It's just a filler Chapter. This chapter shows the recovery of Carter in Rehab and all the bonding of Aishweriya and Carter
CARTER's POV
The white ceiling tiles above me blur in and out of focus, not from medication this time, but from the ache in my chest. Everything still feels raw. Like I'm stitched together with thread far too thin to hold. The beep of the monitor beside me is steady, unlike my thoughts.
She's here. She's always here.
Aishwariya sits curled in the plastic hospital chair like she belongs nowhere else in the world but at my side. Her hair's pulled into a loose braid. There's a sketchpad open on her lap, a tiny pencil tucked behind her ear, and yet she hasn't looked down in an hour. She's only been looking at me.
"Hey," I say, my voice cracking as I break the silence. "You don't have to stay, you know."
She lifts her eyes, soft but unshaken. "Don't start with that again."
I sigh and look away. "I'm serious, Aish. You've already lost so much because of me. Clients. Reputation. Hell, your peace of mind."
"Carter." There's a quiet power in how she says my name—like she's summoning something from me that I'm not sure exists anymore.
"I mean it." I force myself to meet her gaze. "You nearly lost me for real. And not just to Emily. I— I almost let it happen. I almost didn't care."
Tears gather in her eyes, but she blinks them away. "I know," she whispers. "But you're here. You're still here."
She reaches out and takes my hand, gentle but sure. Her warmth seeps into my skin. I don't deserve it.
"Everyone keeps telling me I should be angry with you," she says, her voice barely audible over the monitor's beeping. "They say I should walk away, protect myself."
"Maybe they're right," I manage to say.
Her fingers tighten around mine. "They don't understand."
"Understand what?"
"That some people are worth fighting for, even when they've stopped fighting for themselves." The conviction in her voice steals my breath. "Especially then."
I swallow hard. "The thing is... I can't stay here pretending I'm okay. Not after this. Not when every cell in my body remembers what it felt like to go numb again." My throat burns. "I want to get better. Better. And not because I'm afraid, but because... because you were screaming at Emily like you were ready to burn the world down for me. And that-that terrified me."
Her brows furrowed, confusion etched between them. "Why?"
"Because you still saw something in me worth saving. Even when I didn't. Even when I was trying to disappear."
Her hand tightens around mine.
"When I was lying there, feeling everything fade," I continue, voice breaking, "I had this moment of clarity. So sharp it hurt. I thought—what would happen to Aish if I just... stopped? And for the first time in years, I was scared of dying. Not for me. For you."
A tear slides down her cheek. "Carter..."
"I want to go back," I say. "To rehab. This time, not to check a box. Not for show. I need to do this. For me. Because I want to look you in the eye one day and know I'm not going to fall apart the moment life gets hard."
"Are you sure?" she asks, and I hear the caution in her voice—she's been here before with me, with promises that dissolved like sugar in rain.
"Last time," I admit, "I went because they told me I had to. This time... I'm asking to go. That's the difference."
Aishwariya's lips tremble. She leans forward, pressing her forehead gently to mine.
"I'll visit every single day they let me," she whispers. "And I'll bring you terrible jokes and worse drawings."
I laugh—a cracked, tired sound that still feels like hope. "Promise?"
"Promise."
She pulls back, eyes shining. "I don't care how long it takes. I just want you to come home to yourself. I want you to know what I've known since the night I saw you on that rooftop eight years ago."
I nod, overwhelmed. "That I'm not broken."
"That you're worth everything," she corrects. "Every fight, every tear, every moment of doubt."
"Even after I pushed you away?"
She smiles—a sad, weathered thing. "Especially then."
I close my eyes. I don't deserve her. But God, I'm going to fight like hell to be someone who does.
"Thank you," I whisper.
She kisses my forehead and smiles. "Let's take this step. One at a time."
"Every mountain begins with pebbles," I murmur, repeating what she always used to tell me.
"You remember."
"I remember everything, Aish. Even when I pretended not to."
That night, I slept without nightmares for the first time in weeks.
Some days later
Her hand was still in mine when the nurse came in with the discharge papers.
It wasn't raining outside, but something about the light made it feel like it was. The kind of light that filters through grief, through goodbye. Her thumb kept tracing circles on my knuckles like she was memorizing the bones of me, like she was afraid I'd vanish again.
"I don't want to say goodbye," I said, voice low, brittle.
"You're not," she whispered. "You're saying 'see you soon.'"
I swallowed hard. My heart had never felt heavier. Or clearer.
"What if I can't do it this time either?" The question escapes before I can stop it. "What if I'm just... wasting everyone's time again?"
Aishwariya shifts to face me fully, her eyes fierce and tender at once. "Do you remember what you told me the night of my first gallery showing? When I was hiding in the bathroom?"
"That was different."
"No, it wasn't. I was terrified of failure. You said courage isn't the absence of fear—it's moving forward even when your hands are shaking."
I look down at our intertwined fingers. "My hands are shaking."
"Good," she says. "That means you're awake. That means you care what happens next."
"I'm scared, Aish."
"I know." Her voice cracked, but she didn't let go. "But you're still going. That's everything."
She reached into her bag and pulled out a folded piece of paper—her sketch of the rooftop where we first met, eight years ago. "Put this somewhere. So if you forget who you are... you'll remember who you were with me."
I open the sketch carefully. It's us-silhouettes against a night sky filled with impossible stars. The kind of stars you can't see in the city unless someone shows you where to look.
"How did you manage to keep believing in me?" I ask, my voice barely a whisper. "After everything. After Emily. After finding me like... that."
She's quiet for a long moment, her eyes distant with memory. "Do you remember the diner where we went for a quick meal a few days ago? When you told me about your mother?"
I nod. How could I forget? Sitting in that twenty-four-hour diner at 3 a.m., spilling my darkest truths while she stirred too much sugar into her coffee.
"You said addiction runs in your blood like a curse," she continues. "But I saw something else that night. I saw someone fighting against the current. And that fight—that's who you are, Carter. Not the moments when you drift underwater. But the moments when you claw your way back to the surface."
"I don't deserve you," I breathed.
She cupped my face. "You don't have to. Just fight. Just come back."
And then, quietly, firmly: "I'll visit every Thursday. I'll bring bad tea, good books, and all my worst jokes."
That made me laugh, even though my chest felt like it was splitting open.
"The strawberry ones?" I ask, referring to our long-running argument about what constitutes the worst type of joke.
"The worst ones I can find," she promises with a smile. "I've been saving them up."
The nurse gave me a soft nod. It was time.
"I've spent so long running from myself," I say, my voice steadier than I feel. "Maybe it's time I finally stand still long enough to face who I am."
She squeezes my hand. "Just don't forget who you can be."
I hugged her like I was anchoring myself to shore. "Don't disappear while I'm gone."
"I won't. I'll be here. Always."
"Even if—"
"No ifs,'" she interrupts. "Just come back better. Not perfect. Just better."
And when I let go and took my first step toward the doors, I didn't look back.
Not because I didn't want to.
But because I finally believed I might have something to return to.
CARTER – 3 WEEKS INTO REHAB
Some mornings I wake up and forget where I am.
The sterile white walls. The quiet buzz of fluorescent lights. The way the window filters in a kind of muted sun. It all feels like a dream I never wanted, except I know I chose this. For once in my life, I chose to stay. I chose to fight.
She visits every Thursday.
Aishwariya brings tea in a thermos that technically isn't allowed, but the nurses love her, so they look away. She carries books—Rumi, Murakami, Maya Angelou. Once she brought a children's book because she said my brain needed soft places to land. I laughed. And I needed that laugh more than I knew.
"You're actually smiling," she says on her third visit, settling into the plastic chair across from me.
"Don't look so surprised," I reply, taking the thermos she offers. The warmth feels like a gift. "I've smiled before."
"Not like that." She studies me with artist's eyes, seeing details others miss. "That's a real smile. It reaches your eyes."
I look down at the steaming cup. "I had a good session yesterday. First one where I didn't feel like I was just... performing recovery."
"Tell me about it?" she asks, and I hear the careful hope in her voice.
"We talked about my mother," I say after a moment. "About how I've spent my life terrified of becoming her."
"And?"
"And maybe... maybe that fear is what kept pushing me toward her path." The realization still feels raw, newly formed. "Like I was so afraid of the fall that I couldn't stop looking down."
She nods, understanding without needing more words. That's always been our way—half-finished sentences that the other completes in silence.
"Dr. Levinson asked me something that kept me up all night," I continue.
"What was it?"
"He asked when I last did something purely because it brought me joy. Not to escape. Not to impress someone. Not to check a box. Just... for joy."
She brings her knees up to her chest, making herself smaller in the chair. "And what did you answer?"
"I couldn't remember."
The sadness in her eyes mirrors my own. "Oh, Carter."
"So that's my homework," I say, attempting lightness. "To remember what joy feels like."
"And have you?"
I look at her. The flecks of gold in her dark eyes. The small scar above her right eyebrow from when she fell off her bike at twelve. The way her hands never completely stop moving, like they're always creating something, even in stillness.
"I'm starting to," I say softly.
She brings sketches, too. Her fingers were stained with charcoal, her eyes lit with something like freedom. She always says, "This one's terrible, but I drew it thinking of you." Then she watches my face like it matters if I like it.
And God, I always do.
"This is incredible," I tell her as she hands me a drawing of the ocean at sunset. "The way you've captured the light..."
She shakes her head. "The proportions are all wrong. And I rushed the foreground."
"You've always been your harshest critic."
"Says the man who once threw away an entire manuscript because the protagonist didn't deserve a happy ending."
I wince at the memory. "Touché."
"I have been thinking about that story, though," she says carefully. "Do you ever miss writing?"
The question catches me off guard. "Sometimes," I admit. "But it feels... distant now. Like something from another life."
"You could start again. Small steps."
"Maybe." I trace the edge of her drawing with my fingertip. "My therapist suggested journaling."
"And?"
"And I wrote two words and stared at the ceiling for an hour."
She laughs, the sound warming the sterile room. "What were the words?"
"'Dear Aish.'"
Her smile fades into something deeper, more complex. "You could write to me, you know. Between visits."
"Would you write back?"
"Every single time."
We don't talk about the overdose. Not directly. Sometimes she holds my hand too tightly, sometimes she just whispers, "Not again. Not ever again."
AISHWARIYA – 1 MONTH IN
He's trying.
I see it in his shoulders when he sits up straighter, in the way his hands have stopped shaking when he holds my tea. In how he asks, "Did you eat?" before he lets me talk about my week.
"You don't have to mother me," I tell him, but there's no bite in my words.
"It's not mothering," he counters. "It's caring. There's a difference."
"And what's that?"
"Mothering is what you do because you think you should. Caring is what you do because you can't help it."
I smile despite myself. "When did you get so wise?"
"Thursday group therapy," he says wryly. "Turns out rock bottom is a great teacher."
"Carter—"
"It's okay," he says, and for once, I almost believe him. "I'm learning to talk about it without drowning in it. That's progress."
He's still afraid. I am, too. But healing is a slow and brutal mercy, and we're both crawling toward it.
"Tell me something good," he says every visit, like it's our ritual now. "Something that made you smile this week."
Today, I have news. "I've started working again."
His eyes brighten. "Really? That's fantastic, Aish."
I've started working again. Small weddings. Soft colors. Familiar faces. I didn't announce it on social media. Didn't do a PR blitz to fix what Aaron shattered. I let the silence build a new beginning.
"It's nothing big," I add quickly. "Just a few small events. People who knew me before..."
"Before the gossip mill got hold of us," he finishes.
There's a moment of silence between us, heavy with all the time we've lost. All the time, we might still lose.
"I'm proud of you," he says finally. "For not letting him win."
"Aaron was just the messenger," I reply. "The real battle was with myself. Believing I could still create beauty after... everything."
And then—my art.
"There's something else," I say, hesitant to share too much good news when he's still confined by these walls.
"Tell me."
I submitted pieces to a local gallery. Anonymously, at first. Then under my name. The woman at the gallery cried when she saw them. Said they made her feel something she couldn't explain.
"She wants to feature them," I finish, still not quite believing it myself. "In next month's showcase."
Carter's smile is radiant—the kind I've missed for so long. "Aish, that's incredible! Which pieces?"
"The series I did a few months ago. The ones about memory."
"The charcoal sketches? With the water elements?"
I'm touched he remembers. "Yes."
"They'll be perfect," he says with such certainty that I almost believe him. "Those pieces... they speak."
"They were about you," I admit, the words escaping before I can reconsider. "About us."
His expression softens. "I know."
That was the first night I didn't cry myself to sleep in weeks.
CARTER – 2 MONTHS IN
Group therapy broke me.
I didn't even talk. Just listened as a man named Theo said he couldn't remember his daughter's birthday because he'd been high. And a woman named Mina said her boyfriend was in jail because of something she made him do.
Their shame stuck to me like tar.
"It was like looking in a mirror," I tell Aishwariya during her visit. "Seeing all the ways I could have destroyed more lives. Including yours."
She shakes her head. "You can't carry their guilt, Carter."
"Can't I? Their stories could have been mine. Might still be mine."
"But they're not."
"Only because Liv found me in time and you were there to help me."
She flinches like I've struck her. "Don't."
"I'm sorry." I reach for her hand. "I shouldn't have said that."
"No, you shouldn't have." There's a hardness to her voice I rarely hear. "Because it makes what happened about me. And it wasn't. It was about your pain, your choices."
"Aish—"
"Let me finish." She takes a deep breath. "I didn't save you. I just happened to be there when you decided to let yourself be saved. There's a difference."
I went back to my room and stared at the mirror. Not at my face—but at my eyes. Hollow. Faded. Like they didn't believe in anything anymore.
That night, I wrote Aish a letter.
Not a love letter. A truth letter.
I told her I had to stop trying to be the version of me she saw. I had to learn to be okay with being broken and still breathing.
When I hand it to her the following Thursday, she reads it silently, her face giving nothing away.
"You think I don't see you broken?" she finally asks, looking up.
"I think you see past it. And sometimes... sometimes I need someone to just sit in the broken with me. Not trying to fix it."
"Is that what you think I've been doing? Trying to fix you?"
"No. Not intentionally." I search for the right words. "But loving someone means wanting their pain to stop. And sometimes... sometimes pain needs to be felt before it can be healed."
She wrote back the next day: "Then be broken. I'll still be here."
Her letter continues: "I don't love you because I think you'll become whole again. I love you because you're brave enough to admit you're shattered. Because you're trying to find beauty in the cracks instead of pretending they don't exist. Be broken, Carter. Be messy and difficult and uncertain. Just be alive with it all."
AISHWARIYA – 3 MONTHS IN
He's starting to sound like himself again.
In letters, in small jokes. He asked me to send him the worst wedding Pinterest board I'd seen that week. I sent him a nightmare of glitter mason jars and camo tuxedos. He laughed. "You deserve hazard pay."
"I missed your laugh," I tell him during my visit, sitting closer than usual.
"Even though it's rusty?" he asks.
"Especially because it's rusty. It means it's real."
We've developed rituals now. Every visit begins with tea. Then he asks about my week, genuinely listens as I talk about clients and color schemes and the new gallery pieces.
"What about the Hamilton wedding?" he asks today. "Did they finally decide on a venue?"
I'm surprised he remembers such a detail from my previous rambling. "They did. The botanical gardens."
"Good choice. Better than that converted warehouse they were considering."
"You were paying attention."
He looks almost hurt. "Of course I was."
I'm handling bigger weddings now. Word got out that I didn't fall apart. That my business didn't close. Some clients even apologized for canceling. I told them it's fine, but I won't take them back. Not out of pride—just out of peace.
"Aaron called," I say carefully, watching his reaction.
Carter stiffens. "What did he want?"
"To apologize. Said he was drunk when he leaked those photos to the press. Said he never meant for it to go so far."
"Do you believe him?"
I consider the question. "I believe he's sorry he got caught. That his high-society friends now see him as the villain instead of me."
"Are you going to forgive him?"
"Already have," I say simply. "Not for him. For me. Carrying that anger was exhausting."
Carter reaches for my hand. "You amaze me, you know that? Your capacity for forgiveness."
"Don't mistake forgiveness for trust," I clarify. "I've forgiven him. But that doesn't mean I am ever taking him back."
CARTER – 5 MONTHS IN
They let us walk outside now.
Thirty minutes, once a day. I never thought I'd be so grateful for sun on my skin or birds that don't shut up. The small things feel like miracles.
"You look different," Aish says when she visits. "Your color is better."
"Fresh air will do that," I reply. "And not subsisting on vending machine snacks between therapy sessions."
She laughs. "You were addicted to those terrible cheese crackers."
"Still am. They're just harder to come by in here."
"I could smuggle some in," she offers conspiratorially.
"And risk losing your visiting privileges? Not worth it."
Our easy banter feels like finding a favorite sweater I thought I'd lost—comfortable, familiar, warming me from the inside out.
I've been learning how to sit with myself.
No music. No distraction. Just silence.
And it's hard. Every memory of Emily. Of my mother. Of what I almost did. They rise like ghosts. But I let them.
"We talked about Emily today," I tell Aish, watching carefully for her reaction.
She stills. "And?"
"And it was necessary. She was part of my spiral. I needed to understand why I let her in, knowing what she represented."
"Which was?"
"The easy way down," I say simply. "The permission to self-destruct."
Aishwariya nods slowly. "And do you... Miss her?"
"No." The certainty in my voice surprises even me. "I miss what she was 7 years ago, also, I miss what she offered—escape. But now Emily, I don't they are different."
I stopped running.
AISHWARIYA – 6 MONTHS IN
He's coming home in two weeks.
And I'm terrified.
Not because I don't trust him, but because the world outside is still loud and brutal, and I don't want it to bruise him again.
CARTER – DAY BEFORE RELEASE
The final night feels surreal.
Six months of structure, of constant supervision, of working through the darkest parts of myself—and tomorrow, freedom. The thought is both exhilarating and terrifying.
Dr. Levinson conducted my exit interview with the same calm demeanor he's maintained throughout my stay. "How are you feeling about tomorrow, Carter?"
"Nervous," I admit. "Like I'm about to step onto a tightrope without a net."
He smiles slightly. "That's a normal reaction. But remember, you're not the same person who walked through those doors six months ago."
"What if I slip?" The question has been haunting me for weeks.
"Then you use the tools you've learned here. You reach out. You don't isolate. You remember that recovery isn't a straight line."
I nod, absorbing his words.
"I noticed Aishwariya hasn't visited this week," he comments, watching me closely.
"We agreed it would be better that way," I explain. "To give us both space to prepare for... whatever comes next."
"And what do you hope comes next?"
I consider the question carefully. "Honesty. With her and with myself. No more pretending I'm fine when I'm not. No more hiding when things get hard."
"That's a good foundation," he acknowledges.
She's waiting.
I can feel it in the way she ended her last letter: "I'll be there. On the other side of the door."
And I'm ready.
I'll probably always carry the weight. The past. The pain. But now, I carry something else too—hope. Small. Steady.
I pack my meager belongings—the books Aish brought, the letters she wrote, the sketches she created just for me. Each one a thread connecting me to a life outside these walls. A life I'm finally ready to reclaim.
I walk to the mirror again.
This time, I look at my eyes.
And they look like mine.
Tomorrow, I step back into the world. Not cured. Not fixed. But healing. Continuing.
The journey ahead won't be easy. Life rarely is. But for the first time in longer than I can remember, I'm not afraid to live it.