After My Boyfriend Said His Ex’s Name in His Sleep

The thermometer read 103.2.

I pulled it from Rhys's mouth and set it on the nightstand next to the bottle of Tylenol, the glass of water I'd refilled three times, and the bowl of lukewarm broth he hadn't touched. The digital clock beside the lamp said 2:47 a.m. I'd been sitting on the edge of his bed for five hours.

His face was flushed. Sweat darkened the collar of his t-shirt and made his hair stick to his forehead. I wrung out the cloth in the bowl of cool water, folded it into a neat rectangle, and pressed it against his skin. He flinched but didn't wake. His breathing was shallow and fast, like a dog panting in summer heat.

I watched him the way I always watched him. Carefully. Like if I looked hard enough, I could find the version of him that loved me back.

Rhys Andrews. CEO of Andrews Capital. Top of his class at the University of Washington. The kind of man who walked into a room and rearranged it around himself without trying. Sharp jaw, dark hair, the sort of face that made people want to agree with him. I fell in love with him when I was twenty years old and too stupid to know that falling was the easy part. Staying was the thing that killed you.

I dipped the cloth again. Pressed it to his neck. His pulse beat fast under my fingers.

We'd been together for almost six years. I cooked his meals. I left notes in his jacket pockets reminding him about meetings. I checked every restaurant menu for mangoes because he was severely allergic and never remembered to ask. I kept a pothos vine on the kitchen windowsill and a pot of roses on the balcony and I tended both the way I tended him — with more attention than either one required, and less reward than either one deserved.

He shifted on the pillow. His lips moved.

I leaned closer. Sometimes when he was sick he talked in his sleep. Fragments of work calls, numbers, names of clients. I used to find it endearing. I used to smooth his hair and whisper that everything was fine, that I was here, that he could rest.

His mouth opened. A sound came out, low and rough, shaped by fever into something almost tender.

"Ana... stasia."

I didn't move.

"Anastasia..."

The cloth dripped onto the sheet. I watched the dark spot spread on the white cotton. I counted the drops. One. Two. Three.

Anastasia Gray. His ex-girlfriend. The one who left him when his grandmother was dying because she couldn't put her life on hold for someone else's tragedy. The one who came back years later when he was successful and worth returning to. The one who sat next to him in first class on business trips and touched his arm at client dinners and existed in his mind as the sophisticated, self-possessed woman who got away.

I was the one who stayed.

I set the cloth down on the nightstand. I folded my hands in my lap. Something inside my chest went very quiet. Not broken. Not angry. Just quiet. Like a room after someone has turned off all the lights and left.

I sat there until dawn.

---

His fever broke around six. The light through the bedroom window was gray and thin. Seattle in November. Rain tapped against the glass like fingers asking to be let in.

Rhys opened his eyes. They were clearer now. He blinked at the ceiling, then turned his head and saw me sitting on the edge of the bed. Still in the same spot. Still in the clothes I'd been wearing since yesterday. My back ached. My eyes burned.

"Hey," he said. His voice was hoarse. "What time is it?"

"Six," I said.

"Did you sleep?"

"No."

He pushed himself up against the headboard and rubbed his face. He looked at the nightstand. The thermometer. The Tylenol. The broth. The evidence of a night spent keeping him alive. He didn't comment on any of it.

"You said her name," I said.

He stopped rubbing his face. His hand stayed where it was, covering his mouth and jaw. His eyes found mine over his fingers.

"What?"

"In your sleep. You said Anastasia's name."

A pause. Then his hand dropped. He looked at me the way he always looked at me when I brought her up. Like I was a problem to be managed.

"I had a fever, Alanna. I don't control what I say when I'm unconscious."

"You said it twice."

"So?"

"So I've been sitting here all night. Checking your temperature every hour. Giving you medicine. Changing the cloth on your forehead. And the name you said wasn't mine."

He exhaled through his nose. That sound. I knew that sound. It meant he had already decided this conversation was over.

"You're overreacting."

There it was. The word. The same word he used every single time I tried to talk about her. Overreacting. Like my feelings were a malfunction. Like the problem wasn't what he did but how I responded to it.

I looked at him. I looked at this man I had loved since I was twenty. This man I had sat beside in hospital waiting rooms when his grandmother was dying. This man I had tattooed my skin for — a wild rose vine with his initials, R.A., inked into my inner forearm the week after his grandmother's funeral because he'd said he had no one left and I wanted to give him proof that he did.

He'd kissed my forehead that day. Then changed the subject.

"I have spent six years being the woman who stays," I said. My voice was steady. I didn't raise it. I didn't need to. "I have stayed through every late night. Every forgotten birthday. Every time you worked late with her on projects that didn't need both of you. Every time I swallowed what I felt because I thought if I just loved you hard enough, long enough, quietly enough, you would eventually see me."

He stared at me. His lips parted but nothing came out.

"Staying has never once made you see me, Rhys."

Silence. The rain hit the window. The clock ticked on the nightstand. He had no language for this. He never had.

I stood up. My knees ached from sitting so long. I picked up my coat from the chair by the door. It was still damp from yesterday's rain. I put it on.

Rhys didn't move. He didn't say wait. He didn't say don't go. He didn't say anything at all.

I walked out.

---

The streets were slick and dark. Rain came down in sheets. I drove without a destination, my wipers beating fast, my headlights cutting through the gray. Downtown Seattle blurred past. I ended up near Pike Place, in the parking garage of a shopping mall I'd been to a hundred times. I didn't want to go home. Home smelled like his fever and my wasted devotion.

I wandered through the bright corridors. My coat was still damp. My eyes still burned. The mall was mostly empty this early, just a few workers opening shops and a security guard drinking coffee near the escalator. I drifted toward the food court because the light was warm there and I didn't want to think.

I was standing near a pillar, staring at nothing, when I saw the man.

He came from the direction of the south entrance. He was moving fast. His hand was inside his jacket. Something about the way he walked made the security guard look up. Then the man pulled out a knife — long, serrated, catching the fluorescent light — and lunged at a woman standing near the pretzel stand.

She was pregnant. I could see the curve of her belly under her coat. She had her hand on it the way pregnant women do, protective and absent, like breathing.

I didn't think.

I threw myself between them.

The first stab hit my shoulder. It felt like being punched, then it felt like fire. The second hit my side. The third my back. I grabbed the man's jacket and held on because if I held on he couldn't reach her. He stabbed me again. And again. I stopped counting. The floor came up fast and cold against my cheek. The tile was white with gray veins. I noticed that. I noticed the fluorescent lights above me buzzing. I noticed the woman screaming.

Twenty-three times. That's what they would say later. Twenty-three stab wounds.

My last thought was strange and clear: at least this time, the person I saved would know I was there.

---

I opened my eyes.

I was standing. The floor beneath me was the same white tile, but I couldn't feel it. The fluorescent lights buzzed above me but the sound was muffled, like hearing it through water. People were running. Someone was screaming into a phone. Paramedics were pushing through the crowd.

I looked down.

She was lying on the floor. Coat soaked through. Face turned to the side. Left arm stretched out, palm up, and on the inner forearm — a tattoo. A wild rose vine. The initials R.A. woven into the thorns.

Me. That was me.

I stared at my own body and understood, with a calm that surprised me, that I was dead.

I waited for something. A light. A pull. A door. Something that would take me wherever dead people go. But nothing came. Instead I felt a thread — thin, familiar, stubborn — tugging at the center of my chest. It pulled in one direction. The same direction it had always pulled.

Toward Rhys.

Even now. Even dead. Even after everything.

I closed my eyes. The thread tightened. And I followed it, because following was the only thing I had ever known how to do.