She sat down again, hand landing gently on my thigh, eyes huge and pleading. “Why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve helped.”
“I figured it out, Char.” I swallowed. “Sebastian helped, but… I figured it out. And I don’t want you to worry or feel like you need to support me. The last thing I want is for him to be right and for me to just live off the Langleys forever.”
Her expression didn’t budge. “If you didn’t want the money, that’s fine. But why didn’t you let me help yougo throughall of that? Just talking. Listening. There are other ways to help, Ethan.”
I stared at her.
“When the whole thing with Sebastian blew up, I told you to stop doing this,” she went on, voice tight. “To stop carrying everything on your own. You and me? We’re it for life, E. If something like that happened to me, would you want me to hide it and go through it alone?”
“Of course not.”
“Then stop thinking letting people in makes you weak.”
My brain stalled. Literallystopped.
Because she was right. And because—god—it hit somewhere deep enough that something inside me flinched. I could picture myself saying that exact same sentence to Sebastian. And that was the part that gutted me.
When had I started behaving like him? When had I turned into the thing I spent so long resenting?
“I just…” The words scraped on the way out. “I just don’t want people to have a reason to leave me.”
Charlotte’s eyes welled the second I said it—like she’d been waiting for me to say something that honest. “That’s not going to happen.”
But it already had. Over and over.
I never realized how much Sebastian leaving was carved into me. How deeply my parents’ bullshit had lodged under my ribs. And now… this. All of this fucking mess. I’d crossed the same line I’d spent years hating them for.
And instead of dealing with it, I felt myself shutting down all over again. Every disappointment made me colder. Every time it happened, I pulled further back. Suddenly I was looking at myself through her eyes and realizing?—
Was that what it was like for him too? Carrying everything alone until the fractures began to show somewhere he couldn’t control? Was he just… shut down? Not because he didn’t care, but because he genuinely didn’t know how to reach out?
The thought was so sad my eyes burned.
Charlotte’s arms wrapped around me again, fast and tight, and I leaned into her without thinking.
“Fuck, this is sad,” I said against her shoulder.
She let out a wet laugh. “A little.”
“I’m sorry. You’re finally away from the kids, and I have you here looking after me.”
She pulled back just enough to pinch my arm.
I yelped, hand flying to the spot. “What the hell was that for?”
“Stop apologizing for being human, Ethan. We all are.”
I rubbed the sting, a small smile tugging at my mouth as something in my chest unclenched. “I hope that’s not how you correct your kids. This kind of thing is illegal now.”
She smacked my arm—lighter—before grabbing her wine and downing it. “I wouldnever. You just need extra help.”
The tension in me eased after that.
We ate, we talked, she curled her feet under her on the couch the way she always did, and for the first time in days, the noise in my head felt manageable. I felt more grounded. More like myself and less like the spiraling mess I’d been since arriving in Madrid. Probably before that, honestly.
And when I finally lay in bed later, replaying everything—our fight, his voice in that doorway, his face when he looked at me—it didn’t hurt the same way.
It gave me clarity.
