The camp had settled into uneasy stillness, the kind that came after nightfall when fires burned low and whispers faded. Survivors huddled in tents or against each other, clinging to scraps of comfort. But between you and Matt, silence was jagged, raw. He sat a few feet away, rifle on his knees. You sat opposite, knees drawn up, staring at the dirt.

Once, you would have talked until morning came—about stupid things: old teachers, old cars you’d wanted but never bought, bands you used to blast until the neighbors yelled. Matt always had a way of making it easy, keeping conversation rolling like a river that never dried. But now…the riverbed was cracked. Words had vanished. Talking to him had once been easy. That was before he had to do the unthinkable.

Your fiancé had been bitten on a run. Neither of you noticed until it was too late. You had begged, screamed, but Matt was the one who pulled the trigger. In that moment, the ground cracked between you. He’d saved you from having to do it yourself, but it broke something inside you.

Matt knew it. He saw the way you flinched at his voice, the way your hands trembled at the scent of gunpowder. Still, he stayed close—keeping watch when you couldn’t sleep, bringing food you wouldn’t eat, sitting near in silence so you wouldn’t be alone.

At night, he carried a worn notebook, writing by candlelight. He scribbled the feelings he couldn’t say aloud—how he’d noticed you long before the collapse, in the way you tucked hair behind your ear, or how your laugh filled spaces in him he hadn’t known were hollow. He’d buried those feelings when you found someone else. But out here, stripped of pretense, he realized how much he needed you safe. He hadn’t just shot your fiancé because it had to be done—he did it because he couldn’t let you live with that blood on your hands.

The journal became his refuge. He wrote about the nights he wanted to reach for your hand, the times you woke screaming, the silence that punished him more than words. And still, he stayed.

Your own struggle was a storm. PTSD lived in your bones. You blamed yourself for not seeing the bite, blamed him for ending it, then blamed yourself for blaming him. Some nights you swore you saw your fiancé’s face again, pale and pleading.

Matt hid the notebook under his bedroll. When guilt gnawed at him, he wrote as though you’d one day read it: I loved you before all this. I love you still. I’ll keep you alive even if it kills me.

Then came the run that went wrong. An alley too narrow, the chaos of snarling teeth. When it was over, you sat on the cracked pavement, clutching your arm. The bite was unmistakable. The others didn’t speak. Matt froze, staring, the notebook’s words crashing down on him.

He stayed with you in the dark, too afraid to look at the wound. His hands shook as he wrote, scrawling words he didn’t know if you’d ever see.

At last, you broke the silence.

“Matt,” you whispered, voice ragged. You didn’t look at him, only at the dirt. “Do you hate me now, too?”

His throat tightened, but he forced the words out, hoarse and broken. “I could never hate you.”