By the time I reach my car, my chest is hollowed out and filled with hot coals. I sit, grip the steering wheel.
The fifteen-minute drive home is a blur of clenched teeth and swallowed curses. Each mile gives me more time to imagine Anton explaining it in that tempered, infuriatingly protective tone he uses when he thinks he’s doing the right thing.
I know he’s more experienced at this than I am, but I asked him. He agreed. I was in the lead. He was backup… All of this feels too much like all the other times in the various careers I tried when I was marginalized. Pushed to the sidelines or all out not listened to.
Why do I always have to fight for my place at the table?
By the time I reach the gates of Monarch Hills, I’m shaking with the force of holding everything in.
Inside the house, the silence closes in like a blanket I don’t want. I drop my keys into the bowl, and they clatter with a scream.
God, I miss living with Lara. She’d hand me chocolate, validate my every emotion, and tell me I’m right. She’d help channel all this fury into something coherent.
Instead, the house swallows my footsteps.
I open the fridge and grab a ginger beer—the ones he bought for me— and that alone makes my jaw lock tighter. I twist the cap off, the hiss sounding like an insult.
I can’t believe him.
I’m done trying to earn space in rooms I already belong in.
When he walks through that door later, I’m going to have to look him in the eye and ask why he didn’t think I could handle it. Why he made decisions about my case without me. Why he thought I needed protecting instead of partnering.
The questions simmer, then boil.
Why did you go behind my back?
You think I’m incompetent?
You think I can’t do my job?
My throat burns. Emotion surges so hard, it takes my breath. It always comes back to the same thing—proving, proving, proving, until I’m raw.
I brace my hands on the breakfast bar because suddenly, my knees feel unsteady. Hormones. Exhaustion. Humiliation. All of it.
He tells me I’m good at this.
He tells me he’s proud.
He looks at me like I’m strong.
And then he still did this.
I don’t know if I want to scream or cry…or both.
The house has slipped fullyinto darkness by the time I finally stop pacing and sink onto the sofa. I curl my feet up beneath me and sit there in the quiet, the only light coming from the lit porch outside, bleeding thinly through the blinds. It casts long stripes across the room, across the still full ginger beer sweating on the coffee table, across the ache sitting too close to my ribs.
I’ve been here long enough for the anger to settle into a place where this isn’t going to blow over on its own.
The sound of the front door unlocking shatters the silence.
Bootsteps. Then the soft click of him setting his keys in the bowl, the sound I’ve heard so many times, but tonight, it punches straight through my chest.
“Freya?” His voice carries in from the doorway, searching for me. “You home?”
He steps into the living room and stops dead. His eyes adjust to the dark, find me on the sofa, still and waiting. Concern sweeps across his face like a shadow passing over sunlight. “Hey.”
He clicks on the lamp beside him, light spilling over his face and catching me off guard in a way I refuse to examine.
