This feels messier.
The anger is still there, but it’s cracked now. Fractured. Like ice starting to melt from underneath, turning slick and dangerous. Like something I could slip on if I’m not careful.
That’s worse.
Anger keeps you upright. This in between, this grief adjacent, hope adjacent, bone-deep exhaustion, is dangerous.
I pick up the phone again despite myself. My thumb slides across the glass. I reread the message.
LEO: Saturday market. Meet me at the Saturday market.
That part matters more than I want it to.
He didn’t come here. He didn’t show up at my door. He didn’t corner me in the alley or wait outside like a penitent ghost. He didn’t demand. He didn’t explain. He didn’t fix.
He asked.
And then he stopped.
I hate that I notice. I hate that my brain is cataloging the difference, lining it up against every other time a man with resources decided that waiting was optional.
“No strings,” I murmur, mostly to myself.
I’ve heard that before. From banks that wanted naming rights. From landlords who wished to control clauses buried in fine print. From men who smiled too easily and talked about partnership like it was a favor.
Gwen shifts beside me. The metal table creaks under her weight. “You don’t have to answer him,” she says.
“I know.”
I mean it. I really do. I don’t owe him forgiveness. I don’t owe him time. I don’t owe him closure so he can feel better about himself and move on to the next thing that lights him up, only to try to optimize it six weeks later.
But this isn’t about him feeling better.
That realization settles slowly, heavy and unwelcome.
This is about me. About whether I can live with not knowing.
Because right now, I don’t know if the man I kissed, the one who scrubbed pans like they mattered, who listened when I talked about crumb structure and hydration percentages like it was gospel, is the same man who sat in a bar and signed away my future with a pen that probably cost more than my oven repair fund.
Right now, I don’t know which version of him is real.
And I hate not knowing.
“I’m not forgiving him,” I say aloud, needing to hear it in the room. My voice is flat, but true. “What he did… that doesn’t disappear because he did one right thing afterward.”
Gwen nods. She doesn’t argue. She never does when I sound like this, when my words come out stripped down to their bones. “Good,” she says simply.
I stare at the closed sign hanging crooked in the window. At my reflection in the dark glass. I look tired. Older. Like someone who trusted the wrong person and paid for it. My face is puffy around the eyes. There’s a faint crease between my brows that wasn’t there a year ago.
But I also look standing.
Not folded. Not shattered. Standing.
“He didn’t spin it,” I say slowly, piecing the thought together as I speak. “He didn’t soften it. He didn’t make himself the hero.”
“No,” Gwen agrees. “He made himself the villain.”
I swallow. My throat feels tight, like I’ve been holding my breath without realizing it.
