The water below Ravenwood Bridge was dark and restless, churning against the pilings like something with a grudge. Ethan gripped the cold iron railing and watched it, and did not look away.
Somewhere behind him, the town was doing ordinary evening things — dogs barking at nothing, a lawnmower finishing its last pass, someone's kitchen window fogged gold with dinner. None of it reached him.
He'd walked here the way he did most things lately: automatically, like his body had memorized the route and simply hadn't bothered consulting him.
Liv's voice surfaced in his memory, light and unbothered, the way it always was right before it gutted him.
'I'm just killing time with you, Ethan.' She hadn't meant it cruelly. That was the part that made it worse — she hadn't even had to try. Cruelty took effort. This had cost her nothing at all.
He'd almost told her he loved her on this exact bridge yesterday. The words had gotten as far as his teeth, lined up and ready, and then she'd filled the silence with something about Chloe being busy and how lucky it was that he existed to fill the gap, and the words had gone back down where they came from and stayed there.
He thought about the bullies who'd broken his nose in seventh grade and somehow ended the day with his name in the incident report — how the story had rearranged itself around him without his permission, the way stories about him always seemed to. He thought about his brothers' spotless, empty rooms, still smelling faintly of a life happening somewhere without him. He thought about his sisters' laughter drifting up from a farm three hours away, a sound he could almost hear if he tried, and didn't want to. Middle child. Forgotten placeholder. Furniture with a heartbeat, dusted occasionally, never really looked at.
He was so tired of being furniture in his own life.
A strange thought threaded through the misery, thin and cold, arriving from nowhere he could name. He'd been here before. Not this bridge. Not this life. But this exact flavor of nothing — bottomless, familiar, worn smooth by use — he knew it like an old scar he kept forgetting he had until his fingers found it in the dark.
He didn't know what to do with the thought, so he let it go, the way he let go of most things now.He climbed onto the ledge. The metal was cold even through his jeans. Below him the river didn't care. It never had, and there was something almost restful in that — the first honest thing he'd encountered all week.
He didn't cry. He'd expected to. Instead there was just a vast, quiet stillness, like the moment before a held breath finally goes out.
"I'm tired," he said, to no one, and the wind took the words before they'd finished leaving his mouth.
No one heard. No one was going to.