myra to her feet.

Myra's throat tightened as she hugged Chloe—brief but fierce—feeling the woman's shoulder blades beneath her palms like folded wings.

"Thank you," Myra managed, then turned away quickly, her cane tapping a path back to the Garden of Glass, where broken things belonged.

The classroom dissolved around her like smoke—the smell of wax and citrus evaporating, the hush of the reading corner collapsing into a high, keening silence. Myra felt the carpet slip from beneath her feet, replaced by something thin and unstable, and her cane met not linoleum but a surface that trembled like a held breath.

"Promise," she caught from the chaos of voices, a fragment that snagged on something raw in her chest. The darkness swallowed the last echo of Chloe's voice, and then there was only the humming—that bone-deep resonance of flute-thin pillars reasserting themselves, closer now than before, their vibration almost welcoming.

“You’re stuck. Birthday rules.” Myra steadied herself, gripped her cane, waiting through the fog that curled around her ankles with new texture, less hostile than exploratory.

"I didn't ask for coffee," drifted past her ear, so familiar it made her breath catch. Erin? The darkness seemed to shift around her, less oppressive than before, and she realized her hands were still open, palms up, as if searching for something to hold onto in the void.

"But at least I knew there was someone on the other end, you know?" echoed through the whispers—voices she almost recognized but couldn't quite place. Somewhere deeper in that tangled chorus, she caught it: "Whatever happens, don't disappear," spoken with an urgency that mirrored Chloe's grip, still phantom-warm against her palm.

She steadied her breathing, her whole body uncertain whether to mourn what she'd left behind or anticipate what was waiting ahead, and waited for the next mirror-shard to flash its threshold.