“We stay alert and we keep living our lives in the meantime, because the alternative is handing him control through absence.” He closed the tablet and set it flat on the table. “Lettinghim make you paranoid and reactive is part of the strategy. You know that.”
I knew it fine. Didn't make it any less like standing on a floor that might not hold.
“Declan brought Mara on as co-owner,” I said. Easier to be talking about facts than the crawl of anxiety I'd been managing since Rafael went dark. “She's capable. But the learning curve on the business side is steep and Rafael had been running most of it for a year. There's a lot of ground to recover.”
“How's Declan handling it?”
“Like Declan handles everything. Head down. Keep working. Don't talk about it.” I turned my cup again. “His fight is tomorrow.”
Luka looked up from the tablet. “I'll be there.”
“You don't have to?—”
“I'm going to be there, Troy.” His tone closed the door on the conversation. “Declan matters to you. Which means he matters to me. That's how it works.”
The plain straightforwardness of it landed somewhere I hadn't been braced for. I looked away, out at the gray street, and didn't say anything for a moment.
“The face you're making right now,” Luka said.
“Don't.”
“It's an observation. You always look like you've been ambushed when someone names what you're actually feeling.”
“Because it usually feels like one.” I brought my eyes back to him. “You said I talked about him a lot. In London.”
“Constantly.” He picked up his Americano and took a drink. “You'd be halfway through a debrief and suddenly drop in something like, 'Declan used to do this.' Or you'd go quiet mid-conversation and come back off by about fifteen degrees, and it was always because something had reminded you of Chicago.” He set his cup down. “I notice things. It's reflex. And what I keptnoticing was that Declan occupied more space in your head than you were willing to account for.”
“People think about their families.”
“The way you think about him isn't the way people think about family.”
He didn't say it to cut me. Just laid it out flat between us, patient enough to let it sit there without pressing for a reaction.
I looked at him across the table. He was watching me with that steady, measuring attention that made him effective at everything and exhausting to be around in moments like this one.
“How's it going between you two?” he asked. “Actually going. Not the version you'd give someone who hadn't known you for six years.”
The question settled over the table with more weight than I'd been expecting. I turned my cup. The ceramic scraped against the wood.
“It's weird,” I said finally.
“Weird how?”
“Weird like I spent years telling myself the anger was the whole story. That it was just rage and old grief and the need to put distance between me and everything that reminded me of her.” The admission came out rougher than I'd planned, a little uneven at the edges. “But I've been looking back at it since I got here, and I'm starting to think the anger was doing a second job the entire time.”
“Which was?”
“Covering up something else I didn't want to look at.” I stared at the table. “I thought about him too much. Measured things against what he'd think. Wanted to know if he was watching when I left and then hated myself for caring. And when I was old enough that the grief angle didn't hold anymore, I just keptcalling it resentment because resentment had a story around it I could explain.”
“That's not resentment,” Luka said. “That's fixation.”
“Yeah.” I looked up. “I figured that out eventually.”
“And fixation at that level tends to sit right next to something else.”
I didn't answer that directly. Picked up my cold coffee and drank what was left of it just to do something with my hands.
“I didn't let myself see it until I came back here,” I said. “Came back and saw him as an actual adult instead of the symbol I'd built out of him. Showed up expecting the same arguments. The same walls. Braced for all of it.” I set the empty cup down. “And then he was just there. And everything I'd planned to feel came out sideways.”
