Too easy.
“I love you,” she said at the curb. “I just… lose my shit because I love you so much.”
I nodded.
But something inside me had already stepped back.
Dinner that night was quiet. Candlelit. Soft.
She told me everything.
The engagement. The infertility. The father she never knew.
The way it broke her.
I believed her.
I felt for her.
Anyone would.
But as she held my hand across the table, eyes searching mine for reassurance, one truth settled in heavy and immovable:
Trauma explains behavior.
It doesn’t excuse it.
She’d been hurt.
Deeply.
And she was still dangerous when she was afraid.
I kissed her knuckles gently.
“We’ll take things slow,” I said.
She smiled.
Relieved.
But even as the conversation drifted lighter, I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d just been handed a map to a minefield.
And I was already standing in it.
I knew what I should do.
I just wasn’t ready to be the kind of man who did it.
Maybe I was born to be a man who fixed up broken things. I never saw myself getting broken in the process. It was never on my radar until tonight. Until the police. Until I picked up broken shards of glass on my bedroom floor.
The business trip to New York was breathing room between us. And I needed air before she suffocated me. I would end this but needed to figure out how,
CHAPTER 17
ETHAN SEPTEMBER
They don’t sendlimos when things are going well.
