Nothing.
Sienna makes me promise to get some sleep. To start fresh in the morning.
I nod. Agree to things I know I won't do.
When she leaves, I climb the stairs to the roof.
The roof iswhere I come when I need to think. When the café feels too small and my thoughts too loud.
It's freezing tonight. The late autumn wind cuts through my jacket like it has a personal vendetta, finding every gap andseam, making me shiver despite the layers. The cold bites at my cheeks and makes my eyes water—or maybe that's not just the wind.
I should go back inside. Make tea. Try to sleep, though sleep feels impossible right now, a distant concept that belongs to people whose lives aren't actively falling apart.
Instead, I sit on the ledge, legs dangling over empty air, and stare out at the neighborhood I've come to love despite myself.
Most of the rowhouses are dark at this hour, their residents safely tucked into bed with normal problems and normal sleep schedules. A few windows still glow with warm yellow light, scattered like stars in the urban darkness. Lives happening in small, contained spaces. People with their own dramas and joys and mundane routines, probably not sitting on rooftops at three in the morning questioning every life choice they've ever made.
Grath's window is lit. I can just see the edge of it from here, a warm rectangle in the darkness.
Is he awake? Thinking about me? Replaying our conversation the way I am, picking apart every word and gesture and the terrible things I said?
Or has he already moved on? Already decided I'm too much trouble, too closed-off, too fundamentally incapable of accepting what he was offering?
The thought makes my chest ache worse than the cold air burning my lungs.
I've never been good at this. At needing people. At letting them in past the carefully maintained defenses I've spent years constructing.
My parents taught me early that love is conditional. That it comes with expectations and disappointments and the constant pressure to be better, smarter, more successful.
So I learned not to need it. Learned to be self-sufficient and practical and fine on my own.
Except I'm not fine on my own.
I'm exhausted and scared and so desperately, achingly lonely I can barely breathe around the weight of it.
Grath saw that. Somehow, impossibly, he looked past all my deflections and sarcasm, saw straight through the defenses I've spent years perfecting, the careful walls I've built brick by stubborn brick to keep people at a safe distance.
And instead of backing away slowly like a sensible person would, instead of making excuses or deciding I was too much work, too damaged, too fundamentally broken?—
He stayed.
He planted himself in my life with the same quiet certainty he brings to everything, looked at me with those earnest eyes, and offered me something I didn't know how to accept.
Until I panicked and pushed him away with both hands, threw his kindness back in his face like it meant nothing, likehemeant nothing, when the truth is he means everything and that's exactly what terrifies me most.
A sob catches in me. I press my hand over my mouth, trying to muffle it.
But there's no one up here to hear me. No one to witness this breakdown.
So I let myself cry. Huge, ugly sobs that shake my whole body.
I cry for Pebble. For the café. For the petition and the developer and the whole impossible mess.
But mostly I cry for Grath.
For the hurt in his eyes when I implied he was just a marketing tool.
For the careful way he stepped back, giving me the space I asked for even though it clearly tore him apart.
