The chair across from me scrapes against the linoleum floor. I don't look up immediately from my chipped mug of decaf coffee. The steam has long since dissipated, just like the courage I felt this morning when Dr. Calloway suggested Eliot might visit again.

"They wouldn't let me bring actual coffee," he says. His voice sounds different than yesterday—less sharp, more tentative. "Said it might 'agitate the patients.' As if anything here could be worse than their sad excuse for tea."

I finally lift my gaze. Eliot's dressed more casually today—dark jeans, a soft gray sweater that brings out the blue in his eyes. He still has shadows beneath those eyes, proof that his nights are as restless as mine. The cane he was using yesterday is gone, but I notice how carefully he lowers himself into the chair, as if his body still remembers being a prison.

The silence stretches between us, thick with all the things we haven't said and might never say. Outside the common room windows, afternoon light slants at an angle that turns the dust motes visible in the air. I wonder if he's thinking about yesterday too—the way I flinched when he reached for me, the harsh words he'd unleashed before storming out.

"Dr. Calloway says we should try... talking," he finally offers, his fingers drumming nervously on his thigh—a nervous habit I've never seen from him before. "Actual talking, not just..." He gestures vaguely between us, "whatever that disaster was yesterday."

I set my coffee mug down carefully, watching the ripples in the remaining brown liquid. "Talking," I repeat, the word feeling foreign on my tongue. It seems so simple, yet the things I need to say feel too big to fit into ordinary words.