They talked to Mrs. Smith.
They decided it.
They looked at my life and my choices and the small, specific arrangement I had made for myself, and they reached over and changed it. Without asking.
I hear Daniel's voice the way I always hear it now. Not as sound but as sensation.
The desk is still perfect. Owen's face is still open, still hopeful. Jace is leaning in the doorway looking pleased, arms crossed.
Something tips over in me and comes down hard.
"You had no right."
The room goes quiet. I watch the expressions change. Owen's hope closes like a door. Jace straightens.
"Maya," Reid starts.
"No." The word comes angry. "You had no right to contact my landlord. You had no right to break my lease. That was my contract. My arrangement. My decision."
"The cabin isn't safe to—"
"Stop." My voice is steady in a way my hands aren't. I press them flat against my thighs so no one can see. "Do not tell me what is and isn't safe for me. I am so tired." My throat tightens and I push through it because I will get these words out even if it kills me. "I am so tired of men hijacking my life." I look at them. All three of them. These men who have been kind tome, and right now I cannot access any of that. The warmth of the last three days is still there but I can't reach it. "I sacrificed everything. Do you understand? Everything. I will not let it happen again."
"That's not what—" Jace starts.
I'm already in the hallway.
My coat is on the hook by the door. I get it on, then the boots, fingers clumsy with the laces, and I don't let myself slow down because if I slow down I will have to feel the thing beneath the anger. The grief of it. The specific grief of a warmth I almost believed in.
I am not doing that here.
I open the door.
The cold hits me like a verdict.
Three days ago the cold almost had me. I was down in it, unable to move, and I had thought, in that flat pragmatic way of someone past fear, that this was probably it.
This time I walk into it myself.
10
JACE
The door closes and none of us move.
Not slammed. Pulled shut with the kind of control that costs more than slamming would.
Owen is the first to react. He takes half a step toward the hallway and Reid shifts, not speaking, just moving his weight to block the path. I'm ahead of them both.
"I'll go."
Owen turns. His face has gone careful, the openness from moments ago shut down so completely it might never have been there. "Maybe she needs space."
I look at him. He reads it and nods once. Reid doesn't move. Doesn't agree out loud. But he doesn't stop me.
I grab my coat off the hook.
Outside, the cold is a solid thing. I stand on the porch for a second and scan the tree line and there she is, already past the clearing, moving into the pines at a pace that isn't quite running, but close. Her coat is dark against the snow. Her head is down. She's not looking where she's going.
