The house is quiet now.

Not the good kind of quiet—not the easy silence of shared comfort. This quiet is thin, fragile, like ice over a deep lake. I sit very still, afraid to crack it.

I feel like the dog again. The way she freezes when voices rise, or when they are in trouble, hiding in their crate.—waiting for the storm to pass. _Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. Maybe no one will notice you._

I brought them here. Two women I love, two survivors, two people who know what it means to sleep uneasy and wake up fighting. I thought we could build something safe together. But safety looks different to each of us.

For Mira, safety is control—no strong smells, no surprises, no traces of the past she’s still outrunning. Her nose, sharpened by chemo and fear, catches dangers I can’t even smell. When she’s calm, she thanks me for the smallest things. When she’s scared, her voice is a knife, and I am suddenly the enemy.

For Shanna, safety is action—clean the mess, fix the problem, _do something_. She scrubbed the floors today, thinking she was helping. She didn’t know the alcohol would smell like a threat. Now she’s locked in her room, wondering if she’s the villain in a story she didn’t mean to write.

For me, safety is… I don’t know anymore. Maybe just the absence of yelling. Maybe the hope that if I stay small enough, careful enough, the house won’t splinter again.

But I can’t people-please my way out of this. I can’t scrub every surface or mute every scent or explain every misunderstanding fast enough.

This isn’t about good or bad people. It’s about three broken radios tuned to different frequencies, all playing the same static of _I just want to feel safe_.

Mira might leave. Shanna might leave. I might be left holding the keys to an empty house, wondering if I failed or if this was always how it would end.

But tonight, the quiet holds. The dog sighs in her sleep. Somewhere, a floorboard creaks.

We’re all still here.

For now, that’s enough.