Jake watches me too closely. “You think any of that has something to do with you?”
I look away. “That would be stupid.”
“That is not a no.”
I let out a slow breath. “I don’t know.”
That’s the truth.
I don’t know anything except that I left because staying would have swallowed me whole. Because when everything blew up at the office, I had one clear instinct for once in my life and it was run.
Because I was pregnant and humiliated and in love with a man I had known for barely any time at all, and that combination felt less romantic than fatal.
I was not going to raise a child in the middle of his family war. I was not going to become another woman folded into the Vasiliev machine because a man looked at me hard enough to blur my judgment. And I was definitely not going to wait around while he chose a wife with me in the background like some disposable, shameful side note.
So I left.
I got smaller. Quieter. Found a cheaper apartment. Took barista shifts. Wrote at night. Stopped recording. Kept my head down. Built a little life that fit in my own two hands.
“I’m not sorry I left,” I say finally.
Jake nods. “Okay.”
“But I…” I stop.
He waits.
I press my lips together, then let the sentence come out ugly and true. “I hate that some part of me still wants him to have looked harder.”
Jake’s expression softens in that annoying, human way people do when they’re being decent. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “That tracks.”
I laugh once, because if I don’t laugh I might cry and that would be deeply embarrassing in the middle of a half-empty café.
Outside, a siren cuts through the street and fades again.
I look toward the window one more time. That feeling has gone.
Or maybe it hasn’t. Maybe I’ve just gotten too good at carrying it.
Jake stands and picks up his bag. “I should go before I start helping myself to pastries and your boss fires you.”
“I am very close to firing myself.”
“Please don’t. My sister likes you.”
I smile and push myself upright again.
He leans in and presses a quick kiss to the top of my head. “Text me when you get home.”
“I’m twenty-seven. Not twelve.”
“Pregnant, stubborn, and weirdly unlucky with powerful men. So yes. Text me.”
I make a face at him, but he’s already walking backward toward the door.
A few days pass.
Enough for the weird feeling at the back of my neck to fade into background noise again. Enough for me to do what I have gotten very good at doing these past months:
