Page 72 of The Weight of Her Silence
He pressed his forehead to her hand. “Please don’t go.”
Lila exhaled softly. “I don’t want to. But I’m tired.”
He said nothing. Just breathed, just held her hand as if that alone could tether her to this world.
“I’ve been angry with you,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “But I don’t hate you.”
He looked up at her, guilt breaking across his face like a wave.
“I never stopped loving you,” Nate choked out. “Even when I was too selfish to show it. Even when I ran away from the wreckage I caused.”
She touched his cheek, slow and trembling. “You were my home. Even when it stopped feeling safe.”
He closed his eyes, the words splintering through him.
“I kept wondering what I did to make you stop choosing me,” she continued. “But I realized… it wasn’t me. You were lost. And I just… I stayed too long trying to anchor someone who didn’t want to be still.”
“I wanted to,” Nate said, voice raw. “God, Lila, I wanted to. But I didn’t know how. I thought I needed more—more passion, more control, more… something. And all the while, the best thing I ever had was slipping away.”
Tears streamed down his face now, uncontrolled.
“I would undo it all,” he whispered. “I would burn every lie, every second I spent with her, just to go back and be the man you needed.”
“You can’t go back,” she said gently. “But you can go forward. For them.”
He nodded, throat tight. “I will. I swear to you, I will.”
She leaned forward, her strength fading, and rested her head on his shoulder.
“I wish we had more time,” she said.
“So do I.”
They sat in silence for a while, the kind that doesn’t need filling. The kind that says all the things words never could.
As the sun began to dip beyond the window, painting the walls gold and pink, Lila’s breathing grew slower.
Fainter.
Her fingers went slack in his.
Nate looked down, panic rising. “Lila?”
She opened her eyes one last time. “Don’t be angry anymore,” she said, her voice nearly gone. “There’s too much beauty left in the world for that.”
Then, with a sigh like a whisper, Lila leaned fully into him—into the man who had broken her heart but was still her home—and the last breath she ever took left her lips in peace.
The world held its breath with her.
And when Nate called her name again and again, no answer came.
Only the echo of what they were.
Only the weight of her silence.
He didn’t move for a long time.
Nate sat there with Lila’s head cradled against his shoulder, her body warm but unmistakably still. A kind of stillness that defied hope. The kind that made time feel irrelevant.
