Interlude: Sarah- The Static Between Us

  Cold.

  The word had never meant much before. A passing thing. A nuisance in winter. An excuse to huddle closer under blankets or linger in hot showers too long. But after the crash, the cold became something else entirely. It lived in her now.

  It was there the moment the glass shattered and the shriek of twisting metal gave way to silence. Cold air had rushed through the broken windows, hungry and sudden, like a scream with no voice. She remembered blinking up at a sky that didn’t make sense. Remembered thinking—I’m upside down, aren’t I? Then the pain. Then nothing.

  She was airlifted from the wreckage, her body broken but somehow intact. She survived. Everyone kept reminding her of that, like survival was something to be proud of. But the cold clung to her even as they wheeled her into sterile hallways. It followed her into the bright lights and beeping monitors and the soft murmur of concerned nurses. It crawled into her bones. It stayed.

  She never felt warm again.

  Not truly.

  And worst of all—she felt it from him, too. Nathaniel.

  He was always cold now. Not in cruelty, but in presence. In absence. The way he stared through walls, his eyes fixed on ghosts only he could see. The way he would flinch at nothing. The way he smiled when she asked about his job but never said a word about what it cost him.

  He didn’t have to talk about it. She saw it in his face. Heard it in the things he didn’t say.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  She tried to reach him. God, how she tried. She asked him to open up. Begged him to let her in. And each time, he gave her the same gentle wave of the hand, the same crooked smile that said, Don’t worry about me. And then he’d drift—into silence, into memory, into whatever haunted place he’d come to call home inside his head.

  He was always so good at pretending everything was fine. So good at being cold.

  And then there were her own nightmares.

  The figure. Always the figure. Dressed in black. Faceless. Standing in the middle of the road just before their car swerved and chaos swallowed the world whole. She could still see it—clearer than any dream. But no one believed her. No one except Nathaniel. The others blamed the ice. Said he must have been distracted. Said things like It’s easier not to remember. But she did. She remembered all of it.

  And with each memory came the same crawling sensation along the base of her spine. The same breathless cold that made her shiver even in July. It wasn’t just trauma. It was something else. Something wrong. Something unfinished.

  She worried about him. About Nathaniel.

  Her wounds had healed—at least the ones you could see. But his never had. His ran deeper. Jagged, infected. Left to fester by time and silence and a world that moved on without him.

  He didn’t need her. Not really.

  Not with her panic attacks. Not with her static-filled phone calls and dreams where Nathaniel came to her… but with someone else’s face. Not when she couldn’t even trust her own mind anymore.

  She remembered one night—early on—when she tried to explain the buzzing in her head. The TV that would flicker without warning. The dreams where the world bent sideways and refused to snap back into place.

  She remembered his face. The worry that tightened his jaw. The guilt that darkened his eyes.

  He didn’t need more weight on his shoulders.

  That’s what she told herself, anyway.

  That’s why I left, she whispered now, curled beneath the cheap blanket in the corner of her small apartment, phone silent on the pillow beside her. There was no other option.

  But even she knew that wasn’t the whole truth.

  The cold had never left.

  And maybe—just maybe—it never would.