Without You

10

I wake up to an ear-piercing scream. It rips through the silence of the night, cutting into the darkness with such force that it takes me a second to register it's real. My heart pounds in my chest, and before I can even think, my body is already moving.

I jump out of bed, the cool air biting at my skin as I run down the stairs, my footsteps quick but heavy. Azriel's right behind me.

As I round the corner into the living room, I freeze.

My mom is standing in the middle of the room, her eyes wide, distant. The floor around her is littered with shards of glass, the remnants of a broken picture frame or maybe a vase—anything that could shatter, really. But it's not the mess that stops me in my tracks. It's her. Her posture is off, like she's lost in some sort of trance. She's not looking at me the way a mother should. Her face is blank, like she's somewhere else entirely.

"Mom?" I say, my voice shaky.

She slowly looks up at me, as though the sound of my voice has broken through the fog in her mind. Her eyes meet mine, but there's nothing there that feels familiar. Just confusion, like she's not sure what she's seeing.

And then, without warning, a smile spreads across her face. It's the same smile she used to give me when I was little, when everything felt safe and whole. But it's wrong. It's hollow, tinged with something I can't quite place.

She whispers a name. 

A name that used to make me smile.

"Ella?" she says, so softly that for a moment I wonder if I imagined it. But no, it's real. The name hangs in the air like a ghost, thick with nostalgia and pain.

I feel a knot form in my stomach, a tightening that I can't shake. 

My breath catches in my throat as I watch my mom take a slow, unsteady step toward me.

"Mom, please," I say, my voice more frantic now. "What's going on? You need to lie down. You're not yourself."

But she doesn't listen. Instead, she steps closer, and the air between us feels thick, like she's reaching for something just beyond her grasp. She touches my cheek with fingers that are colder than they should be, like ice. Her touch makes me flinch, but I don't pull away.

Her gaze softens, and for a second, I almost believe she's here. But then she speaks again, and her words crush the fragile illusion.

"Baby, are you really here?" Her voice trembles, the edges of it raw with something unspoken, something desperate. She pulls me into a hug, and I don't know whether to cry or pull away.

"I love you, don't forget that," she whispers into my ear.

I close my eyes, but the moment feels like a dream, a nightmare I can't escape. Part of me wants to believe that she's talking to me—that maybe this is just a momentary lapse, that things will go back to normal. That we'll go back to who we were, before all the pain, before the chaos. But deep down, I know it's not true.

She's not talking to me.

She's talking to Ella.

I swallow hard, but the lump in my throat won't go away. For a brief, sickening second, I almost wish she was still here. I wish that Ella could be the one holding her right now, because I can't carry this burden on my own. I'm not strong enough for both of us.

I pull back from the hug, but her arms don't want to let go. She clings to me, whispering those same words over and over again. "I love you, don't forget that."

It's like she's trying to remember something, trying to hold onto something that's slipping through her fingers. And I am the only thing she has left to hold onto.