It was the third year since Talia’s borderline personality disorder had clawed its way back to the surface. And it was the third time she had put me in a hospital bed. When I finally drifted awake in the sterile, white room, the space beside my bed was empty. A familiar, cold spike of anxiety shot through my chest. I scrambled out of bed, my limbs heavy and trembling, and limped out into the corridor to find her. Instead, as I approached the heavy fire doors of the stairwell, I heard a voice. It was Cody, my best friend, his tone low but vibrating with a suppressed, furious roar. “You almost choked him to death, Talia! Do you even realize what you did?” A heavy silence followed, thick and suffocating. “The first time you spiraled, you shattered his left ankle,” Cody continued, his voice cracking with emotion. “He’ll never run again because of you. The second time, you scalded his hands so badly he can barely hold a pencil. And now, this? You almost took his life!” “Why won’t you just divorce him? Why won’t you let him go?” I crept closer, my breath catching in my throat. Through the narrow pane of the reinforced glass, I watched them. Talia didn’t answer with words. Instead, she leaned in, her movements desperate and starved, and pressed her lips against Cody’s. It was a long, agonizing kiss. When she finally pulled back, her face was a mask of torture. “You know what this disease does to me,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “It only destroys the people closest to me. If I divorce him and marry you… I’ll just end up hurting you, Codes. I can’t do that to you.” “I just can’t…” The blood in my veins turned to ice. I stood frozen in the hallway, the sterile smell of bleach suddenly making me violently ill. Right then, my phone vibrated in my hand. It was a FaceTime call from an unknown number. Mechanically, my thumb swiped the screen. The face that appeared on the screen made my breath hitch. It was Talia. But not the Talia in the stairwell—this was Talia at eighteen, her eyes bright, her face free of the heavy, manic shadow that would later consume her. “I’m the eighteen-year-old Talia, the one who finally got cured,” the girl on the screen said, her voice bubbling with a sweet, youthful hope. “You’re twenty-eight-year-old Jesse, right? Tell me, did we get married? Do we have kids?” “And Cody… that annoying shadow of a best friend, he didn’t keep ruining our dates, did he?” A sharp, physical pain bloomed in my chest. Slowly, silently, I angled the phone’s camera toward the glass window of the stairwell. “See for yourself,” I whispered. … Talia’s eyes were filled with a burning, desperate intensity as she looked at Cody. “Three years ago, when I relapsed for the first time… it was because I saw you accept a drink from another woman at our wedding reception,” she confessed, her voice hollow. “I didn’t want to hurt you. So I had to take it out on Jesse.” My hand tightened around the phone, the metal casing digging into my palm. I remembered our wedding night. Talia had spent it huddled in the dark corner of our bedroom, staring at me like a predator cornering a rabbit. She had picked up a heavy wooden chair and hurled it at my shins, her eyes wild and bloodshot. “If I break your legs, you’ll never be able to run away from me, will you?” she had screamed. I had blacked out from the sheer agony. When I woke up, there was a steel rod holding my left tibia together. My athletic career, my scholarships—gone in an instant. And only now did I learn the truth. I had spent seven years helping Talia manage the illness she thought she had beaten at eighteen. But all it took was Cody showing a little warmth to someone else for the madness to drag her back under. Cody turned his face away, tears spilling over his eyelashes. Talia reached out, her fingers trembling as she cupped his jaw, forcing him to look at her. “The second time I snapped… it was because you wrote a birthday card to a female colleague. What was I supposed to do? I had to find Jesse. I had to let it out.” The color drained from my face. My whole body began to shudder. After losing my athletic career, I had tried to rebuild myself, teaching myself digital design. I remembered the afternoon I had finally finished a major portfolio piece for a client. I had been so proud. Talia had walked into the study, carrying a kettle of boiling water. Without a word, she had poured it over my hands. “You’re working so hard,” she had whispered as I screamed in agony. “Are you trying to build a life without me? Just let me take care of you. Stay here.” Though she had panicked and driven me to the emergency room herself, the third-degree burns had already done their damage. My fingers were permanently stiffened. Even holding a stylus was an exercise in frustration. Cody shook his head desperately, trying to pull away from her touch. “Stop… please, Talia, just stop…” But she wouldn’t. “And this time? You texted me saying you were leaving the country. You were going to cut me out of your life forever.” I stumbled backward, my shoulder hitting the wall. Last night, I had spent hours cooking a beautiful dinner, waiting to celebrate her twenty-eighth birthday. She had burst through the door, her face dark with fury. “You made all this food, put on this little show… is this your grand farewell?” she had hissed. “You’re never leaving me.” She hadn’t listened to a single word of explanation. She had dragged me from my chair, slapped me repeatedly until my face was numb and swollen, and then wrapped her hands around my throat. Just before the darkness took me, I had seen Cody burst through the door, sinking his teeth into her arm to pull her off me. For years, I had blamed myself. I thought my own inadequacies, my obsession with my work, had triggered her anxiety. But it had never been about me. Every single time she broke me, it was because of Cody. Cody was sobbing openly now. “I give up. I won’t leave. I’ll stay. Just… please don’t hurt Jesse anymore.” On my phone screen, the eighteen-year-old Talia’s eyes had gone completely wild. Tears of rage and horror streamed down her youthful face. “I’m going to kill them,” she hissed, her voice a terrifying whisper through the speaker. “How could they do this to you? How could I do this to you?” I let out a weak, broken laugh, leaning my head against the cold wall. “Don’t,” I whispered to the screen. “I don’t want revenge. I just want the eighteen-year-old you… to let the eighteen-year-old me go.” The young Talia froze. Her lips parted, trying to form words, but only a desperate sob came out. “Wait for me,” she finally managed, her voice cracking. “I won’t let anyone hurt you again. Not even myself.” The screen went black. I dragged myself back to my hospital room, feeling like a ghost inhabiting a broken shell. A few minutes later, Cody walked in, his eyes red and swollen. Seeing me awake, he rushed to my bedside, his hands hovering over my bandaged neck. “Jesse, you’re awake,” he breathed, trying to look into my eyes. “I… I gave her a piece of my mind. She won’t lay a hand on you again.” I flinched away from his touch, staring blankly at the ceiling. “You told me last week you were moving to Chicago. When’s your flight?” In the corner of the room, Talia, who had been quietly peeling an apple, froze. The paring knife nicked her finger, but she didn’t seem to notice the blood dripping onto the fruit. Cody’s smile turned stiff. “I’m not going anymore. Not with Talia in this state.” When he saw me frown, he quickly added, “Jesse, we’ve been brothers since we were kids. I’ve always had your back. If I leave, who’s going to protect you from her?” Looking at his tear-stained, earnest face, I felt a sick sense of wonder. How had he kept up this lie? They had been sleeping together behind my back for at least five years. My mind drifted back to the first day I met Talia. She had been huddled on the curb, bruised and crying after her stepfather kicked her out. I had stolen my dad’s first-aid kit to clean her scrapes. I had brought her into my home, shared my life with her. And in return, her attachment to me had grown into something suffocating. When we were kids, if I accepted a candy bar from another classmate, she would bite my arm until it bled. In high school, if I whispered to a female lab partner, she would drive a pencil into my palm. Once, she had even held a small pocketknife to my ribs, forcing me to let her scratch her initials into my hip. And every time she crossed the line, Cody would step in. He would scream at her, fight her, put himself between us. He had always been my protector. “She’s out of her mind, Jesse! She’s a psycho!” he would tell me. And Talia, after every episode, would dissolve into a puddle of weeping remorse. “Jesse, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. I’m just so scared you’re going to leave me like everyone else did.” When we graduated high school, I had stolen money from my parents’ safe to take her to a private therapist. That was when we first heard the words: Borderline Personality Disorder. My parents had found out about the money and beaten me within an inch of my life. I remembered Talia kneeling beside me, her hands hovering over the welts on my back, weeping because she was too afraid to touch me. “Jesse… you’re the only person in the world who truly loves me,” she had sobbed. “I believe you now. You’ll never leave me.” After that, her symptoms seemed to vanish. We went to college together. She worked herself to the bone to build a successful career, desperate to prove to my parents that she was worthy of me. Three years ago, we got married. And on our wedding night, the nightmare started all over again. Cody had arrived at the hospital back then, silent and pale, staying by my side until I was discharged. I had thought he was just being a loyal friend. But now I understood. I was the anchor that kept her stable, and Cody was the tempest that tore her apart. I took a deep, agonizing breath. I looked directly at Cody and let out a cold, humorless laugh. “You don’t need to worry about protecting me anymore,” I said. “I’m divorcing her.” Talia stiffened. The paring knife clattered against the linoleum floor. “Divorce?” she whispered, her voice dangerously quiet. “You want to leave me? Just because of one bad night?” If we were eighteen, Cody would have jumped for joy, telling me I had finally gained some sense. But now, he only looked at me with a heavy, patronizing sigh. “Jesse, don’t talk in anger,” Cody said softly. “You two have been through hell and back for a decade. You can’t just throw that away. She only lost control because she was terrified of losing you. Tell you what—I’ll move into your guest room. I’ll help you keep an eye on her.” I pushed his hands away, a wave of pure disgust washing over me. “She almost killed me, Cody! If one of us has to die for this marriage to work, why does it have to be me?” Talia’s face darkened, the violent, erratic energy rolling off her in waves. She forced a tight, chilling smile and handed me the blood-speckled apple. “But you’re still breathing, aren’t you? You’ve survived worse. Don’t be so dramatic.” “Dramatic?” I threw the apple against the wall, where it shattered into wet pieces. Before they could stop me, I ripped open my hospital gown, exposing my chest and torso. “Look at me, Talia! Look at my arms, my legs, my ribs! Is there a single inch of my skin that doesn’t carry a scar from one of your ‘episodes’?” “I gave you everything. And what did you give me?” For a second, she looked at my ruined body, and a flicker of something close to disgust crossed her face. My voice cracked, tears finally spilling over. “I’m done. We’re divorcing. If you don’t sign the papers, I’ll let my lawyer handle it.” Talia slammed her fist into the drywall, leaving a dent. She took a step toward my bed, but Cody jumped in, his face pale as he pushed her back toward the door. “Get out,” Cody told her, his voice tight. “Let me talk to him first.” Once the door clicked shut behind her, Cody let out a long breath and turned to me. “Jesse, before you married her, I asked you if you were sure. You swore to me, on your life, that you would protect her forever…” “When did it start?” I interrupted, my voice barely a whisper. He froze. “What?” I looked him dead in the eye. “Was it after college, when you suddenly turned down that stable state job your dad got you, just to move to our city? Or was it when we were getting my tux fitted, and Talia insisted you try one on too?” The color drained from his face. “You… you know?” his voice shook, the self-righteous anger vanishing instantly. “Jesse, I… I did it to protect you. After high school, I went to the same college just to make sure she wouldn’t hurt you again. We were always together, the three of us. And then, graduation night… we both got so drunk, and it just… happened.” He bit his lip until it bled. “But I’ve been in agony, Jesse! Every single day for the past three years, I wanted to end it. But Talia…” The betrayal felt like a physical blade twisting in my chest. I grabbed my pillow and hurled it at his face. “Get out!” I screamed, my voice breaking. “Get the hell away from me! Don’t you ever look at me again!” Cody choked back a sob, turned on his heel, and ran out of the room. I lay back, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling as the silence of the room closed in on me. A text buzzed on my phone. It was from the unknown number again. “Almost there… just hold on a little longer, Jesse. You’re going to be free soon.” I closed my eyes, my head throbbing with a brutal, blinding pain. Suddenly, a violent force grabbed my wrist. Before I could process it, I was dragged off the bed and slammed onto the hard floor. A sickening crack echoed through the room as my left leg—the one with the steel rod—twisted unnaturally. White-hot agony flared through my body. I looked up, gasping for air through the sweat dripping into my eyes, and saw Talia. Her eyes were completely black with rage. “What did you say to Cody, Jesse?” Ignoring my screams, she grabbed my collar and began dragging me down the hall. My elbows and knees banged violently against the metal doorframes, then against the concrete steps of the stairwell as she hauled me upward. By the time she threw me onto the gravel of the hospital rooftop, I was barely conscious. I forced my eyes open. Cody was standing at the very edge of the roof, his back to the drop. He looked down at my bruised, shivering form and screamed at Talia. “How could you do this to him? You promised me you’d never lay a hand on him again!” Cody turned to me, his eyes filled with a desperate, tragic guilt. “Jesse… I’m sorry. I ruined everything. I’ll give her back to you now. I’ll make it right.” I let out a bloody, bitter spit onto the gravel. “Is this a joke to you, Cody? Are you trying to play the tragic hero now? I treated you like a brother, and you crawled into my wife’s bed. Now you want me to bless your drama?” Talia glared at me, her chest heaving. “Shut up! Jesse, you’re the one who should feel guilty! If you hadn’t forced your way into my life, if you hadn’t taken the title of my husband, he wouldn’t be like this! He’s been depressed for years because of us!” She grabbed me by my torn gown and shoved me toward the ledge, right next to Cody. “If you can’t convince him to step down, then you can go down with him!” I lost my footing, my bad leg giving out. The cold night air rushed past my back as I began to tilt over the edge. But just as gravity took hold, a small, incredibly strong hand clamped onto my forearm. “I’ve got you,” a voice gasped. I was violently pulled back onto the gravel. I looked up, panting, and froze. Standing there, holding my arm, was the eighteen-year-old Talia. She was breathing heavily, wearing the vintage denim jacket I remembered from high school. I looked over at the twenty-eight-year-old Talia and Cody. To my horror, their bodies were beginning to flicker. They were turning translucent, like fading ink on wet paper. “What… what is happening?” Cody gasped, looking down at his hands as they began to dissolve into the night air. I looked at the young girl beside me. “What did you do?”
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