"Xavier—"
"I made you prove something that didn't need proving." The admission tore through me like shrapnel, and I could feel every piece of it lodging in places that would ache for a long time. "You told me. You told me every day in a hundred different ways. The way you reached for me in your sleep, the way you said my name, the way you tried to kiss me in the kitchen that morning, and I took every single piece of evidence and ran it through a filter designed to reject it. Because if I accepted it, if I let myself believe you loved me and then you changed your mind—"
I couldn't finish. The sentence dissolved into something that wasn't quite a sound and wasn't quite silence. My forehead dropped against hers, and I was breathing her air again, and the closeness was both salvation and torment because she was right here and the suitcase was right there, and the distance between those two facts was the distance I'd created with my own fear.
"Stay," I whispered. "Please. Forget what I said about choosing and walking away and clear eyes. Your eyes have been clear since the day I met you. I was the one who couldn't see."
Her hands tightened on my wrists—that fierce, planting-her-feet grip—and for one incandescent, agonizing second I thought she was going to say yes. I thought the determination in her jaw was going to soften and she was going to lean into me and say okay, and I'd carry the suitcase back to the closet and unpack it myself, item by item, and we'd never speak of it again.
"No."
The word was quiet. Gentle. Absolutely immovable.
"Molly—"
"No." She opened her eyes, and they were bright with tears but steadier than mine, steadier than my hands on her face, steadier than anything I'd ever built or held or defended. "Because you weren't entirely wrong."
"I was—"
"You were wrong about the reason, but not about the need." Her hands released my wrists and moved to cover mine where they held her face, her fingers wrapping around my palms with a tenderness that was worse than any refusal because it came packaged with love. "Xavier, I have slept next to you every night for eight weeks. I have eaten food you prepared, worn clothes you bought, used breathing techniques you taught me. I have organized my entire existence around the rhythm of your heartbeat. And I love you—" Her voice cracked, hard, a fissure running through granite. "I love you so much that it scares me, because I can't tell where the love ends and the dependency begins, and if I can't tell, how can you?"
"I don't care about the—"
"I care."She said it with a fierceness that stopped my words cold. "I care because I will not be the woman who stays because she's afraid to leave. I will not be the woman who says I love you and wonders, in the quiet hours, if what she really means is I need you and I'm too broken to know the difference. You deserve better than that. And so do I."
The sound that came out of me wasn't a sound I'd ever made before. It was the sound of a man who'd finally gotten everything he wanted and was watching it walk away. The cosmic, unbearable justice of it. The woman I loved was leaving me for exactly the reason I'd told her to, and the fact that I'd changed my mind didn't change the fact that she hadn't. That she'd taken my words and built them into a framework stronger than the one I'd intended, and now that framework was holding even as I tried to tear it down.
"I want a Daddy out of choice not out of necessity."
"How long?" My voice was barely functional. A rasp. A ruin.
"I don't know." The honesty of it—no false comfort, no arbitrary timeline, just the truth—was both devastating and exactly what I would have expected from her. "A week. A month. However long it takes for me to sleep through the night alone and know that I can. However long it takes for me to wake up in my own apartment and miss you because I want you, not because the silence is unbearable."
"And then?"
She leaned forward and kissed me. Soft. Deliberate. Her lips against mine with the full, unambiguous intention of a woman who knew exactly what she was doing and why. Except she didn’t answer. She simply dressed, collected her phone and the case and the grocery bag and walked out of my life.
Chapter Fourteen
Molly
The cab ride lasted eleven minutes. I knew because I counted every second of every one of them with the same obsessive precision Xavier used to count my breaths, except instead of monitoring someone I loved, I was monitoring the distance between us as it grew block by block, turn by turn, the tether stretching thinner and thinner until I could feel it humming in my chest like a wire about to snap.
I didn't look back. I wanted to. God, I wanted to. I wanted to turn around in the cracked vinyl seat and watch his house shrink in the rear window until it was a dot and then nothing,because some masochistic part of me believed that if I watched it disappear, the disappearing would feel more deliberate. More chosen. Less like being ripped away from the only place I'd felt safe in months and more like the brave, autonomous decision I was pretending it was.
The cab driver was a woman in her fifties with a Saints bumper sticker and a pine-tree air freshener that smelled nothing like pine and everything like the chemical approximation of a forest designed by someone who'd never been outside. She didn't try to make conversation, which was either professional courtesy or the result of one look at my face in the rearview mirror, blotchy, tear-streaked, wearing jeans I'd yanked on with shaking hands and a sweater that wasn't Xavier's. I'd been deliberate about that. Grabbed my own sweater I'd left out instead of reaching for the black t-shirt that was still on the bedroom floor. My own clothes. My own smell. My own body, contained within fabric that carried no trace of cedar or coffee or the particular warmth of his skin.
I hated every thread of it.
The apartment building looked different. Not dramatically. Just the same brick facade, same narrow staircase, same crooked mailbox with my name on a strip of masking tape that had started peeling at the corners months ago. But the difference was there in the details: new paint on the hallway walls, a clean, sharp white that made the corridor look wider and brighter and completely unfamiliar. The floor beneath my feet had been refinished, and the smell of polyurethane and fresh latex hung in the air like a chemical ghost, overwriting every memory I had of this place with something sterile and new.
My door had new locks. A deadbolt and a secondary latch that Boris had apparently insisted on, because Boris's approach to problem-solving involved layers of steel and the unshakeable conviction that any situation could be improved by making itharder for people to get through doors. I fumbled with the keys Katya had pressed into my hand last week during one of her visits, the metal biting into my fingers as I worked the deadbolt with hands that were shaking so badly it took three attempts to align the key with the slot.
The door opened.
The apartment was small. I'd lived here for two years, so I knew exactly how small it was, but knowing and experiencing were different things, and the experience of stepping into this space after eight weeks in Xavier's house was like stepping from a cathedral into a closet. One bedroom. A bathroom barely large enough to turn around in. A kitchen that was really just a counter with ambitions. The window that had always stuck, the one I'd propped open with a copy ofWar and Peacebecause the irony amused me, had been replaced entirely, and the new one sat in its frame with the smug precision of something that worked properly and knew it.
Katya had been here. I could tell because there were flowers on the kitchen counter—yellow tulips in a mason jar, cheerful and defiant. The fridge, when I opened it, was stocked with the basics: milk, eggs, bread, butter, a container of soup that had Katya's handwriting on the lid. The bed was made with sheets I didn't recognize.
