Chapter 84: LOSING REN
Chapter 85
Lumi
I don’t remember actually falling asleep. I just remember the floor, and then the grey light of morning coming in through the blinds, and somewhere in between the two there must have been sleep, because my body had simply run out of ways to stay conscious through that much crying.
I woke up only because some small, stubborn part of my brain refused to let me forget that Theo had school.
My eyes were so swollen I could barely get them fully open in the bathroom mirror.
I splashed cold water on my face until the puffiness went down enough that Theo wouldn’t ask questions, got him dressed, got him fed, drove him to school with a smile stretched so tight across my face it ached worse than the crying had.
I drove back home after drop-off instead of going to work. I didn’t call anyone in the office to say I won’t be around.
I just couldn’t do it...couldn’t sit at a desk and pretend to be a functioning person while the inside of my chest felt like it had been scooped out with a spoon. I let my phone buzz twice with messages from work and didn’t look at either of them.
I got back to the apartment, climbed under the duvet still in my clothes, and stayed there.
I don’t know how long I lay in that bed. Long enough that the light through the curtains moved from one side of the room to the other.
Long enough that I stopped being able to tell if I was crying or just lying there hollow, past tears, past anything.
I didn’t know which was worse...losing Neve, or knowing that I might never let myself have Ren the way I’d let myself have him for those few days.
Or whether the two of them had become the same wound now, so tangled together that I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
I only knew that both of them sat in my chest like stones, and I didn’t have the strength to move either one.
I got up only for Theo. I picked him up from school with my sunglasses on even though the sky was overcast, made him dinner, sat across from him at the table and watched him eat while I pushed food around my own plate without a single bite of it reaching my mouth.
I gave him his bath. I read him half a book before he fell asleep against my arm, and I carried him to bed and stood there for a long moment just watching him breathe, because he was the only thing in my life right then that hadn’t looked at me like I was something to be thrown away.
Then I went back to my own bed and lay there, not eating, not really sleeping, just existing through the hours until the sun came up and I had to do it all again.
That was how the first two days went. I didn’t eat anything in either of them. Not breakfast, not lunch, not the dinners I made for Theo and never touched myself.
I got up because he needed shoes tied and lunches packed and a mother standing at the school gate who looked, at least from a distance, like she hadn’t fallen apart.
The moment he was through those doors each morning, whatever was holding me together came undone all over again.
I called Neve constantly.
I lost count somewhere past sixty. I called in the morning after drop-off, when the apartment went quiet and I couldn’t stand the sound of my own thoughts.
I called at night, lying in the dark, telling myself this time she’d pick up, this time she’d at least let me hear her breathing on the other end even if she didn’t say a word.
I called during the grey, empty hours in between, when I was supposed to be at work and instead was staring at the ceiling with my phone resting on my chest like it might ring on its own if I just waited long enough.
Every single call rang out. Every one went to the same flat voicemail greeting I’d heard so many times I could recite it in my sleep.
I left messages in the first few days...apologies, half-sentences, my voice breaking halfway through most of them...until I couldn’t stand hearing myself fall apart into a phone that would never call me back, and I just let it ring out silently after that instead.
She never once answered.
On the second day, I’d just gotten back from picking Theo up from school, still in the doorway with his backpack in one hand and his shoes half off, when there was a knock at the door.
I opened it hoping, foolishly, desperately, that it might be her.
It wasn’t. It was a woman I didn’t recognize, mid-forties, sharp navy coat, a leather folder tucked under one arm like she was there to deliver something official rather than something that would gut me.
"Lumi?" she asked.
"Yes..."
"Neve asked me to let you know you’ll need to vacate the apartment today."
For a second the words didn’t land right. I actually laughed, a short, confused sound, because it seemed impossible that a sentence like that could just be spoken in a doorway like it was nothing.
"Today?" I repeated. "I’m sorry, I don’t...this is Neve’s apartment, I know, I understand that, but Theo has school in the mornings, I have things to arrange, can I just have a few days to find..."
"She said you don’t need to find anything." The woman’s voice didn’t change at all, flat and professional, like she was reading off a script she’d rehearsed on the way over so she wouldn’t have to feel any of it herself.
"She said, and I’m quoting her directly, that she doesn’t care if you end up living on the street. She wants you out by tonight."
I stood there in my own doorway...her doorway, I reminded myself, it had always been hers, I’d just been allowed to forget that for two years...and felt something in my chest cave in on itself.
"Please," I said. My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "Please just tell her I need a little time. Not for me. For my son."
The woman’s expression flickered, just barely, something that might have been pity if she’d let it stay long enough to be called that.
"I’m sorry," she said. "Tonight."
She left before I could say anything else.
I called Neve immediately after the door shut. The call didn’t even ring. It went straight to a flat voice telling me the number I’d dialed wasn’t accepting calls.
She’d blocked me.
I sat down right there on the floor of the hallway, my back against the wall, and let myself cry for exactly four minutes, because that was all the time I could afford to give it.
Theo was standing right there watching me with his backpack still half on one shoulder, and I couldn’t let him see more of this than he already had.
I packed everything I could fit into two suitcases and a duffel bag. I packed Theo’s dinosaur nightlight and his three favorite books and left behind the furniture, the dishes, the little herb pots on the windowsill I’d been so proud of, because none of it was mine, not really, none of it had ever been mine, I’d just been borrowing a life that belonged to someone who no longer wanted me in it.
Theo held my hand when we got to my car, and asked, in the small, matter-of-fact way four-year-olds ask the questions that break you clean in half,
"Are we going on an adventure?"
"Yeah, baby," I told him, and made myself smile so he wouldn’t see anything underneath it. "A little adventure."
The hotel was twenty minutes away, a mid-range place near the highway with a lobby.
I checked us into a single room with two queen beds, and by the time I got the suitcases through the door my arms were shaking from carrying all of it alone, Theo half-asleep against my hip, the duffel bag strap cutting a raw line into my shoulder.
I set him down on one of the beds and he curled straight into the pillow without even asking why we were somewhere new.
Kids adjust like that. It’s the adults who carry the whole weight of a day like this one all the way down into their bones.
I sat on the edge of the other bed once he was asleep and looked at my phone.
Ren’s name sat right there at the top of my recent calls, right below the endless, unanswered string of Neve’s. I hadn’t heard from him in two days either.
Not one text. Not one call. He’d said *call me when you’re ready to stop pushing me away*, and then he’d actually done it...he’d let me have the silence I’d asked for, completely.
My thumb hovered over his name.
I wanted, so badly it physically hurt, to call him. I wanted to hear that low, steady voice tell me it was going to be fine, that he’d send a car, that he’d have us moved into somewhere warm and safe within the hour, that I never had to sit alone in a hotel room carrying my own suitcases again as long as he was in my life.
That was exactly the problem.
Every single time things got hard, I reached for him, and it was easy, and it worked, and that was precisely what Neve had said out loud in my living room.
I could still hear it. I could still feel the shape of it sitting in my chest like something lodged there permanently.
If I called him tonight, I would be proving her right in real time.
I put the phone face down on the nightstand.
I needed to fix this without him. I needed, for once in my life, to be the one who stood back up on my own, because if I couldn’t do that much, then maybe Neve had seen something true about me that I hadn’t been able to see about myself.
My best friend...the woman who’d sat beside my hospital bed, who’d bought my son his first pair of socks, who’d been more of a family to me than my own ever managed to be...was somewhere out there tonight believing I was capable of using someone. That mattered more right now than my own comfort did.
So I was going to fix that first. I was going to keep calling until she picked up, keep showing up until she let me explain, keep apologizing until she believed it, because losing her wasn’t a wound I knew how to survive around the edges of.
Even though it meant losing Ren.