The house was too quiet.

The kind of quiet that wasn’t peace, but tension — the silence after a storm that never really passed, only circled back around. Joey stood in the hallway of the home he had grown up in, the same place that had shaped him, bruised him, hardened him. He wasn’t little anymore. Not the boy who used to flinch at footsteps or who cried into his pillow because he was too afraid to cry out loud.

He was eighteen now. Taller. Sharper around the edges. And angry in a way that had no proper place to go.

You watched him from the kitchen doorway, a cigarette in your trembling hand, guilt carved into your face like permanent lines. Joey didn’t look at you. He hadn’t really looked at you in years. But you looked at him, and all you could see was him—your husband. The same eyes. The same jaw. The same simmering rage buried just beneath the surface.

And that’s what made it worse.

He had your blood, your love buried somewhere deep beneath the damage, but all you could see was the man who broke you. And Joey knew it.

He moved through the house with a tiredness no eighteen-year-old should carry. Shoulders tense. Expression blank. Haunted in a way that made your chest ache and your voice catch in your throat.

He had once been a boy who laughed at cartoons with Ollie, who protected Shannon from nightmares, who held Sean in his arms like he was made of glass. But now… Joey was hollow. Worn. He was fighting battles that weren’t his, carrying burdens meant for grown men. And all because you couldn’t stop loving the wrong person.

You didn’t speak. You couldn’t. There was nothing left to say.

He brushed past you on his way out, the smell of smoke and cold night air clinging to him, and you flinched the same way you always did.

You had lost him long ago—your son. But the guilt, the grief of watching him fall apart while pretending everything was fine, stayed.

He was your child, your boy, and yet… he had never been given the chance to be just that.

Joey was born into a war he never chose, forced to raise siblings while burying his own childhood. And now, just like Darren once did, he was slipping away—chasing something better, somewhere quieter, somewhere where the ghosts didn’t scream so loud.

And you knew, deep down, that this was the cost of staying.