Nathan hated the crutches,
The hospital food,
The humiliation of asking for help.
His body felt broken,
But worse than that,
His pride had shattered too.
He had long covered over feeling vulnerable,
And he truly didn't want to be in a situation where he needed Nico's help.
Nico didn't come with speeches or apologies.
He just showed up,
With rides to physiotherapy,
With healthy takeout options and paper bags,
With silence that felt steady.
At first,
Nathan pushed back,
Snapping,
Grumbling,
Every part of him wishing he didn't have to accept his brother's support.
But then came the night when the pain meds wore off and his whole body shook,
And it was Nico who held the glass of water to his lips,
With the pain medication he desperately needed.
Nathan didn't say thank you.
He didn't need to.
Sometimes the most human thing we can do is let someone we're furious with hold our glass when our own hands can't.
The first time Lauren visited him in the hospital,
Nathan couldn't look at her,
Raged,
Burned in him like a second heartbeat.
But when she asked softly,
How's your pain today?
Something gave way inside of him.
She wasn't asking to be let off the hook or to be given time to explain what had happened.
She was asking because she cared,
And that care,
The way she looked at him,
As much as he didn't want to admit it,
It still reached him.
She stayed that afternoon,
Sitting in the chair by his bed,
In the quiet between breaths,
And something in him softened,
Almost against his will.
He realized how much he missed her,
The sound of her voice,
Even her laugh when he cursed at the physical therapist.
A crack was beginning to form in the wall he'd built,
And through that crack came a flicker of something he hadn't let himself feel in weeks.
Maybe it was relief,
Maybe gratitude,
Or maybe it was the simple mercy of not being alone in all of this.
This softening opened up a moment that felt like she could share about her experience at the family constellation workshop all those weeks ago.
She put the contact information for the therapist in his phone.
She had created such a shift,
Opened up so much awareness,
So that he could reach out to someone that he could really trust with everything that he would likely still need support with.
Lauren knew he'd already tried talk therapy before.
He came away more riled up from talking about what had happened,
Exposing the raw hurts,
Everything that was left unsaid,
All that was left unspoken.
It's as if it had stirred everything up without finding resolution.
Nathan believed therapy wouldn't help him.
His pain was too deep,
He thought.
He felt lost with who he could reach out to,
Who he could trust with this pain he'd carried for so long.
He truly believed it was a part of him.
Nathan walked into his private constellation session the way a dog digs in his paws at the vet's door,
Resistant,
Suspicious,
Already scanning the room in case an escape is required.
With each session,
Nathan unwrapped the words he'd been carrying like barbed wire,
Some of what he discovered when visiting his mom's grave just before the accident.
Painful thoughts,
Like I wasn't enough for my mom,
I wasn't enough for Lauren,
Maybe I'll never be enough.
A therapist caught his eyes and simply nodded.
She helped him trace it all back through the family line.
His father's rage,
His mother's silence,
The inheritance of unspoken grief that had been shaping him all along.
For the first time,
Nathan didn't drown it in whiskey or burn it out on the highway.
He sat with it,
And it hurt like hell,
A fresh kind of hurt.
He now understood the intensity of what he'd been running from in the first place.
There was something sacred in that hurt,
Because that's what turning towards what had been handed down feels like,
Touching the grief and the silence that never belonged to you,
But lived within you anyway.
And beginning to give it back,
The starting point of not living from that painful place.
Nathan left every session wrung out,
Like someone had pulled his insides into the light.
But he also felt a little less armored.
The pain wasn't gone,
But it was loosening,
Leaving space to breathe where before there had only been constriction.
He began to see that his fury at Nico,
At Lauren,
At himself,
Wasn't just about what happened between them.
It was about a lifetime of trying to outrun the silence of his childhood,
The ache of never being able to step out of his parents' storm.
What surprised him wasn't the therapist's questions,
But his own answers,
Words he never thought he'd say aloud.
Words like,
I needed my mom,
And she wasn't there.
Instead,
It felt like my mom needed me to be there for her.
It was so confusing.
It felt impossible.
Words like,
I hated my dad,
But I loved him too.
Words like,
I'm so fucking tired of pretending I don't care.
I'm done with living a life to distract myself from all of this.
In saying them,
In the act of speaking what had been unspeakable for decades,
Something inside of him began to shift.
It wasn't peace.
It wasn't forgiveness.
But it was an inner movement that started to make everything in his life feel different.
And sometimes,
That kind of movement,
Even when it hurts,
Is the first proof that you're not trapped anymore.
