“Because loving you cost me my dignity,” he went on. “It made me beg without words. It made me hurt myself just to feel seen. And I hate that part of me now.”
“No,” I said hoarsely. “You don’t get to hate yourself for my failure.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he replied. “You got to leave.”
The sentence settled between us like a verdict.
I leaned forward slowly, elbows on my knees again, hands clasped tight enough to ache. “You’re right,” I said. “I left. And I don’t expect you to make peace with that just because I came back.”
Elliot swallowed. “I need you to understand something,” he said. “If you stay—really stay—this can’t happen again. I won’t survive another version of that silence.”
The tremor in his voice betrayed how close that truth sat to the surface.
I met his eyes and didn’t look away. “I know,” I said. “And if I ever feel myself reaching for distance instead of honesty, you deserve to hear it before it becomes abandonment.”
His lips pressed together. “That’s not a promise,” he said. “That’s a boundary.”
“Yes,” I said. “And I accept it.”
Elliot looked at the wall as he processed my words. He let me sit with everything he’d said. My eyes slowly dragged over his body as I took in all the injuries he’d sustained.
A bloody nose and a cut to his head where the airbag deployed. A broken arm too, and thanks to the nurse, I knew he had a broken collarbone too. But those were just the surface wounds. They would heal in time without a mark.
The devastation that existed beneath his skin. The wounds I’d inflicted that had festered for months. Now those would take years to heal, if they ever did. He’d have to work on himself to become strong enough to survive them.
I refused to be a bystander in his journey. I wouldn’t be a band-aid. I wanted to be a pillar of support. I wanted to be his partner in every sense of the word. If he ever let me.
But that also meant I’d have to work on myself too. And I think finally what Thomas had been trying to tell me was starting to sink in. I projected my worst fears onto Elliot. All the unresolved issues and trauma I’d suffered were the catalyst for how terribly I treated him.
He added quietly. “I’m angry with you.”
“I know.”
“And I don’t forgive you… yet.”
“I know.” He didn’t know it, but I clung to that yet. It gave me hope that maybe, possibly, we’d have a future.
“But I don’t want you gone,” he finished, voice breaking at last. “I just want you to understand what it cost me to see you in this room. What it will cost me to let you back in.”
Tears slipped down my face, unchecked. “I do,” I said. “And I will spend the rest of my life proving I do—if you let me.”
He turned his face away again, exhausted now, anger having burned through what little strength he had. “Stay,” he said after a moment. Not looking at me. “But don’t touch me. Not yet.”
I nodded. Stayed exactly where I was. And for the first time, his anger didn’t feel like rejection.
It felt like survival.
CHAPTER 21
ELLIOT
One Month Later
The room was smaller than I expected.
That was the first thing I noticed. Not the couch, not the soft lamp in the corner, not the woman sitting across from me with her legs crossed and her hands resting loosely in her lap. The room had edges. Real ones. Four walls. A ceiling low enough to make the space feel held rather than cavernous.
Court-ordered rooms were supposed to feel like punishment. Sterile. White. Designed to remind you that you’d screwed up.
