Chapter 181: Process

Chapter 181: Process
The first week after the hospital was the worst one because Del still thought it was going to get better soon.
She was home, and she thought the familiarity of it would help, that being in her own space would give her back some version of herself that the last several weeks had taken.
It didn't work like that.
The house felt like a place she'd left in a hurry that she was now returning to as a slightly different person, and all the objects in it, the sketchbooks on the shelf, the lamp by the window, and the coffee mug she'd used every morning for two years, were artifacts of someone who no longer quite existed.
She had been warned that her house would have been processed as part of the case, that Oliver's room in particular would have been gone through thoroughly.
Oliver's motorbike was seized as a potential asset and part of the broader investigation into Oliver's finances and movements. .
She went up on the second day.
The door to Oliver's room was closed, which meant someone had pulled it shut after they finished, which she appreciated without knowing who to thank for it. She stood in the hallway for a minute with her hand not quite on the handle, and then she opened it.
The room was empty.
The investigators had taken everything—the clothes, the books he'd kept on the small shelf above the desk, the few things he'd had on the windowsill— all bagged and labeled somewhere in a federal building.
The desk itself was still there, as was the bed frame, because those were hers, but the surface of the desk was bare, and the chair was pushed in neatly.
She stood in the doorway of the empty room for a while and thought about Oliver moving in. She thought about passing him in the kitchen in the mornings.
She closed the door.
Del slept a lot the first few days. Then she stopped being able to sleep at all.
The lawyer came on day four. A woman named Patricia Chen, who had been recommended by the detective handling the case. She explained what the coming weeks would look like—more formal statements; likely a deposition; possibly a grand jury, depending on how things developed; and civil proceedings from Wyatt's family, which were already being discussed.
"They released a statement yesterday," Patricia said. "Expressing grief for Wyatt and for Liza McNamara. Also expressing significant interest in understanding the full circumstances of what happened."
"Okay," she said. "Tell me what I need to do."
Patricia told her. She listened and took notes and asked questions, and by the end of the meeting, she had a folder of her own and a calendar with dates on it and the very specific exhaustion that came from having to be the person that all of this had happened to.
The media part was something she hadn't been prepared for, which was naive in retrospect.
Her face was on television within two days of her name becoming public.
The story was everywhere. Not just locally — it had gone national within a week, and then international not long after. She was described as a victim in some of it and as a survivor in others and occasionally as a person of interest, which her lawyer handled swiftly.
She was described as Oliver's girlfriend, which was accurate and inadequate at the same time. She was described as traumatized, which was probably accurate and also nobody's business.
She stopped reading most of it by the end of the second week.
The reporters started showing up outside her house not long after, which meant Del mostly stopped trying to leave her house.
She ordered groceries online. She did her police statements over video call when they let her. She had conversations on the phone with Patricia that got shorter as the legal picture clarified.
She dropped out of the university on a Thursday. She called the registrar's office, and a very kind administrator told her there were options for medical withdrawal that would protect her academic record, and Del said yes to all of them.
She'd been thinking about New England for weeks. It was somewhere that the story hadn't saturated everything, where she could be a person rather than a story.
A month later, she went to get her hair done.
A woman at the salon named Rosa looked at her blonde hair without comment, and Del said she wanted it back to brown and shorter than she'd had it.
She looked at the mirror.
"Good?" Rosa said.
"Yeah," Del said. "Good."
The day before she left, she walked past the café.
She hadn't planned it. She'd been running the last few errands before the drive north, and the route had taken her down that street.
She stopped on the pavement outside and looked through the window.
The rain had been bad that day. She'd tripped on the curb two blocks away and scraped both palms open and limped inside to get out of the downpour with her knee throbbing and her general outlook on the afternoon at an all-time low.
Then a tall stranger had appeared at the side of the booth, holding a stack of napkins with the thought he was being helpful.
You look like you could use these,” Oliver had said to her that day.
She'd looked up at him and accused him of watching her, because he had been, and there wasn't any point pretending otherwise. And he'd grinned like she'd said something funny instead of something accusatory.
And he'd brought her coffee without properly asking. Slid into the booth across from her like she'd invited him. 
Oliver looked so completely unbothered by her that she'd found it more interesting than annoying. Which she hadn't expected. She didn't usually find people interesting. She found them exhausting.
Del sat at the table now and looked at the empty seat across from her. And the thing she kept coming back to, sitting here now, was not that he had fooled her. She'd been through that line of thinking enough times in enough therapy sessions to have made some peace with it.
What she kept coming back to was the version of him in this booth—a man who had watched her limp through the door of a café, grabbed a stack of napkins, and made her talk to him without her fully understanding how she'd let that happen.
She stood up, and she didn't look back at the booth when she walked out.
The next morning, Del loaded the car. She didn't have much. She'd gotten rid of a lot over the past few weeks.
She'd thought about calling Winston, because Winston had come to the hospital and that had meant something, but she didn't know what to say beyond "thank you," and she'd already said that. She thought about a few other people, people from before, but what would she tell them? So she didn't make any of them.
She locked her house, got in the car, and drove.