This baby chapter is, like, happy sad? Just a little something to hold you over. Be on the lookout for a few more things in And Other Stories in the meantime.

Trigger warning regarding suicidal thoughts (which should not be a surprise if you read that last chapter). Proceed with caution.

GUYS I PROMISE IT HAS A HAPPY ENDING OK. I've written the epilogue (don't worry, we're not even close lol) and 10/10 it will give you warm fuzzies. Money-back guaranteed.

In invisible oceans, we get so carried away… It's unbearable that I can't lift the weight of her world, and I guess it was delusional to think I ever could – "Invisible Oceans" by Amos Lee

Quil

Forty hours later, we're on a plane.

Ten of those hours are spent trying to find Bussaba, Panya, Paitoon. Calling Jon and Embry and my therapist and Jacob and my mother. Someone. Someone who can help me help Claire.

Ten of them are spent holding Claire while she cries in my hotel bed. In the shower, when I help her under the spray, wash her hair, hold her as she shivers even though steam clouds the air.

Ten of them are spent watching her sleep. The deep kind where she doesn't move, doesn't dream, just lets her body keep her alive. I couldn't sleep myself—I was terrified to take my eyes off her. I had to press my hand to her chest, just to feel her breathing.

And ten of them, these last ten, I have spent on logistics. Packing up her small but significant life here. Booking us flights, choosing speed over savvy.

Because if I don't focus on the details, I will fall apart, and that is a luxury I can no longer afford. Not when she is crumbling. Breaking.

Already crumbled. Already broken.

I wonder how long it will take for this to catch up to her. She was half-present when she said goodbyes to the family that kept her for so long. When she held Bear for the last time, I thought I saw a glimmer of fire in her eyes before it flickered out, just as fast.

"We'll visit," I told her then, and I say it again now, as the flight attendant walks by to close the overhead bins.

She nods, mute. Still mute. She's hardly said five words since the words:

I don't want to keep breathing

I bite my lip, squeeze the arm rests to ground myself. Look at her again. For now, she is breathing.

She's staring blankly out the window, her arms crossed over her chest. My jacket swallows her. She threatens to disappear before my eyes.

But she is breathing.

"We'll be home soon," I tell her when the plane pulls away from the gate. "Twenty-seven hours."

twenty-seven

twenty-six

twenty-five

twenty-four

twenty-three

twenty-two

twenty-one

Our only layover is in Qatar, the same one I had less than a week ago.

It's the middle of the night, and we are acting on autopilot. I must eat, must feed her, but I don't remember when or where. Get to Seattle, I think. Get her home. Get her to people who know what to do. Because that's not me. I'm Scared to hold her too tight and afraid if I don't hold her tighter, she'll slip away. She hardly speaks except to ask me to come into the bathroom with her.

Please, she says. I don't trust myself to be alone.

Everything moves fast-forward and slow-motion.

twenty

nineteen

eighteen

seventeen

sixteen

fifteen

fourteen

thirteen

twelve

eleven

ten

nine

eight

seven

six

five

four

three

two

one

Claire

I couldn't tell you. What day it is, who dressed me in these clothes, if I've eaten or gone to the restroom in the last twenty-four hours. Maybe even the last week. If it's sunny or cloudy or raining.

I bet it's raining. This is Washington, after all.

We touch down, and Quil exhales heavily next to me, squeezes my hand. "We're home, sweetheart."

I just nod.

It's all I can do.

He guides me off the plane, carries my tattered and well-traveled backpack. It looks funny hanging off his shoulder. Tiny. I remember packing it in the dead of night. If I hadn't, would I still be here? Would colors still be this dull, sounds this loud?

We're guided through customs like cattle, and when the agent looks at me funnily for my lethargy, Quil leans forward to tell him something. When the agent looks back at me, there is an emotion in his eyes I can't decipher. I don't have the energy. I don't have the desire.

"Ready?" Quil whispers once we're cleared, passports in hand—his hand, naturally. It's a good thing he traveled light. I can hardly carry myself, much less a year and a half of baggage.

I wonder, as I follow him through an endless maze of hallways and vestibules, if this is what it will always be like. If it will always hurt so much my body refuses to feel anything at all.

He leads me to an escalator.

And then I hear my name.

And I see my sister.

And my dad.

And I know—no. I will not always hurt this way.

Callie is running up the down escalator, tears already tracking down her face, screaming my name, and I'm tripping over feet and people and bags and myself to get to her, touch her, hold her and love her and—

We tackle each other halfway, and I can't tell where her tears end and mine begin—where she ends and I begin—but there are tears anyway, and sobs, and the smell of her. The fit of her head in the crook of my neck.

"I miss you," I choke, even though she's here, now, and she nods against me like she knows just what I mean.

There's a low hum in my ears it takes me a second to recognize—people are clapping. Don't clap for me, I want to say. I don't deserve it.

But the escalator ends, and we would have gone tumbling if it weren't for my father, my dad, waiting at the bottom to catch us.

"Claire," he breathes, and there is more humming I drown out because I haven't hugged my dad in so, so long—and because he's my dad.

I don't know if he maneuvers the three of us out of the path of the escalator or if people part around us. I don't know. Because these people are mine.

I thought I'd cried myself out, cried myself num, cried myself to sleep, but there are more tears now for them. For all the days I have missed them. For the times I haven't heard them laugh, haven't been around when they cried, haven't celebrated birthdays, haven't worn matching pajamas on Christmas, haven't—

breathed.

I told Quil I didn't want to keep breathing, but the truth is evident now. It's not that I don't want to. It's that some days it feels like I can't.

My mother told me in her letter—the only thing I've carried since we left Thailand—that just breathing is enough. And that if I can't, I should get help. I don't want help, but I need it. I don't want to rely on someone else to fix what is clearly mine to fix. But history has only proven I can't fix this myself.

The Black has invaded so much of me, straight down to the center. I can't get it out without killing myself, trying to rip out my own fucking heart.

And my heart, I'm thinking, as I stand here, belongs to other people, too.

Callie pulls back first, wipes her thumbs under my tired eyes. "Oh, Sissy."

"You've grown a foot," I try to tell her, but a spit bubble pops in my mouth, and we're laughing and crying some more. She is taller than me now. My head could rest on her shoulder. I let it, for a second.

"Dad," I say, turning to him. I'm worried our hug will be awkward. It isn't. I wrap my arms around his waist and let him swallow me up. He's thinner than I remember, the tendons in his neck and arms standing out against his dark skin. Callie, too, looks like she's lost weight.

We all have.

It's in the split second after hugging my father that I start to turn for my mother.

She isn't there.

Quil is, though. He smiles sadly, like he knows what I'm thinking.

He takes my hand. "Welcome home, Claire."

And, for the first time in eighteen months, I am.