Dark circles deeper than mine. Stubble. Red-rimmed eyes looking at me with something so undefended that my hands fist at my sides to keep from reaching for him.
He looks wrecked.
That's my fault.
We stand in the doorway. Two people who have learned to be careful with the distance between their bodies, close enoughto feel each other's warmth and not touching because touching would end something we're both trying to survive.
He looks past me. Into the room. His gaze finds the folded clothes, the evidence.
His jaw works.
"You're packing."
The words land flat. Careful.
I don't answer. I had hours to prepare for this moment and I spent them crying and packing and failing to breathe and I have nothing ready for the look on his face.
He's holding the tray. Rosemary bread, sliced. A small bowl of chicken soup. A glass of water. He arranged everything with care. Napkin folded, spoon placed.
He lifts the tray slightly. A question made physical.
I step aside.
He sets it on the bedside table with controlled placement. Then he turns and sees the folded clothes again.
His eyes go bright.
He blinks. Clears his throat with a sound like something tearing.
He nods. Slow. The nod of a man granting permission for something that is destroying him.
Then he reaches into the pocket of his jeans.
He comes closer. Close enough that the air between us becomes a living thing, charged with everything we are not saying.
He pulls out a key. Small. Brass.
"I don't understand why you're doing this." His voice is quiet in a way I've never heard from him. "But I get it. Leaving. I've been doing it almost my whole life."
He looks at the key.
"Then I found someone who made me stop." A breath that I can see costs him. His throat works. "I hope someday you find that too."
He takes my left hand. Opens my fingers and sets the key in my palm. Brass against skin. Cold, small, and weighted with something that has nothing to do with mass.
"Key to our house," His voice cracks onour. "So maybe, someday, you find your way back."
The half-smile that surfaces is a ghost of the Jace grin. The one that gets him into trouble and out of it in equal measure. "I'd say it's the key to my heart but that's the worst line I've ever considered saying out loud, and also it'd be wrong, because you've owned that since I watched a woman in a bath towel come at me with an axe."
The sound that comes out of me is broken and jagged and half sob and the moment he hears it his face collapses and he's blinking hard.
"Don't." A whisper. "Please. I can take a lot but I can't take you crying."
He folds my fingers around the key. His hand over mine. His palm warm against my knuckles.
The tears come. Not the silent ones from behind the door. These have sound. These move through my body in waves, racking, ugly, the crying of a woman who has run out of ways to hold herself together.
"Come here," he says, and pulls me in.
