He can’t hurt me.
That pain in my chest? The wetness in the corner of my eyes… and on my cheeks… and, fuck, dampening the front of my shirt?
It’s nothing.
He’s nothing.
I show up at the coffee shop with my backpack, my textbooks, and that lie I keep feeding myself burning in my gut like a biblical case of heartburn.
I’m not hurting.
The cafe smells like espresso and cinnamon and buttery pastry; it’s quiet enough to think, bright enough to pretend I’m fine, that I don’t have to see the lies and danger and heartbreak lurking in every shadow. I claim a corner table by the window, shrug out of my jacket, give a glance to everyone around warningthem to keep their distance and their opinions to themselves, and lay everything out with the precision that usually calms me: laptop, notebook, highlighters, index cards, and my phone.
There’s a text message to Rabid that sits saved in my phone, unsent, held back because of heartbreak and the pain of knowing that once I throw this message out into the cellular ether, the pain that I went through becomes even more real —We need to talk. Evan isn’t who he says he is.
It’s not just the suffering swirling inside my chest that I’m afraid of; it’s knowing that I may have put the people I care about in danger. That the people who have loved and trusted me for years, people that I asked to trust me and let Evan in, are in danger because they trusted me.
I shake my head, release a slow sigh, and open my accounting book.
The first page I see might as well be a fist.
A little notecard falls out. On it, in Evan’s chicken scratch scrawl, are the words “You got this, Molls.”
And as I take that notecard in hand, read it, feel the wetness overflows the corners of my eyes before I rip it in half while visions of Evan smiling as he wrote this and snuck it in my book swirl in my wet-hazy vision, as thoughts of Evan’s mouth, his voice, his smile, his touch, the way he made mefeel like someone who matteredoverwhelm me, a sound comes out of me I've never heard myself make before.
Then the anger comes in right behind it, sharp as broken glass.
I let him in.
He arranged a secret study date. He brought my textbook. He bought color-coded index cards. He sat across from me for hours and never once made me feel stupid. And I thought — I actually thought — that was just who he was.
That son of a bitch. That asshole who sold me a story—kind, caring, responsible,normalEvan — when the reality is he isn’t even Evan, he’s some fucking asshole who goes by the road name Gator and reports to some creep named Midnight who wants to kill everyone I care about.
This is what I get for letting someone in. For trusting someone. For loving someone.
I should have known.
I slam the book shut.
The sound snaps through the quiet cafe, a hard slap that turns one or two heads. I just sit there, breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth, slowly, trying to calm myself, trying to convince my body I’m not back in my bedroom, staring at his phone, feeling my world split in half.
I pick up a pen. Set it down. Pick it up again.
I can’t do this.
Not right now.
Not when the act of studying feels like poking a wound.
I shove the book back into my bag so fast I nearly tear the zipper, grab my coffee before it can spill, and stand. My chair scrapes the floor. Too loud. More people stare. I don’t care — I meet their eyes and return their staring with a look that I hope teaches them to never stare at crying, heartbroken strangers again.
I need noise. Motion. Something that isn’t this quiet space where my brain can run wild.
I need work.
The Noble Fir will give me a task and a rhythm and a reason to keep my hands busy and my heart and brain pacified just enough that I don’t feel like I’m literally ripping in half. It will let me beMolly behind the bar— the version of me that can survive anything if she just keeps moving.
So I go.
