They knew I had no floor…no cushion to cradle my demise.
I find the balcony through a set of tall French doors left open to the evening air—not because I'm looking for it but because the air coming through them is cold and I want cold right now, want the particular honesty of March night air that doesn't perform anything, just is what it is.
The balcony is empty.
Thank God.
Stone balustrade, wide enough to lean against, looking out over the back grounds of the castle.
Dusk has arrived while I was inside—the sky is that particular shade of early evening that can't decide between blue and indigo, and against it the fields behind the property are a deep, saturated green, the formal flower beds laid out below in geometric patterns that Elowen has decorated for the season: clover and ranunculus in rows that from this height look almost architectural, miniature and deliberate. Beyond the beds, open land, and beyond that, the faint suggestion of trees at the property's edge.
I lean on the balustrade and look at it.
The question arrived the way honest questions tend to—not announced, not requested, just there: did I love them?
I turn it over.
The real version of it, not the practiced social answer. Not the way I frame it for people who ask, which is: it was complicated, it was three years of my life, there were good moments before the bad ones.
The actual question, stripped of its performance:
Did I, Mila Castellanos, love Dante, Kieran, and Seb?
The champagne is cold in my hand. I brought a fresh glass on the way out—dry, with that particular pale gold of good brut, the small persistent bubbles catching the evening light as they surface and dissolve. It smells clean. Green apple at the rim, that faint yeasty biscuit note of decent méthode traditionnelle underneath, and at the back something almost saline, coastal.
I take a sip and think honestly.
No.
The answer is no.
I loved the idea of it.
I loved the architecture of what a pack was supposed to be—the promise of the structure, the three-point stability of it, the specific fantasy that having people meant having a net. I loved the first six months when they were performing their best versions, while I was performing mine, and we were all collectively pretending that performance was the foundation.
But I didn't love them.
And they—transparently, definitively, with receipts—didn't love me.
You can't leave someone the way they left me if there's love involved.
You can leave, yes.
Packs end, situations collapse, people outgrow each other.
But you don't hand someone a fifty-thousand-dollar liability and walk out of the city. That's not the exit of people who once loved you. That's the exit of people who treated you as infrastructure.
The thought doesn't break anything.
That's the thing I didn't expect—that the honest answer would land this quietly. Not shattering, not grief, just—a door closing on a room I'm not going back to. Definitive in the way that clean things are definitive.
Okay.
So I didn't love them.
That's a fact now.
Filed.
