“I can guess.”
I shook my head. “I spent years raising money to stop exactly this. And now I’m sleeping in the house of a man who makes money from it.”
He stepped toward me. Slow. Deliberate.
“I’m not asking you to forgive it,” he said. “I’m asking you to see it.”
“See what?”
“Me. Not the label. Not the transaction. Me.”
My throat tightened. “I’m trying.”
“Are you?”
The question wasn’t cruel. It was quiet. Honest.
I looked away, toward the ivy climbing the brick wall. “Harper wants me to distance myself. Publicly.”
He didn’t react outwardly. But I felt the shift in him—subtle tightening, like a bowstring drawn half an inch.
“And you?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Silence stretched.
Then he said, softer than I’d ever heard him: “If you need to walk away, I won’t stop you.”
The words landed like a blow.
I turned back to him. “That’s it? You’d just … let me?”
“No.” His gaze held mine. “I’d let you choose. Then I’d follow.”
My breath caught.
He stepped closer, close enough that I could feel the heat of him. “I told you I don’t let go. That hasn’t changed.”
I searched his face. No anger. No pleading. Just certainty.
And beneath it—something raw.
Fear?
No. Not fear.
Hunger.
The kind that didn’t shout. The kind that waited.
I reached up, touched his jaw. The stubble was rough under my fingers.
“I’m scared,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“I might lose everything I built.”
