“I don’t give a shit what Rex thought.”
The silence that follows is enormous. Pressing. On my ears, my chest, the space between us. Even the refrigerators seem to hesitate, like they’re waiting for the explosion.
Leo exhales slowly, shakily, like he’s trying not to spook a wild animal.
“I was trying to help.”
That word,help,finally cracks the last barrier holding my anger back.
“Help?” I laugh.
It’s not a nice sound. It scrapes my throat raw, brittle, and sharp.
“You took my dream and ran it through a branding deck,” I say, words tumbling, hot and unstoppable. “You turned my grandmother into a bullet point. You turned the kids I want to protect into a ‘market penetration’ metric. You turned my parents’ failure into a case study.”
He flinches, like I’ve hit him.
“I didn’t, Tess. You don’t understand. This gets you everything faster. The apprentices. The funding. You said yourself it would take years…”
“Yes,” I snap. “Years. Because that’s how long it takes to build something real.”
I step closer. He doesn’t retreat. He just stands there, tall, earnest, stupidly beautiful, and I hate how much that still hurts. Hate that my body remembers him even as my mind tears him apart.
“You didn’t listen to me,” I say, quieter now.
Somehow that’s worse. “Not really. You heard the parts you liked. The parts that fit into your world. And then you did what you always do.”
His brow furrows. “That’s not fair.”
“It’s exactly fair,” Gwen says behind me. Her voice is low, calm, lethal. “You saw a problem, and you bought it. Congratulations.”
Leo looks at her like she’s betrayed him, like he thought she was on his side just because she laughed at his jokes and tolerated his presence.
“I was protecting her,” he insists.
“No,” I say softly. “You were protecting your version of me.”
That one lands. I see it in his face, the way the fight drains out of him all at once, replaced by something like grief, like recognition, like the slow realization that good intentions don’t cancel out damage.
“I didn’t want someone else to get to you first,” he says. “Rex was right. People are circling. With the press, the videos, the buzz. If I didn’t lock this down…”
“So, you locked me down?” I ask.
He goes very still. The quiet stretches. I nod once. Slowly.
“There it is.”
“I would never…”
“You already did.”
I reach out and close the tablet. The click is loud in the quiet room. Too loud. Like a door slamming shut.
“I trusted you,” I say. The words hurt coming out. They lodge in my chest like broken glass, sharp, jagged, unmoving. “I showed you something I have never shown anyone. Not banks. Not grant committees. Not even Gwen until it was finished. I showed you the thing I built out of grief, stubbornness, and love. And you took it and turned it into leverage.”
His eyes shine now. He doesn’t wipe them away.
“I thought if you saw the scope, if you saw how many people this could help…”
