“‘He fixed the shelf today.’“ Her voice broke the silence, quiet, directed at the trees. Then louder, mocking, the narrator of her own stupidity. “‘Didn’t say anything about it. Just walked in with the tools and fixed it while I was reading. When I thanked him, he said the structural integrity was compromised.’“
She snorted. “Structural integrity. God, I actually thought that was romantic. A man says the wordstructuraland I write a whole paragraph about it.”
My claws dug into the rock.
“‘Solomon doesn’t do favors. He solves problems.’“ She read it in a voice reserved for eulogies. “‘The fact that my problems keep ending up at the top of his list is the closest thing to a love language he has.’“
My chest cracked open. She’d written that about me and believed it. Now she read it as a stranger’s words, searching for proof that none of it was real.
It was real. Every moment.
Every problem I solved for her, every time I put her at the top of my list without hesitation.
She’d never believe me now.
“Mira.” Her name left my mouth, barely a sound. She couldn’t hear me. I said it anyway.
She flipped the page. “‘Percy burned dinner again.’“ Faster now, clipped, performing an autopsy on her own happiness. “‘Lucian ate it. Sol cleaned up the mess.’“ She paused on the name.
My name. The version only she used.
“‘Sol cleaned it up before anyone asked him to.’“
Because that’s what I did. Cleaned up. Fixed. Maintained. Every act of love disguised as logistics, every moment she’d noticed that I thought I was hiding. She’d written all of it down and I’d never known.
I was supposed to be the one who fixed things. Who solved problems. Who made the broken pieces fit back together.
This time, I was the one who broke her.
The one thing I couldn’t fix was the damage I’d helped cause.
Mockery died in her throat. “‘This is what happy looks like. I didn’t recognize it at first because I’ve never had it.’“
She closed the journal. Held it against her chest with both arms.
Then she tore the page out.
A lighter appeared from her jacket. Cheap, plastic. The flame caught the corner and climbed. She held it until the fire reached her fingers, then dropped it into the pine needles. Ash scattered.
She was burning me.
The version of me she’d loved, the one who fixed shelves and cleaned salt off the floor and showed up in the margins of her journal as proof that someone gave a damn. She was setting that man on fire because I’d taught her he wasn’t real.
Another page torn out. Percy’s name from what I could make out from here. The wordpancakes. A line I caught before the fire consumed it:he makes me laugh and I hate how much I need that right now.
Burned. Gone.
“Mira.” Again. My forehead pressed against the rock and my claws left grooves in the stone.
A third page. The bitterness was back when she spoke but thinner, stretched over something it couldn’t fully cover.
“‘I keep waiting for the catch.’“ She stared at the words. “‘These three keep showing up and I’m running out of reasons to expect the worst. Maybe that’s the scariest part. That I’ll let myself believe they won’t leave.’“
She held the page over the lighter. Watched it curl.
“Spoiler alert,” she whispered to the ash. “They left. Congratulations, past Mira. Your instincts were right all along.”
One more page. This one she didn’t read aloud. Her eyes moved across the words and her lips pressed together and the trembling in her chin spread to her hands.
