Eve doesn’t try to comfort me. She just waits, her presence a buffer between me and the rest of the world.
When I’m done, I wipe my eyes and laugh, shaky and hollow. “I probably sound pathetic. How fucked is that?”
She bumps my shoulder with hers. “You sound human.”
I look at her, really look, and see that she believes it.
We sit together in the quiet, the only sound the click of the old radiator and the soft buzz of the desk lamp.
After a while, I ask, “Did you ever want him, like I want Julian?”
She thinks about it. “Not at first. But after a while… yeah. It’s like your body remembers what it’s supposed to want, even if your head hates it.”
I bite my lip. “I hate that.”
Eve laughs. “Welcome to womanhood.”
Womanhood. What a wild concept that this is what it’s meant to be. A series of choices being stripped from you until you’re a raw, bloody mess.
She stands and stretches, then surveys the mess on my desk. “You have a lot of reading to do.”
I glance at the textbooks, the smears of ink and torn pages. “I can’t focus.”
Eve shrugs. “You will. Eventually.”
She heads for the door, then pauses. “You’re not alone, Amara. Even if it feels like it.”
I nod, and this time I almost believe it.
After she leaves, I stare at the ceiling until my neck aches.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel.
But I know I’m not the same as I was this morning.
And maybe that’s something worth surviving for.
Sleep never comes.
I try every trick—deep breathing, counting the slats of the blinds, clamping a pillow over my ears to drown out the racing in my head—but every time my eyes flutter closed, I see a flash of teeth or the shadow of a contract or a pair of hands pinning me to a desk.
Sometime after two, the silence thickens enough to suffocate. I throw the covers off and sit at the edge of the bed, elbows on knees. My nails dig into my palms. All I want is to get out of my skin. To escape.
A soft tap at the window breaks my spiral.
At first, I freeze, expecting Julian or worse—my brother’s bodyguards. But the silhouette behind the glass is smaller, bundled in a hoodie. There’s another tap.
I move closer, heart jackhammering.
It’s Eve. She motions with her chin. Come on.
I slip into slippers and pull on a hoodie, then slide the window open. She helps me over the sill and we drop quietly into the overgrown quad below.
“Sorry, couldn’t get into your wing. Wanted to take you somewhere. Figured you wouldn’t be able to sleep either.”
The night air bites through the thin cotton, but the cold is bracing. I breathe it in and for the first time in hours, I feel alive.
Eve’s hands are quick—she shoves her own in her pockets, shoulders hunched as she leads me along the wall, away from the main walk. “If you’re up, you might as well do something with it,” she whispers.
