CHAPTER THREE — GOD I’M SORRY, SAID THE ATHEIST.

TW // RELIGIOUS GUILT, MOLLY USE.

God I waited.

Draven's job should feel almost grotesquely mundane compared to everything happening inside him. He sat down on his chair, working on tons of things that suddenly felt like choking him. He barely breathed lately. All the calls, meetings, deadlines- they wore him down until there was nothing good inside him anymore. He had to fix his team’s little mistakes and be there for them when they needed something, a problem solver who couldn’t solve his own issue.

Adele walked up to him and sat down next to him while giving him a case that she couldn’t bear to handle. She was nearly crying because of being screamed at by the customer. “Okay, you go and take a fifteen-minute break, I’ll take over,” Draven replied, noticing her teary eyes as she left without saying anything. He knew that if she let a sound, the tears wouldn’t hold themselves back anymore.

The most important thing for Draven is: he shouldn’t say no. He keeps accumulating responsibilities because being useful gives him a temporary excuse not to think.

For the next hour, the office settled into its usual noise. Keyboards clicked in uneven rhythms. Someone laughed near the break room, too loudly and for too long. Calls came in, were transferred, escalated, and finally ended with the same exhausted promises that someone would look into the matter.

Draven worked through all of it. He corrected a report one of his team members had submitted with the wrong figures, answered three messages from management, and joined a meeting where everyone agreed that the deadline was unrealistic before agreeing to meet it anyway. He wrote down the tasks he had to delegate, then kept most of them for himself. Being useful was easier than being still.

Adele had not come back from her break yet. Her empty chair sat beside him, pushed back at an awkward angle. Draven looked at it once, then opened another case. The customer was angry about a charge that had been explained twice already. Draven listened without interrupting, apologized for the inconvenience, and promised to resolve the issue.

He kept his voice calm. When the call ended, he lowered the headset and stared at the corner of his desk. A small silver cross lay there, attached to a thin chain. He had seen it before, probably belonging to Adele. She must have left it behind when she rushed away.

For a few seconds, it was only an object. Tarnished silver. A tiny figure fixed to the center. Something that had passed through someone’s fingers often enough to lose its shine. Then Draven imagined looking up. Not toward heaven. Toward the judgment waiting there. His stomach tightened.

You're disgusting.

He blinked and reached for the next file.

You know what you've done.

The words did not sound like a voice exactly. They were closer to his own thoughts stripped of every excuse, repeated until they became something separate from him. He tried to focus on the customer’s account number. The digits blurred, rearranged themselves, and blurred again.

You keep asking for forgiveness and then doing the same things.

Draven pressed his thumb into the edge of the desk. The pain was small and clean. He wanted more of it, not because he wanted to hurt himself, but because it was something he could understand. Something that began and ended in one place.

Across the office, someone mentioned church. It was casual, almost cheerful. A conversation about Sunday services, a child’s baptism, a choir rehearsal. Draven did not catch the details. The word was enough.

What exactly do you think repentance means?

His breathing grew shallow. He opened an email and read the same sentence four times without absorbing it. Around him, the office continued as if nothing had changed. Phones rang. Chairs rolled across the carpet. A printer spat out several pages and stopped.

You don't deserve forgiveness.

Draven looked at the cross again. He could put it in the lost-and-found box. He could leave it where it was. He could touch it and pretend that touching it meant something.

The next case was already waiting in his queue. Ariel dropped a folder on the corner of Draven’s desk and pulled the spare chair over with his foot. He sat down backward, arms folded across the backrest, his expression caught somewhere between concern and impatience.

“This one’s been reopened twice,” Ariel said. “The customer says the adjustment never went through, account payable says it did, and now management wants an answer before lunch.”

Draven nodded. Ariel opened the folder. “I traced the first transaction, but the second one is attached to the wrong account. If we reverse it, we might create another charge. If we leave it, the customer’s going to escalate again.”

Draven looked at the pages in front of him. The figures were printed in neat black rows. Numbers, dates, reference codes. A small, orderly world in which every mistake had a source and every source could eventually be found.

He should have been listening. He tried. He watched Ariel’s mouth move and waited for the meaning to arrive. Instead, his attention drifted toward the silver cross near his keyboard. It was still there, though he had forgotten to put it in the lost-and-found box. The thin chain had gathered into a dark knot beside the mouse.

Maybe Adele had come back and seen it. Maybe she had not noticed. Draven imagined her picking it up later and realizing he had touched it. The thought made his hands go cold.

He looked down at the table. The wood laminate had a faint scratch near the edge, pale against the gray. It curved slightly, then disappeared beneath the folder. Draven fixed his eyes on it. The scratch seemed easier to hold than anything else. It did not ask him to explain himself. It did not expect him to become better.

Ariel kept speaking. Something about approval. Something about the customer’s previous complaint. Draven stopped hearing the words. He thought of the things he had asked for in the dark. Forgiveness. Relief. One more chance. He had asked with the desperate certainty of someone who believed being sorry should matter immediately. Then morning came, and he was still the same person inside the same body, carrying the same thoughts, making the same choices.

And the worst thought came quietly.

Maybe God had already stopped listening.

Not because Draven had been rejected in some grand, final way. That would have been almost easier. Maybe the silence was simply what he deserved. Maybe every prayer had reached the ceiling and fallen back down, unanswered because there was nothing left in him worth answering.

“Draven?” He realized he had been staring at the same spot on the table for several seconds. He looked up. Ariel was watching him.

“Sorry.”

“What do you think?”

Draven glanced at the folder. He had no idea what they were talking about. He scanned the page and guessed. “Leave the original charge in place, reverse the duplicate manually, and send finance the transaction history before escalating it. That way the account doesn’t get touched twice.”

Ariel considered this, then nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.”

“Yeah,” Draven said. “Do that.”

Ariel wrote it down. The tension left his shoulders.

“Good. I’ll handle the customer.” Draven nodded again. Everyone accepted the answer. Ariel moved on to the next task, already trusting him to have understood. That almost made it worse. Nobody noticed. He could be falling apart perfectly.

By lunch, Draven had answered enough calls to forget what day it was. The office thinned around noon. People stood in small groups near the elevators, talking about restaurants, leftovers, and the weather outside. Someone asked if he wanted to come with them. Draven looked up from his screen and realized he had been holding the same pen for several minutes.

“I’m good,” he said. The lie came easily. Most things did lately.

He went downstairs anyway, following the others through the glass doors and into the noise of the street. The air was colder than he expected. Cars moved through the intersection in slow, impatient lines, and a delivery truck blocked half the sidewalk. He stood outside a small restaurant and read the menu without understanding it.

He chose something quickly. A sandwich, fries, and a drink he did not want. He paid, took the paper bag, and returned to the office before anyone could ask him to sit with them.

At his desk, the food stayed untouched. Draven opened the bag. The smell rose toward him, warm and greasy, filling the small space between his monitor and keyboard. His stomach twisted so sharply that he had to close the bag again. He placed one hand against his abdomen and waited for the nausea to settle.

He stared at the sandwich through the thin paper wrapping, but the nausea decided to stay. He knew he needed to eat. He had barely had anything that morning, and coffee was beginning to feel less like a drink than a punishment. Still, the thought of swallowing made his throat tighten.

His phone lit up beside the bag. A message from his boyfriend.

Did you get lunch? I’m sorry I couldn’t cook you food earlier.

Draven looked at it for a long time.

He typed, Yes, then deleted it. He typed, I’m trying, and deleted that too. No answer would sound like another excuse. He had been saying he was tired for weeks. He had promised that work would calm down after the next deadline, after the next meeting, after his team stopped making mistakes he had to fix himself.

None of it had calmed down. And in the middle of it all, his boyfriend had been left alone with him, without really having him. Draven came home exhausted, distant, and already halfway gone inside his own head. Even when they were together, he barely saw him in a good state. There was always another call to answer, another message from work, another problem waiting to be solved. His boyfriend had learned how to ask if he had eaten without expecting much else.

Draven turned the phone face down. The guilt settled beneath his ribs, twisting together with the nausea. He could picture the apartment, the abandoned-not-really room, the couch where he had sat while Chase and Tracy walked ahead of him. He could picture the same room later, quiet and dark, his boyfriend somewhere nearby but unreachable. The memory made his chest feel tight.

He had thought exhaustion was temporary. A consequence of being responsible. Something he could survive if he kept moving.

Draven turned the phone face down. The guilt settled beneath his ribs, twisting together with the nausea. He could picture the apartment, the abandoned-not-really room, the couch where he had sat while Chase and Tracy walked ahead of him.

You lied.

Draven looked at the paper bag again. The sandwich remained untouched. He had lied about how often he had been using. He had lied by omission about the people who still contacted him, the people who knew he could get things, the people he had supplied because saying no felt impossible when money was involved, or when loyalty was involved, or when he wanted to feel needed.

You sold drugs.

The thought appeared without anger. It was only a fact, placed neatly among the others.

At the time, it had seemed small. Controlled. Chase and Tracy had been there. They had made the exchange feel safer, almost ordinary. Draven had told himself he never sold to unfamiliar faces. That was supposed to mean something. That was supposed to separate him from worse people. But people had still taken what he gave them. People had still gone home with it. People had still destroyed themselves.

He thought of the ones he had watched overdose, the terrible stillness of their bodies, the panic that arrived too late to be useful. He thought of calling for help while some part of him was already calculating what the police might find. He thought of how often he had survived those rooms when better people had not.

You watched people destroy themselves.

The words kept coming.

You abandoned the person who loves you.

His boyfriend was in the apartment now, perhaps sitting on the edge of the bed, perhaps waiting for an answer that would never sound honest. Draven imagined his face when he realized that love could not pull someone out of a place they had chosen to remain in.

You asked your mother to forgive you and then became the same person again.

His mother’s voice came back to him, gentle even when she had every reason not to be. Draven had cried. He had promised her he understood. He had asked forgiveness with both hands open, as if remorse could prove he was not beyond saving.

Then he had become the same person again. The inventory grew until there was no room left for anything else.

You're not sick. You're disgusting.

That distinction was important.

He was not thinking, I made terrible choices.

He was thinking, I am a terrible thing.

The next call ended with the customer thanking him for his patience. Draven muted the line and stared at the screen. The account was still open. He had forgotten to close it. A notification pulsed in the corner, reminding him that another case had been waiting for twelve minutes.

He reached for the mouse. The cursor moved past the button he meant to click. Draven corrected it, then clicked the wrong option anyway. The case disappeared from his queue. For a moment, he did not understand what had happened. Then the system opened a warning window.

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**Are you sure you want to mark this case as resolved?**

“No,” he whispered.

He clicked cancel. The window remained open. Behind him, a chair rolled across the carpet. Someone stopped near his desk. Draven closed the warning and looked up.

It was one of the other supervisors. He had a folder tucked beneath one arm and a tired expression that looked almost neutral. “Draven, do you have a minute?”

Draven straightened. “Yeah.” The supervisor glanced at the screen. “The Henderson case was assigned to Adele, but it looks like you moved it to yourself.”

“I was handling it.”

“I know. That’s the problem.”

The supervisor shifted the folder against his hip. “You’re making mistakes lately.” The sentence was ordinary. It did not come with anger. There was no accusation in his voice, no raised volume, no dramatic pause afterward. It landed anyway. Draven felt something inside him loosen and collapse at the same time.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m not asking you to apologize. I’m asking you to slow down. You’re taking on too much, and it’s starting to affect the team.”

The team. Draven looked past him at the rows of desks. Adele’s chair was still empty. Ariel was speaking to someone near the printers. Phones rang. A notification appeared on his monitor and vanished beneath another one.

“I can fix it,” Draven said.

“That’s not what I said.”

“I’ll be more careful.”

The supervisor sighed, not impatiently. That made it worse. “Just take your break. Then we’ll talk about redistributing some of these cases.” Draven nodded. The supervisor left with the folder still tucked under his arm. Nothing else happened. Nobody turned to look at him. The office continued its small, steady movement around his desk.

Draven stood. His knees felt weak by the time he reached the bathroom. He entered the nearest stall, locked the door, and sat down with the lid closed. He did not cry immediately. He just sat there. His hands shook in his lap. His breathing came too quickly, each breath catching before it could become full. He pressed his palms together and tried to hold them still.

He lowered his head. The stall was narrow enough that his knees nearly touched the door. Someone entered the bathroom, washed their hands, and left. Another person laughed quietly outside, then moved away.

Draven remained where he was until his breathing slowed enough for him to stand. At the sink, he splashed cold water onto his face. When he looked up, his reflection seemed unfamiliar. Pale skin. Red around the eyes. His hair flattened on one side from where he had pressed his head against the stall. He gripped the edge of the sink.

“What is wrong with you?” he whispered.

His reflection offered nothing back. Draven dried his face, returned to his desk, and packed his bag. The sandwich stayed in its paper wrapping. He shut down his computer, gathered his phone and keys, and checked that nothing important had been left behind. Then he stood beside his chair for a moment, prepared to finally go home.

Draven got into his car and sat with both hands resting on the steering wheel. For a moment, he did not start the engine. The parking lot lay beneath the gray afternoon light, every car wet from an earlier rain. He could see his reflection faintly in the windshield. Pale skin. Red around the eyes. Hair still flattened on one side from the bathroom stall.

His place was in the opposite direction from the apartment. Draven took the turn without thinking about it, following the familiar route through traffic. He knew which lights stayed red too long. He knew where the road narrowed beside the construction site and where people crossed without looking. He had driven there so many times that he could have arrived without seeing any of it.

He would apologize.

He would shower.

He would sleep.

He would stay.

The thoughts came quietly, one after another, practical enough to resemble a plan. He would tell his boyfriend that he was sorry for disappearing into himself. He would say he had been overwhelmed, though the word felt too small and too convenient. Maybe he would eat something if he could. Maybe his boyfriend would sit beside him without asking questions.

Draven kept driving. For several minutes, that was genuinely where he was going. Then he thought about the apartment. Not the room exactly, but the whole place. The abandoned-not-really apartment with its stained walls, its uneven furniture, and the constant sense that someone had left only moments before. Timothée asleep wherever there was space. Chase and Tracy moving through the rooms as if they belonged there more than anyone else. Bags left open. Empty bottles beneath the couch. The smell of smoke and sweat and something chemical caught in the fabric.

People sleeping there because they had nowhere else. People staying because nobody had asked them to leave. The drugs, hidden badly and handled casually. The mess that never became clean because there was always another person, another night, another reason to let it remain. Draven could picture the couch where he had sat while Chase and Tracy walked ahead of him. He could picture the random frat guy standing near the door, alone and uncertain.

He passed the exit to his place’s neighborhood. He noticed it only after the sign had disappeared behind him. Draven did not brake. There was no dramatic decision, no sudden certainty that made the direction feel right. He simply continued along the road, his hands steady on the wheel.

His place represented everything Draven believed he did not deserve. Warmth. Order. A bed that belonged to him. Someone who expected him to come back and meant it. A place where he could not hide the fact that he was sick, or selfish, or disgusting.

The apartment did not ask him to be worthy. It only asked him to exist. Draven turned toward the old neighborhood. The traffic thinned. His phone vibrated again, then went quiet. He drove on. The farther he drove, the less possible it became to turn around.

He loves you.

The thought came with such certainty that Draven almost flinched.

You're abandoning him.

Again.

His fingers tightened around the steering wheel. The road ahead blurred beneath the headlights, wet pavement breaking the light into long, trembling lines. He tried to imagine the apartment behind him. The quiet bedroom. The untouched side of the bed. His boyfriend waiting until waiting became another form of humiliation. Draven swallowed.

At least they need you. The thought arrived softer. Kinder, almost. At least Chase needs someone to handle the exchange. At least Tracy needs somewhere to sleep. At least there are people here who would notice if he disappeared.

That was the lie he used to justify it.

He repeated it until the words stopped sounding like a lie. By the time he reached the old neighborhood, it was sometime after midnight. The rain had thinned to a cold mist, leaving the streets glossy and empty. The building looked exactly as it always did. Broken. Wet. Unremarkable.

One of the hallway lights had gone out again. The remaining bulb flickered above the entrance, turning the cracked concrete and stained brick briefly yellow, then gray. Draven parked along the curb and shut off the engine.

For a moment, he stayed there. His phone was still in the cup holder. He could call. He could send a message. He could say he was sorry and mean it, even if meaning it had never been enough.

Draven opened the door instead. The cold reached through his clothes as he crossed the sidewalk. He walked upstairs, one hand sliding along the damp railing. The steps creaked beneath him. Somewhere on the second floor, a television played to an empty room. A pipe knocked inside the wall.

He reached the apartment door and found it unlocked. Inside, someone was asleep on the couch, curled beneath a thin blanket with one arm hanging toward the floor. Draven did not recognize him immediately. A shoe had fallen off and rested beneath the coffee table. Empty bottles crowded the floor around him.

Someone else was laughing quietly in the kitchen. It was not a happy laugh. It came in short, muffled bursts, followed by the scrape of a cabinet opening. The apartment smelled of rain, smoke, and old food. Nothing had changed. That was the worst part. He had left this place hours ago, but it had continued without him, preserving every stain and every unfinished thought.

Chase was awake. He sat at the edge of the kitchen table, elbows resting on his knees, his face half-hidden in shadow. He looked up when Draven entered but did not speak. Tracy sat by the window with her knees drawn to her chest. The glass behind her was clouded with condensation. She watched the street below as if expecting someone to appear.

Nobody asked Draven where he had been. Nobody asked why he was exhausted. Nobody asked why he looked like he was about to die.

Chase only moved his foot aside, making room for Draven to pass. Draven stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind him. Because this place had stopped asking questions.

Draven put his bag down beside the wall. It landed with a dull, heavy sound, though there was almost nothing inside it except his charger, keys, and the paper-wrapped sandwich he had forgotten to throw away. Nobody looked over.

He took off his shoes and left them near the door. One of them brushed against a bottle, sending it rolling beneath the table. The sleeping man on the couch shifted but did not wake.

Draven crossed the room and sat on the broken couch. The cushion sank beneath him. A metal spring pressed against his thigh through the fabric, familiar enough that he knew how to adjust his weight around it. The blanket smelled faintly of smoke. Someone had left a dark stain on the armrest, and the torn seam beside his hip had been widened by years of people sitting down without caring what they damaged.

His body began to loosen. Not completely. His shoulders remained tight, and his hands were still cold, but something inside him stopped bracing for impact. He did not have to explain why he had come back. He did not have to pretend that work had been difficult, or that his silence had a reasonable cause, or that he would try harder tomorrow.

No one here expected him to be better. For a moment, Draven felt relieved. The feeling came quietly. It settled over him before he could recognize it, almost gentle in its familiarity. His breathing slowed. His back touched the couch. He looked at the room and let himself disappear into it.

Then he understood what the relief meant. He was relieved because nobody here would notice if he failed. Nobody would ask about the untouched food in his bag. Nobody would ask why he had driven past his own neighborhood, or why his boyfriend’s messages remained unanswered. Nobody would look at him long enough to see how close he was to falling apart.

This place did not forgive him. It simply did not care. Draven lowered his eyes to his hands. A faint gray mark remained beneath one thumbnail from the office desk. He rubbed at it until the skin began to redden.

Chase finally spoke from the kitchen. “You staying?”

Draven looked up. Chase had not moved. His face was still half-covered by the room’s weak light, but his eyes were fixed on him. “Yeah.”

The answer came too quickly. Chase nodded as if Draven had confirmed something expected. He reached for a bottle on the table, found it empty, and set it back down. Tracy turned from the window. “You look awful.”

“I’m tired.” She watched him for another second. Draven almost wanted her to ask what had happened. He almost wanted someone to make him tell the truth. Instead, Tracy looked away.

The apartment accepted his silence. The walls held the smell of old smoke and damp clothes. Somewhere beneath the floor, a pipe knocked twice. The sleeping man on the couch breathed through his mouth. Draven leaned back and closed his eyes.

Chase watched him. “You want something?” he asked. Draven opened his eyes. “No.” Chase nodded again. There was no disappointment in it. No concern. Just acceptance. Draven rested his head against the wall. That was why he had come back. Here, even his worst choices could pass without comment.

He grabbed a bottle of Molly on the table, gulped it down, a handful of pills, perhaps four or five. He waited; he always waited. For the drugs to hit his nerves, for something else; all his life spent waiting for something better that felt like to impossible to happen. He waited.

For a while, nothing happened in the apartment as the drug already made him feel like he was about to shake violently, and then finally his body forced itself to sleep. He flew so high, and this happened before. He knew how this would go.

The apartment continued around him in small, indifferent movements. Someone opened the refrigerator and left it open. Water dripped from the kitchen faucet. Tracy shifted by the window, pulling her knees closer to her chest. The television had been muted, but its changing light moved across the walls, blue, then gray, then blue again.

He had spent so much of his life waiting for something better that the waiting itself had begun to feel like a form of faith. He waited for relief. For sleep. For the part of him that still wanted to be good to become stronger than the part that wanted to disappear. He waited for his hands to stop shaking.

He kept his eyes closed and tried to imagine the apartment he had left behind. His boyfriend sitting alone in the bedroom. The untouched side of the bed. The phone placed beside him, lighting up and going dark while he waited for an answer.

Draven swallowed. The pill finally worked. This was all it offered him. The same thoughts, softened at the edges. The same guilt made distant enough to survive. Across the room, someone asked, “You got anything?”

Draven looked up. A man stood near the kitchen doorway, young enough that Draven did not recognize him. His jacket was wet at the shoulders, and his hair clung to his forehead. He kept glancing toward the hall, as if he expected someone to come in behind him.

Chase looked at Draven. Tracy did too. Nobody said his name. Nobody needed to. Draven knew exactly what was destroying him. He knew the apartment was making him worse. He knew his boyfriend was waiting somewhere else, and that every unanswered message was another small abandonment he would later have to explain. He knew he had promised himself he would stop coming here. He knew the people around him were not friends in any way that could save him.

Still, he reached for his bag. The movement felt automatic. His fingers found the strap near his knee and pulled it toward him. The paper-wrapped sandwich shifted inside, crushed against his charger. His keys struck something hard and plastic.

He could have said no. The word existed. He could feel it somewhere in his mouth, small and useless. He could have told the man to leave. He could have picked up his phone and called home. He could have stood, walked through the door, and driven until the old neighborhood disappeared behind him. His boyfriend would have answered. He knew that. That was the problem.

Care was not absent. It was there in every message, every apology, every meal left waiting in the refrigerator. It was there in the memory of a hand resting against his back while he pretended to sleep. Care was there, and it was not enough. Draven opened the bag.

Chase leaned forward. “How much?” Draven did not answer immediately. He looked down at the contents, then toward the closed apartment door. “Enough,” he said.

And because nobody asked him to be better, he stayed.