I don't want to hold it anymore.
I don't want to hold any of it anymore.
I look at Cody first.
He's already watching me. He's been watching me the whole time with those red eyes and that open face — the most honest I've ever seen him, the most unguarded, and isn't that the cruelest thing? That I get the real version of him now. After everything. After all of it. Now he shows me something true.
"Get out," I say.
His face changes. "Adela—"
"Get out of this room." My voice doesn't shake. I don't know how it doesn't shake when my heart is breaking, but it doesn't. "I need you to get out."
"Baby, just listen—"
"Don't." The word comes out sharp enough that he stops. "Don't call me that. Don't call me anything." I look at him, and I feel two years of love sitting in my chest next to two years of lies, andI cannot tell them apart anymore, and that might be the most devastating thing of all. "Please leave."
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then he looks at the floor.
He picks up his jacket.
He walks to the door and stops with his hand on the frame. He turns back and opens his mouth. I shake my head once. He nods and closes it as he leaves.
I look at Beckett.
He's already standing.
He knew before I looked at him. Beckett has always been the one who reads rooms, who understands what's coming before it arrives, who shows up already knowing what's needed. That quality that I thought meant he cared.
Maybe he did care.
It doesn't matter anymore.
"Beck," I say.
"I know," he says quietly.
"I can't look at you right now."
He nods. Once. He doesn't perform anything — no wounded expression, no argument, no last attempt to say something that will make it land differently. He nods, picks up his jacket, and looks at me one time with something in his face that I don't have the energy to decode.
He goes.
The door closes.
I look at Theo.
He hasn't moved.
He's sitting in the chair with the book in his hands, and he's looking at me, and he looks — I don't know what he looks like. I have spent weeks trying to read his face, but I have never been able to fully. I cannot do it now either, and that's the issue. Maybe that's always been the thing. I fell for a face I could never fully read, and I told myself that was depth, and it was just distance.
He kept my pendant from the beginning.
He sat across from me in a library and let me think I was safe.
"Theo." His name in my mouth feels different now. Everything feels different now. "Take the book."
