“Nat—”
“I can’t,” she says again, stronger this time because she has to be. “Maybe you mean all of that. Maybe it’s even true. But I can’t tell the difference anymore, and that means I can’t stay here.”
I want to argue. I want to find the one perfect combination of words that makes her see I’m not lying, not this time, not about how I feel. But the thing is, she’s right. She can’t tell the difference. Because I made sure she couldn’t, every single day I chose not to tell her.
I nod because I don’t trust myself to do anything else.
“Okay.”
The word feels like surrender, but I don’t have anything left.
She turns away.
“Natalia,” I say quietly, because I can’t let her walk out of here with no plan and no protection, “go to the private terminal at theairport. I’ll call ahead and make sure the plane is ready to take you back.”
She holds my gaze for a beat that lasts about nine years.
“Why are you doing this?” she whispers.
Because you’re about to walk out into Vegas alone and that thought makes me physically ill. Because helping you leave me is the last honest thing I can do for you.
Because I love you.
Of course I do. Of course that’s what this is. My ribs ache with it. My throat squeezes around it.
And I can’t say it. Not now. Not when every true thing I’ve told her is buried under weeks of lies. Not when those words would sound like one more play to make her stay.
So I swallow it. Add it to the pile of shit I should have said sooner.
“Because I meant what I said.”
Her mouth trembles once. Barely. Then she tightens it.
She moves toward the door, and every instinct in my body strains after her. To touch her. To stop her. To get on my knees, if that’s what it takes. But I stay where I am.
My hand curls into a fist at my side so hard my nails bite my palm.
“Natalia.”
She stops with her hand on the knob but doesn’t turn around.
“Get home safe,” I say.
It’s nothing. It’s pathetic. It’s nowhere near enough.
She opens the door and walks out.
The click when it shuts behind her feels like getting shot.
For a few seconds, I just stand there staring at the door, half convinced it’ll swing back open if I want it hard enough. That she’ll come back in furious and crying and tell me I left something out, that I owe her more, that she’s not done with me yet.
It stays shut.
My legs finally stop pretending they work, and I slide down the wall to the carpet.
Thirty floors below, the Strip is doing what it always does. Neon and money and a whole city built on the premise that what happens here doesn’t follow you home. Must be nice.
In the stillness, the truth of it settles in ugly and precise.
