Ex Had Childhood Sweetheart, I Had Brilliant Future

The room fell deathly silent. This time, I was truly alone.

My throat had swollen so badly I could barely breathe. My vision blurred, and hallucinations began creeping in at the edges.

I dragged myself into the wheelchair and barely managed to call out:

"No... Nora..."

But Nora had already been taken away by the bodyguards Dominic brought with him. My voice echoed through the vast, empty sanatorium with no one to hear it.

A crushing wave of panic consumed me. I regretted putting on a brave face and telling him it was just my foot. I regretted not grabbing the hem of his coat when he turned to leave.

I was terrified of ending up like my mother -- collapsed somewhere no one could find her, crying for help that never came, lying dead for seven days before anyone discovered her body.

I remembered there was a first aid kit downstairs that might have medicine. I gripped the wheelchair and inched my way toward it, but the wheels caught on the carpet. The chair tipped, and I tumbled down the stairs with it.

The wheelchair crashed down on top of me. In my final moments, instinct took over, and I dialed Dominic's number -- because after my parents died, he was the only person who'd ever been there for me.

This time, the call connected quickly. But I could barely speak:

"I was... wrong... help--"

"Ow! Dominic, it hurts so much!"

Vivian's voice drowned mine out once again, and my throat sealed shut completely.

I could barely see anymore. I didn't notice the call had been disconnected. I just kept rasping Dominic's name over and over, until my eyes closed forever.

---

Dominic was driving when something in his chest went hollow. He thought of how I'd been lying on the floor moments ago, and despite everything, a flicker of worry stirred in him.

He was about to call me back when Vivian's sobbing cut him off.

For seven full days, I didn't call to pester him the way I always had. Something in Dominic felt inexplicably empty.

Even back-to-back meetings couldn't hold his focus. The restlessness in him only grew worse.

He told himself that if I called to apologize this time, he'd bring me home immediately.

For reasons he couldn't quite explain, Dominic -- for the first time -- left Vivian's messages unanswered. He pushed aside the rest of his work and pulled up the surveillance feed he hadn't touched in three years.

My bedroom still looked exactly as it had that day. A layer of dust had settled over everything.

A sharp pain lanced through his chest. A sick feeling rose in his gut. With trembling hands, he scrubbed the footage back to the day he'd left -- and watched me pinned beneath the wheelchair, calling his name for a full thirty minutes.

While I lay there screaming for him, he'd been driving Vivian to the hospital. For nothing more than a slight redness on her hand.

He drove to the sanatorium like a man possessed -- that place he'd so deliberately ignored for so long.

When he pushed open the door, Dominic saw me lying on the floor with my back to him. Beside me, the carpet was stained with blood that had long since dried.

The last of the evening sun slanted through the window and fell across my body, and for a moment it was as though he'd been carried back to the night they first met -- her breath warm against his skin as she carefully dabbed at his wounds with a cotton ball.

So perfectly in sync. So achingly intimate.

Dominic stood frozen in the doorway, his face drained of every trace of color.

"Claire..."