She Took My Hearing, He Took Her Side Chapter 07

She Took My Hearing, He Took Her Side Chapter 07

The first activation appointment nearly broke me. I dug my nails into my palms just to hold still.

Sound wasn’t sound

It was raw static, buzzing and shapeless.

It was shards of broken metal.

It was something sharp scraping against my eardrum.

The doctor asked if I needed to stop.

I shook my head.

“Keep going.”

Adrian stood on the other side of the glass.

He didn’t tell me to push through it, the way Graham always had.

He just wrote one line on a whiteboard.

[If it’s too much, stop. You don’t have to prove anything.]

I read it over and over.

Then I took off the device.

Tears spilled before I could stop them.

Not because of the pain.

Because someone finally told me I was allowed to stop hurting

I didn’t have to be the “understanding” girlfriend.

I didn’t have to grit my teeth and take it.

I didn’t have to hollow myself out so someone else could feel complete.

Treatment dragged on.

Days bled into a blur of tests, follow-ups, and rehab.

I was learning to locate sound again.

The doorbell rang from the left.

A glass hit the floor on the right.

Someone called my name from behind me.

At first, I guessed wrong every single time,

Later, I started catching two or three right out of ten.

The doctor said that was real progress.

I thought so too.

Every inch of it was mine. No one could take it back.

News from back home still reached me occasionally.

Graham was tearing the city apart looking for me.

He checked the airport.

He scoured the hospital.

He tore through his private recording studio.

He even searched my old rehab clinic.

He even tracked down the doctor who’d handled my case

The doctor simply handed him another copy of the surgery cancellation form.

I heard he sat in the hospital corridor all night after that.

By dawn, the nurses said he was still there.

Still clutching that piece of paper.

Like he was holding his own death sentence.

Graham’s mother emailed me.

The first emails blamed me. The later ones begged.

She said Graham hadn’t been sleeping.

That he’d locked himself in the piano room. He wasn’t eating. He wasn’t seeing anyone.

That after the investigation opened, Sienna came by every day, and he turned her away every time.

I read the whole thing. Then I hit delete.

They were always like this.

When I was in pain, no one saw it.

When he was in pain, the whole world showed up to beg on his behalf

But that wasn’t my problem anymore.

My eight years weren’t eight days.

My hearing wouldn’t come back because someone wrote a letter.

A month later, an international music rights company offered me an internship.

Adrian asked if I wanted to take it.

“Your hearing’s still recovering. The workload won’t be easy.”

I said, “I’m taking it.”

He didn’t try to talk me out of it.

He just helped me adjust my rehab schedule.

My first day, I sat in the back of the conference room.

Everyone talked fast.

I couldn’t catch everything, so I turned on a live captioning app.

A colleague noticed and asked me, “Isn’t it hard, working in music when your hearing still isn’t fully back?”

I thought about it.

“Music didn’t do this to me.”

“People did.”

The conference room went quiet for a moment.

Then someone offered a soft, respectful nod.

And right then, something shifted.

The past was a little further behind me than it used to be.