Chapter 388
SIERRA.
The house is quiet. It’s the first thing I notice when I step into the living room.
I stand there for a moment, letting it settle, before moving further in. My steps are slow and unhurried, like I’m taking in a place I haven’t seen in a long time, even though nothing about it has really changed.
Everything looks the same, but it doesn’t feel the same.
I set my phone down on the coffee table and sink into the cushions, leaning back as my gaze drifts toward the ceiling. For a while, I don’t think about anything in particular. I just exist, breathing in and out before letting my mind wander.
Like always, my mind drifts to all that has happened these past few months.
It goes back to the cliff. To the moment I stood there, with pain crashing my heart and soul in ways I’ve never experienced.
I still remember what that felt like. How it felt like I was dying from the inside and how everything had lost meaning and the only thought was to end the pain. To join my baby wherever it is she was.
I remember the wind. The sound of my own uneven breathing, breaking apart in my chest. I remember the whispers of the wind as if encouraging me to jump and then I remember Aunt Harper’s voice.
I close my eyes briefly, remembering how she told me my baby was alive. I remember the way those words hit me. How they crashed into me, breaking through everything else, pulling me back when I had already started to let go and for a moment, there had been overwhelming relief.
I hold onto that feeling for a second longer before it slips because I also remember what came after.
I remember the hospital again. The way everyone looked at me and then the truth they had finally told me.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt something like that before. Not even when I thought she was dead because at least then it was final… This was something else entirely. Something that didn’t have an end.
I let out a slow breath, my fingers curling slightly against the fabric of the couch.
After the doctors gave me a shot, that’s when everything inside me went quiet. I didn’t break again after that. I didn’t scream. Didn’t fight. Didn’t react… I just stepped away from it. From everything.
It was the only way I could survive it. If I didn’t feel it, then it couldn’t destroy me, and so I stopped. I stopped feeling anything. I was basically numb.
I remember voices, and people talking to me, trying to reach me, trying to pull me back, but none of it really reached where I was.
They were there, but it all felt distant, like I was watching something happen from somewhere far away, somewhere nothing could touch me.
They tried, but I just didn’t want to be reached because being reached meant feeling and feeling meant going back to that moment over and over again. So instead, I stayed where I was. Where I was safe from the pain until they decided to take me away.
I didn’t argue nor did I question it because leaving felt easier than staying. Anything that created distance between me and that pain felt like something I should hold onto.
We went to a new surrounding that didn’t carry the same memories and even there they tried to help me too.
At first, I didn’t engage with the therapist. I sat through the sessions, listened when I had to, answered when it was unavoidable, but I didn’t give anything more than that.
I didn’t want to get better because that meant feeling again and I wasn’t ready for that again. I knew I’d never be ready, not unless they gave me back my daughter…
I don’t know how long it had been when my therapist decided to switch tactics. She started talking about my baby. What would happen if I stayed like this? What would it mean when my daughter came back? If I would be able to be there for her. If I would even be able to recognize her as mine in the state I was in.
I remember sitting there, staring at her, really hearing her for the first time and something inside me cracked because for the first time since everything happened, I thought about something beyond the pain. I thought about my daughter. About the version of me she would come back to, and I knew that wasn’t enough.
I realized no one was going to love her the way I would. No one was going to fight for her the way I could, but I couldn’t do any of that if I stayed where I was… so slowly, I started trying.
I wasn’t entirely there at first, but eventually I started answering more than I had before. Engaging instead of just listening. Letting things come up instead of pushing them down.
It wasn’t easy. There were days I didn’t want to get out of bed. Days where everything felt too heavy again. Days where I wished I could go back to that quiet place where nothing reached me. But I didn’t… I stayed. I worked through it all: The grief. The anger. And the fear.