(a short story)
by Kerry Ann Wiley
She kept staring at the scars, like they belonged to a version of her she hadn’t chosen to be. One marked her calf, uneven and new. Another traced her wrist, faded but still there. Her fingers moved over it again and again, like it was a line in someone else’s story.
She shifted in the chair and pulled her sleeves down over her hands, then rose slowly.
“I’m very cold,” she said. “I’m going to try to warm up in the shower.”
She was already at the stairs when she added, “Can you get the heavy blanket?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll grab it.”
I waited until I heard the bathroom door close. Then I went upstairs and opened the linen closet. The blanket was in the third drawer down. As I reached in, something shifted beneath the pillowcases.
A slip of paper. Not carefully hidden, just resting there slightly out of place.
A plain envelope. My name on the front. Sharp, fast, familiar handwriting.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at it. The water was running. Too hot, like always. Pipes hissing behind the walls.
I opened the flap. Her handwriting rushed across the page, fast and raw, like she was trying to outrun the truth of it.
J—
Everything the doctors said is still stuck in my ears. “Idiopathic.” “Degenerative.” “Stable but progressing.” I nodded like I understood, but I didn’t. Not then.
Maybe not now. You looked at me like I had already gone somewhere you couldn’t follow. Remember the crack in the ceiling of that city apartment? It cut through the paint, like something shifted when no one was looking. That’s what my body feels like now. I don’t know if I can be who I was before this.
This isn’t who I meant to be with you. The one testing which hand shakes less. The one afraid to fall in her own hallway.
I keep wondering what it means for you. Not just the appointments. Or the mornings I can’t get the brace on.
Everything feels far away. My body, the way I moved through the world. I want to reach for you like I used to. But I don’t know what version of me you’ll get.
The ACL was the beginning—but it wasn’t the real story. That came after.
That was nine months ago.
The aftermath of the ACL tear lingered, stubborn and unfinished. Six months later, the first round of tests hinted at something deeper. Four months after that, the second round confirmed it.
The crisis never really ended. It just changed shape. It stopped screaming and settled into the background, like a low-grade hum. Easy to ignore until you really start listening.
She hadn’t gone back to the city apartment. I knew she didn’t want to. The thought of being back in that space, with the same view and the same routines, was more than she could stand.
I offered to go. To gather her things: her manuscripts, some tucked in folders, others half-edited with curling corners. She said she’d get them herself. Yet, when she finally returned, it was only for a few clothes and her laptop. The rest she left behind without a word.
She also left the ring by the coffee maker. Not thrown, but placed—carefully enough to look accidental. No note, just the symbol of everything we were supposed to be, waiting where she knew I’d see it.
She had been a full-time editor at one of the city presses. Long hours, in-house meetings, print schedules. Then, gradually, it all moved online. Her condition made that shift permanent. She never said it aloud, but I knew she missed the noise. The back and forth. The red ink. Her life had shrunk to laptops and couriers. She used to bring her work home. Now the home was the work.
Ten days passed before I heard from her again. I called once, tried twice. Then stopped.
On the seventh morning, my phone rang. It was her brother.
“Julian,” he said. “She’s running.” There was static in the background—wind, or traffic. “She’s not okay. She’s holding it together the only way she knows how.”
We met behind his office—neutral ground. The wind cut between the buildings, sharp and restless. We weren’t family, but we were supposed to be.
“How is she, Scott?” I asked.
He didn’t waste time. “She’s broken,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“She’s lost. And scared.”
Still, I stayed quiet.
“She needs you, Julian. Not just the safety net.”
Later, I messaged her.
You can still go to the cabin, if it helps.
She didn’t reply. She just showed up.
I opened the door. “Hi,” I said.
She stepped inside slowly, her eyes moving across the space like it had shifted without her. She didn’t take off her coat.
“To make it easier,” I said, “Please sit down.”
We sat.
“Why did you message?” she asked finally.
She looked at me. “I didn’t come to start anything,” she said.
“I know.”
“I have Scott. My Dad.”
I nodded.
“If you want help with the appointments, whatever you need, I’m here.”
“Help with the appointments,” she repeated. That was the boundary.
“Whatever you need,” I said again.
“The next set of appointments starts Tuesday.” That was her answer.
She acted like a guest, stayed in the spare room. Lived out of the duffel she had brought months ago. Clothes, backup brace, laptop. She didn’t go back to the city.
She began leaving me notes—brief, practical:
Tuesday: Orthotic fitting.
Thursday: Labs.
She added appointments to the calendar without comment. Let me drive. Let me wait. Nothing more than that.
We had lived together for over five years, in more than one place, but now she moved through the house like it belonged to someone else. She folded blankets that didn’t need folding and wiped down counters that were already clean.
She tucked her things into corners instead of unpacking them. Her coat stayed slung over the same chair, her bag never fully opened. She didn’t say it out loud, but everything about the way she was here—how she moved, how she held herself—felt temporary. And I felt it too.
Later, when the house had gone quiet, she closed her laptop with a soft click and leaned back into the couch. Her sleeves slid down over her hands as she settled deeper into the cushions, the fabric brushing against her fingers like a reminder of how long she’d been sitting there.
The hum of the refrigerator was the only sound left, low and steady, as if the silence needed something to anchor it.
She looked at me—not quickly, not fleetingly—as if deciding whether to speak or let the moment remain unspoken.
“Julian.”
Her voice cut through the quiet, not tentative but weighted, like she’d been holding the word in her mouth for a while.
Then, after a beat, she asked, “What’s been the hardest part for you, through all of this?”
I didn’t answer right away. I watched her—really looked at her. She wasn’t guarded, just open in a way that felt rare lately. I let the silence settle a moment longer before saying, “When you tore your ACL.”
She didn’t move. Just waited.
“It felt like…” I paused, searching. “Like the start of something we didn’t know how to name yet. You were in pain. Frustrated. But it wasn’t just the knee. I could feel it, even then. Something had shifted.”
She gave a small nod, slow and almost imperceptible.
I took a breath. “It wasn’t just the injury. It was everything after. The way you started pulling away. Quietly, at first.”
Still, her eyes stayed on mine.
“And then you stopped letting me help,” I said. “You were there. But not really. You were in the same room, but you weren’t… with me.”
Her expression didn’t change, but I saw it land—somewhere deep.
I let the quiet stretch again. Then, softly, almost like I didn’t want to scare the words off: “And then one day… you were just gone.”
She looked down.
I swallowed, voice low. “Why?” The word came out thinner than I expected. “Why did you leave?”
She didn’t answer right away. Her breath came slow, deliberate, like she was building the answer as she said it.
“I thought it would be easier—for both of us,” she said. “I thought I was protecting you. Protecting us… by leaving.”
The words didn’t echo. They just fell—clean, final, heavy.
She had a way of moving through the rooms now that felt… edited. Like she was trying not to touch things too much. She stepped lightly. Closed doors quietly. Even the sound of her stirring coffee in the mornings was careful—soft clinks instead of the usual metal-on-ceramic rattle.
There were no fingerprints on the fridge. No shoes left by the door. She never asked where anything was—she just went without, or waited until I wasn’t in the room. Sometimes I heard her moving drawers in the bathroom late at night, slowly, like the sound might wake something between us.
We hadn’t talked about the letter. I knew it by heart now—the curve of her lowercase g, the way her pen had pressed harder in some places, like the truth had cost her something just to write it down.
She sat across from me, tucked into the corner of the couch. The brace was gone for now, but the skin around her knee still looked bruised, faintly inflamed. She hadn’t noticed me watching. Or maybe she had, and just didn’t care anymore.
I wanted to ask. Just ask. Something. Anything.
Instead I said, “You didn’t eat much.”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t really hungry.”
“You never are anymore.”
She didn’t answer.
The silence that followed was quiet, but not comfortable.
I let my voice drop. “We still haven’t talked about the letter.”
Her fingers tightened around the edge of the blanket in her lap. Just slightly. But I saw it.
She stared past me, toward the window. I waited. Then she turned, met my eyes.
“Julian,” she said softly, “I can’t do this now.”
And that was it.
I didn’t reach for her. I didn’t argue.
I just watched as she stood, slowly, like her bones had grown heavy all at once. She gripped the banister with her left hand—the steadier one—and climbed, step by step, until the house went still again.
When I opened the letter, it didn’t feel new anymore. Just familiar in the way grief becomes familiar when you’ve lived with it long enough.
It still said the same thing: she left because she didn’t want to be seen like this. That letting me watch her unravel felt more dangerous than disappearing altogether.
When she came back down, she moved slowly, her body heavy with fatigue. I was making eggs. Neither of us had eaten much earlier. She sat at the table, her hands trembling. We ate in silence. The space between us stretched.
I risked it, setting my fork down. “We never talked about the day you left.”
She met my statement with silence.
“I kept playing it back,” I went on. “The way you walked out. Like you were sure you weren’t coming back.”
After a while, she pushed back her chair. Tried to stand—winced. I rose too, instinctively. She took a breath and came to me, slow, deliberate.
“I never wanted you to be a caretaker,” she said—not sharp, just tired. “Still don’t.”
I cleared our plates and set everything in the sink. I was tired.
“Kerry, it’s late. We’re getting nowhere,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”
As I passed her, my hand brushed from her shoulder to the small of her back. She inhaled sharply, a tremor moving through her.
“Julian.”
Behind me, I heard her footsteps—close at first, then slowing. The hallway stretched ahead, a quiet divide between the spaces we once shared and the ones we retreated to.
She stood there, motionless for a moment. Behind her, the spare room waited. Ahead, the door to the room that had once held our shared life.
She lingered in the doorway of the room, her hand brushing the frame. Then she crossed the threshold and sat at the edge of the bed, slowly—as if she were unsure whether she was returning to something half-remembered, or drifting deeper into what was already lost.
I lay still beneath the covers. I didn’t turn. I didn’t speak. I just listened.
Without a word, she slipped beneath the sheets and settled beside me. Though her body was close, something in the space between us remained unchanged—sharp, cold, stretched thin like a thread pulled too tight.
Under the covers, she shifted. Just enough to let her hand drift to the hem of her t-shirt. The cotton clung to her in strange places—ribs, elbows, the back of her neck. She pulled it over her head in small, clumsy movements. It looked and felt like she was shedding more than fabric.
She lay there beside me in the dark.
“Julian.”
Her shoulder brushed mine. The contact landed deep. I didn’t move. Neither did she. But the air between us changed—dense and electric with whatever we weren’t saying.
She moved again, slower this time. Her thigh slid against mine beneath the covers. Her hand found my side, trembled once, then stilled. Her fingers pressed just under the hem of my shirt. It wasn’t bold. It wasn’t shy. It was searching.
I turned—just slightly.
And she met me.
She came down late. Her hair was still damp from the shower.
At the kitchen entrance, she paused—like she wasn’t sure she belonged there yet. I had left her sleeping. My side of the bed was a mess of twisted sheets and half-folded blankets, still holding the shape of where we’d been. Tangled. Close.
She wore one of my T-shirts and a pair of shorts. The shirt was a little too big, the sleeves rolled once. She hadn’t asked. She didn’t need to.
Her steps were careful, not hesitant exactly, but measured—like she was checking to see if the night before had carried over. Then she crossed the room and sat.
I met her. Kissed her. Soft, certain. My mouth found hers the way it always had. This wasn’t a beginning. It was the part that refused to leave.
As I turned to get the coffee, my hand drifted to the space between her shoulder blades and settled there. She didn’t move. Then, slowly, she leaned into the touch.
When I set the mug down in front of her, she curled her hands around it, holding it like something steadier than she felt.
“Some days it’s my hands,” she said. “Other days, balance. Stairs are harder now. It keeps changing.”
I nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
She looked at me again, held it longer this time. As if something had cleared, and she was finally allowing herself to see it. I didn’t move. She leaned in, not just toward me, but into whatever had started to form between us.
The days began to settle. Little things returned first. Sticky notes on the calendar in her handwriting. A grocery list on the counter. Her hoodie draped over the couch.
We didn’t talk about what had changed. Not directly. It showed up in the way she moved through the house again, unhurried. In the way I stopped checking if she was okay every time she went quiet.
One evening, as I passed the spare room, I noticed the door was half-open. Her duffel bag was gone. The closet in what was our room was partly filled now, and her charger was plugged in beside mine on the nightstand.
She had unpacked—not just her things, but herself.
I stood at the threshold with my hand resting on the frame, letting the moment settle around me. There was weight in it, and there was peace. She was here. And this time, she meant to stay.
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