STILL HERE AT 2:14AM

CHAPTER 15

The Regret Season

Lena doesn’t leave her apartment for four days.

She calls in sick to work on Monday (actually sick this time: fever, shaking, the kind of bone-deep ache that no medicine touches).

She tells them it’s food poisoning.

It’s not.

She keeps the curtains closed.

The only light comes from the blue glow of her phone and the occasional flash of headlights sweeping across the ceiling when a car turns onto her block.

The message she sent Eli sits in their chat with a single gray checkmark.

Delivered.

Not read.

She checks it every seventeen minutes like a heartbeat she can’t stop.

She replays the sidewalk scene on a loop that never ends:

Eli’s hand in Maya’s hair.

Maya’s smile when she realized it was real.

The way they looked at each other like the rest of the world had finally turned its volume down.

Every time the memory hits, a fresh wave of nausea rolls through her.

She makes lists in her Notes app she never saves:

Things I lost because I was afraid

1. The only person who ever made the dark feel safe

2. Eight years of almosts I was too proud to turn into yes

3. Maya’s trust

4. Myself

She deletes the list, rewrites it, deletes it again.

On day two she opens the closet and pulls out every hoodie she ever stole from Eli.

There are eleven.

She lays them on the bed like bodies.

She presses her face into the navy one with the frayed cuffs (the one she was wearing the night she ended it with Marcus) and screams until her throat is raw.

The scream doesn’t help.

On day three she drinks an entire bottle of wine and calls her mother at 2:14 a.m. (exactly, because some ghosts never leave).

Her mom listens to the whole ugly story without interrupting once.

When Lena finishes, sobbing about how she finally understands what she threw away, her mother says the cruelest, kindest thing anyone has ever said to her:

“Baby, regret is just love with nowhere left to go.”

Lena cries harder.

Her mom stays on the line until the sun comes up.

On day four she showers for the first time since the sidewalk.

The water is scalding.

She stands under it until her skin is red and her fingers prune, trying to wash off the feeling of being the villain in someone else’s happy ending.

It doesn’t work.

She gets out, wraps herself in a towel, and finally opens the box she’s been avoiding: the one in the back of her closet labeled “misc” in Eli’s handwriting from the move two years ago.

Inside are relics:

• The ticket stub from the first movie they ever saw together (some terrible rom-com they mocked for three hours)

• A pressed flower from the night they got stuck in the rain in Prospect Park

• The Polaroid of them asleep on each other sophomore year, mouths open, limbs tangled

• A note in his handwriting: you drool when you dream about tacos

She sits on the floor surrounded by the wreckage of almost and cries until there are no tears left, just dry, broken sounds that scare even her.

At 3:47 p.m. she opens i********: for the first time in days.

Maya posted a story twenty minutes ago: a candid photo of Eli asleep on her couch, one arm flung over his eyes, mouth slightly open, sunlight striping across his chest.

The caption is a single heart emoji (gold, not red).

Lena stares at it until the fifteen seconds loop three times.

Then she does something she’s never done before.

She likes it.

Her thumb hovers over the heart, trembles, presses.

The little animation bursts across the screen.

She immediately regrets it, but it’s too late.

Within thirty seconds her phone buzzes.

Maya (private message):

thank you ❤️

Lena stares at the text until the screen goes black.

She doesn’t reply.

Night four.

She can’t sleep.

She opens the chat with Eli again.

The message is still delivered, not read.

She types a new one, fingers moving without permission.

I keep waiting for the part where this stops hurting and it never comes.

I keep thinking if I could just go back to the rooftop and say yes instead of don’t, everything would be different.

I keep seeing you happy and hating myself for being the reason you weren’t before.

I keep thinking I deserve this and then hating myself for thinking I deserve anything at all.

She stares at the paragraph for a long time.

Then she deletes it, letter by letter, until the text box is empty again.

She turns off her phone, crawls into bed still wearing the navy hoodie, and curls into the smallest ball she can manage.

She whispers into the dark, over and over, like a prayer she doesn’t believe in anymore:

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

The city outside keeps moving.

Inside her apartment, time stops.

She is twenty-eight years old and has never felt more like a child who broke her favorite toy and only now understands it can never be fixed.

Regret, she learns, is not a feeling.

It’s a place.

And she lives there now.

End of chapter fifteen.

This is rock bottom.

The only way out is through.