Edwina turned so quickly the blanket slipped from her shoulder. The softness left her face, replaced first by shock, then concern. She sat upright beside me, no longer tucked against my side, her fingers tightening around the mug.
“Who?” she asked.
I swallowed, my throat scraped raw.
“My father,” I said. “He’s dead.”
Her face changed again, and that almost made it worse. She stared at me for a second, lips parted, eyes searching my face as the missing days took on a shape neither of us had expected.
“Hayden…”
“He’s dead,” I repeated, rougher this time, as if the words still did not fit right in my mouth. “And I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to feel.”
That was the worst part. The death was bad enough. The shock too. Underneath both sat a blank place I did not know what to do with.
I dragged a hand over my jaw, then through my hair, trying to make sense of something that refused to settle. “There’s just emptiness.”
Edwina didn’t interrupt.
“Our relationship was fucked after my sister died,” I said. “Maybe it had been fucked before that. Her death only made it impossible to ignore.” My mouth tightened. “Something changed in him after the funeral. He got colder. Harder. Or maybe I finally started seeing what had always been there. We couldn’t speak without tearing into each other. He wanted me to become the man he had built in his head, and I wanted…”I stopped, a bitter breath leaving me. “Fuck, I don’t even know anymore. One honest conversation in a apartment where everyone was performing all the damn time.”
The tea trembled faintly in Edwina’s hands, and she set the mug down before it could slip.
A humorless laugh left me. “Now he’s gone, and I’m sitting here trying to understand this emptiness. Part of me wonders if I’m heartless for not breaking the way a son is supposed to break. Another part thinks the place where grief should have been was hollowed out years before he died.”
“You’re not heartless,” she said.
Her hand came to my jaw, warm against my skin, and the certainty in her voice nearly pulled something loose inside me.
I looked at her then.
Her face was open in a way that made it dangerous. If pity had been there, I would have hated it. But Edwina was not pitying me. She was simply present, hand on my face, eyes fixed on mine, offering the sort of care she could never fake.
“He wasn’t a good father after that,” I said. “Not to me. He either didn’t know how to be one, or grief gave him permission to stop trying. I don’t know which is worse.” My voice scraped on the next words. “I kept waiting for things to get better between us, for some version of him to come back, someone I could speak to without feeling as if I was talking to a wall. It never happened.”
The silence stretched, but it didn’t feel empty.
“I went back because I had to,” I said. “The apartment was chaos. The company was worse. My mother was barely standing. And the whole time I was there, all I could think was that none of it felt like home anymore. The city, the apartment, the name, that fucking company—none of it.”
Edwina’s eyes stayed on mine.
After a moment, she asked, “What is home now?”
“You,” I said. “And Helena.”
Her face shifted before she could hide it, tenderness breaking through first, pain close behind, with that softness she always tried to bury rising to the surface anyway.
“That’s what made New York unbearable,” I said. “It wasn’t only him or the funeral. It was standing there and realizing that life did not matter to me the way everyone expected it to. The name, the company, the apartment, all that Stone family bullshit, it felt dead. Then I came back here and saw the disappointment in your face because I had left you with silence again.” My throat tightened. “I didn’t know how to fix it.”
Edwina said nothing for a moment. Then she moved closer.
“You don’t fix grief,” she said. “You survive it.”
I closed my eyes.
She was right.
I was tired. So fucking tired.