"Fine, what?"
"I’ll go," I say.
She narrows her eyes. "That was not convincing."
"It’s the best you’re going to get."
Katerina accepts it with a nod, then steps closer and presses a quick kiss to my temple, like she’s reminding me she’s allowed to love me even when I’m being impossible.
"Stop moping," she says, already turning toward the door. "And drink the water."
"I hate when you act like you’re my mother."
"I learned from the best," she calls back.
Then she’s gone, the door clicking shut behind her, leaving my apartment quiet again.
But it’s a different kind of quiet now. The empty kind.
I sit there for a long moment, staring at the vitamins in my hand like they contain answers. Katerina thinks she knows what happened. Scottie thinks he knows. The team thinks they know.
They all see the version of this that fits into simple categories: betrayal, heartbreak, stubbornness.
The truth is that I asked Natalia to hold something fragile for me, and she handed it to someone who shattered it, and now Idon’t know how to separate intention from outcome, because my entire life has taught me that outcome is what matters.
My father always said love makes you weak. I used to think that was cynicism. Now I understand it as strategy. Because the moment you care, you give someone the power to wreck you.
And I cared. That’s the part I don’t want to admit, even to myself.
I reach for my phone without thinking, thumb hovering over her name before I can stop it.
I don’t press call. I just stare at it.
Because the scariest part isn’t that she might have hurt me again.
It’s that she might have stopped trying, and I’m not sure I can pretend that doesn’t matter.
Not anymore.
Chapter Thirty-Three
NATALIA
Two weeks is long enough for the adrenaline to wear off and short enough for everything to still feel tender.
In that span of time, I’ve become someone else.
Not in the dramatic, movie-montage way where you cut your hair and magically stop caring, but in the quieter way where you wake up every morning and reach for your phone out of habit, expecting to see his name, and then you remember—again—that you won’t.
Not because he’s dead.
Because he decided I am.
I’ve sold my condo. I’ve watched the "For Sale" sign come down in Scottsdale through photos Molly sends me, like proof that the life I built there is officially no longer mine. Myboxes arrived at my mom’s place in Seattle in neat stacks that should have felt like progress, and instead felt like the physical manifestation of grief.
I’ve lost Luka.
I’ve lost my job.
