“And I know what he did when I needed someone,” I fire back. “Which is show the fuck up. Something you two seem to have forgotten how to do. So stop judging me.”
“We’re not judging you,” Sam insists, but her voice lacks conviction.
“You are,” I fire back. “You’ve decided he’s trash. You’ve decided he’s a walking red flag. But you weren’t there.”
“Do you hear yourself?” Aubrey demands, her voice rising. “He fucks anything that moves.”
“And?” I shoot back, refusing to flinch. “What does that have to do with how he’s been here for me?”
They don’t have an answer, because they didn’t see him sit on the edge of his bed, battling with himself over whether to let me stay. They didn’t see him freeze when I touched his back. They didn’t see him sit with me in silence because he knew that sometimes words are useless.
They only see what everyone else sees. The rumors. The reputation. The surface-level bullshit. Not the boy beneath all the shitty things that have happened to him to make him that way.
“You don’t know him,” I say, my voice quieter now but more steady and confident.
“We are aware of his reputation,” Sam says, and she sounds almost desperate, grasping for solid ground.
“Reputations are easy,” I reply. “Showing up isn’t.”
Aubrey shakes her head, frustration and fear mixing in her expression.
“He’s going to hurt you.”
The certainty in her voice makes my chest tighten, but I keep my expression steady.
“Go back to your perfect little lives,” I say, exhaustion bleeding into my tone, weighing down every word. “Go back to posting cute photos on Instagram with your boyfriends and pretending everything’s fine.”
“That’s not fair,” Sam whispers, and there are tears in her eyes now.
“Neither is sitting alone in a hospital room wondering if your dad’s going to wake up,” I say, and my voice cracks on the last word. “Neither is feeling invisible to the people who are supposed to give a shit about me.” I pause and swallow hard. “Jace has been there each day at the hospital with me. So you can judge him all you want. But he’s the one who has been there for me. Not you.”
Sam’s face crumples and Aubrey looks away, her jaw working.
What can they say to that? What defense do they have?
A long silence hangs over us. Heavy. Uncomfortable. The kind of silence that feels like the end of something.
Finally, Sam exhales, her shoulders dropping under the weight of it.
“We should have been there,” she says quietly. “You’re right. We fucked up.”
Aubrey’s gaze flicks to Jace one last time, lingering on the car where he sits still, pretending he can’t hear every word of this conversation.
“This isn’t going to end well,” she mutters.
“Maybe,” I say, and I’m surprised by how calm I sound, how resigned. “But it’s my mistake to make.”
Their expressions shift at that. Sam flinches. Aubrey’s face hardens even more, hurt flashing across her features before she can hide it.
Because calling him a mistake means I already know how this story ends. It means I’m walking into it with my eyes open, choosing the crash anyway. And that scares them more than anything else I could have said.
It probably should scare me, too.
But right now, standing here with my whole world falling apart around me, the only thing that matters is knowing Jace showed up when no one else did. That he walked in with me through sterile hospital hallways and didn’t ask questions I couldn’tanswer. That he gave me space to break without trying to put me back together.
Even if it ends badly, even if Aubrey’s right and he hurts me, at least he was there.
Chapter Eleven
