The words should not have unsettled her, but they did. Perhaps because she understood them. Perhaps because she felt the same.
Evan must have seen the flicker of something in her eyes because his grip shifted slightly, his fingers pressing into her back.
“You said you never wanted to fall in love yourself,” he murmured.
“I did say that,” she admitted.
“And you do not intend to?”
She shook her head firmly. “No.”
He arched a brow. “Why?”
Her chest tightened.
It was one thing to say she did not believe in love.
It was another to explain why.
But, for some reason—perhaps because he had told her his reasons—she found herself answering honestly.
“Because I have always carried too much,” she admitted softly. “My father, my sister, our household. I have spent my life ensuring that everyone else is looked after.”
Evan said nothing, watching her intently.
She exhaled. “Love is yet another responsibility,” she said simply. “One I cannot afford.”
A moment of silence passed then, to her utter surprise, Evan huffed a quiet laugh.
She frowned. “What?”
“You are wrong,” he murmured.
She scowled. “I amnotwrong.”
Evan leaned in slightly, lowering his voice just enough that only she could hear.
“Love is not responsibility,” he said. “It is not a burden. Not if it is real.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but he continued before she could.
“It is not something you must hold together with sheer will,” he murmured. “It is something that holdsyoutogether when everything else crumbles.”
Isadora stared at him, thrown off balance by the certainty in his voice.
He was speaking as if he had felt it before. As if he knew what love was.
A slow, creeping feeling curled in her chest—a realization she did not like at all.
Because she had felt one or two of the things he had just described.
Not love. Of course not.
But…
The way Evan’s presence steadied her when she was shaken.
The way his words grounded her when she doubted herself.
