Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 11

So I smiled instead, and reached for the broom. I swept the shards into a dustpan. Little crescent moons of porcelain, white against white, like a graveyard of moments that didn’t survive the weight of morning. I didn’t look up. I just kept my hands moving, kept my breath quiet.

And then, somehow, without meaning to, I thought of James. His laugh. That half-smirk like he was trying to hide the fact that he still believed in something. The way he looked at the ocean last night, like it might speak back. Like he was waiting for it to name whatever ache he carried inside him.

People say love is what draws you to someone. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s loneliness. Maybe it’s that moment when your soul recognizes the hollow echo in someone else, and for a second, your own feels less cavernous. There’s something about James. Not the way he walks or talks or plays pretend around people who want him to be someone else. No, it’s in the quiet spaces. The spaces in between his words. The way he looks like he’s always halfway between wanting to run away and begging someone to ask him to stay.

We are both lonely.

Not the kind of lonely you fix with parties or group chats or playlists. The kind of lonely that sleeps in your bones. The kind that even silence gets tired of keeping company. But last night, it was like our lonelinesses touched. Like two empty rooms opened their doors and found comfort in each other’s emptiness. I used to think two broken people couldn’t be anything but a mess. That their cracks would only widen. But maybe I was wrong. Maybe broken recognizes broken and in that recognition, there’s something tender. Something sacred. We didn’t heal each other last night. But somehow, we held the space around the wounds. And that made the pain quieter. Not gone. Just… bearable.

But my dad? He doesn’t have a James.

He doesn’t have someone whose silence syncs with his. Someone who sees the quiver in his hands and chooses not to flinch.

He only has me.

And I wonder, am I enough? Can a daughter be a lighthouse for a man whose ship has already sunk?

He sits now, hunched over his food, pretending to eat. I hear the fork scrape against the plate, a rhythm too mechanical to be real. I don’t think he’s tasted anything since she died. We’re both drowning. Him and I. But we’ve grown so used to it we’ve started calling the water air. We wear our grief like skin and pretend our lungs are gills. Because if we admit we’re suffocating, we’ll have to stop pretending we know how to breathe. So I stay quiet. I let him pretend he didn’t tremble. He lets me pretend I didn’t notice.

And the morning goes on. Golden light. Garlic rice. Coffee that’s growing cold. And somewhere beneath all of it, two people trying to survive the unspeakable, one broken breath at a time.

“I’ll drive you today,” he said, eyes still fixed on the uneaten food.

It wasn’t a question. And I didn’t ask why.

Maybe it was his way of hiding the tremble, of convincing himself he still had some steady ground to offer. Maybe he just wanted to see if I was hiding my own cracks well enough. Or maybe we both needed the ritual of movement to forget the stillness inside us.

Either way, I let him.

I love when he drives me to school.

It’s one of those small, quiet mercies. In the car, we’re just two people on a mundane morning, trapped in traffic, the radio playing songs neither of us knows the lyrics to. For a few minutes, I can pretend things are as they were, that he’s on his way to the office, that mom’s at home folding laundry while humming along to the oldies station, and that tonight we’ll all have dinner together and laugh about something small.