It's been seventy-six days since he died.
Seventy-six days since I last saw his face, heard his voice, felt his presence in a world that now feels too bare, too hushed.
Seventy-six days since I became the girl everyone whispers about.
"She survived."
"She's lucky."
"Poor thing, she hasn't spoken since the accident."
They think I don't hear them. But I do.
I hear everything. Everything except him.
The rain crawls down the hospital window in trembling lines, just like the night it happened. I lift my fingers, tracing patterns in the condensation. It's the only thing I can move these days: my hands, my mind, my grief. The rest of me—the parts that mattered—are buried under the weight of his absence.
They say I was lucky. That I should be grateful.
Grateful.
I try to remember what that feels like.
The nurse enters, moving too carefully like she's afraid I'll break.
"Lena, can you hear me?"
The words echo, but not in her voice.
I flinch.
"Lena, can you hear me?"
No. No, I can't. I haven't heard from him since that night. Since the last time I saw him—standing in the rain, hands in his pockets, head bowed under the weight of something I didn't understand.
"Are you okay?" I had asked him.
He didn't answer.
"Zane?"
"Don't," he whispered.
And I didn't.
I should have.
I should have grabbed his arm. I should have made him stay.
But I let him go.
And now he's gone.
The nurse keeps speaking. Her voice is soft, muffled, like a sound travelling through water. Everything feels like that now. Like I'm drowning, except my lungs keep forcing me to breathe.
I stare past her, past the white walls, past the machines that beep softly in the background. I stare out the window at a world that still moves, still turns, still breathes—like nothing happened.
Like he never existed.
But I know better.
I know that Zane isn't gone. He's everywhere.
In the rain.
In the headlights of passing cars.
In the flickering hospital lights that buzz at odd hours of the night.
And in the spaces where silence is too loud.
The first time I woke up, I thought he'd be here. Sitting in the chair beside my bed, waiting for me to open my eyes.
But the chair was empty. Just like his seat at school. Just like his side of the bed. Just like the world, now that he isn't in it.
That's when I knew.
I knew he was really gone.
I knew I was alone in this grief, in this unbearable, suffocating quiet.
And worst of all—
I knew that if I had just said something that night, he might still be alive.
"Lena?"
The nurse again.
I blink. The rain keeps falling.
"Are you okay?" she asks.
I almost laugh.
What kind of question is that?
I am a girl who let him go. A girl who now exists in the spaces where he used to be. A girl who cannot feel her legs, cannot feel her heart, cannot feel anything except the absence of the boy who once made her feel everything.
I exhale slowly and let my fingers slip from the window.
No one knows what happened that night. No one knows that the last thing I ever said to him was nothing at all.
"Lena, can you hear me?"
She doesn't mean to say it like that, but it's all I hear.
Zane, can you hear me?
I close my eyes.
He doesn't answer.
He never does.
And even if he used to once upon a time, now it's been forever since I ever heard him speak, or even look back at me.