I nod once. I deserve that.
They don’t leave.
Instead, Alex disappears down the hall and comes back with a clean T-shirt and sweatpants.
“You smell like regret and cheap champagne,” he says, tossing them at me. “Change.”
Mark retrieves a pill bottle from the kitchen drawer—one he’s seen before.
“Doctor-approved,” he says. “One. Not two.”
I don’t argue.
By the time I’m changed, exhaustion has finally caught up with me. Mark pulls a blanket over me without comment. Alex switches off the TV.
“You don’t get to disappear like that again,” Mark says quietly.
“I know.”
“And you don’t get to decide when this hurts less,” Alex adds. “That’s not up to you.”
I nod.
The pill pulls me under slowly.
The last thing I register before sleep takes me is the weight of the truth settling where excuses used to live:
I didn’t lose her because of optics.
I didn’t lose her because of Chuck.
I lost her because I thought silence was safer than honesty.
And somewhere across the city, a woman who trusted me is waking up to a Saturday I don’t get to touch.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
AUDRA
I wake slowly.
Not startled. Not late.
The kind of waking that happens when your body decides there’s no point pretending anymore.
The light in my bedroom is gray and diffuse, seeping through the curtains without definition. Early. Saturday-early. Not rain exactly—just a sky that can’t be bothered to make a decision. It suits me.
For a while, I stay where I am.
The bed is still warm, the sheets faintly twisted from a night of restless half-sleep. My phone lies face-down on the nightstand where I left it, stubbornly silent only because I told it to be.
I reach for it anyway.
The screen lights immediately.
Messages. More than I expected.
My chest tightens—not panic, just awareness.
