“You wanna know how long I’ve been…stalking you?”
The words lands between us like something dropped from a height.
“Years, Sophia. I’ve watched you for years. Your routine. Your rhythm. The way you dress. The way you talk to people. How you chew the inside of your mouth when you’re thinking.”
My stomach hollows out.
“I know how you laugh when you’re trying to pretend something’s funny. How your throat moves while you swallow that first sip of your cinnamon latte.”
My pulse spikes.
“I know how you can’t do something as mundane as laundry without being three steps ahead of yourself, forgetting things.” A pause. “But not when it comes to them.”
“To who?” I choke out, barely a whisper.
“The children.” Something in his voice shifts. Loses the edge. Becomes something rawer underneath. “You soak up their pain like it’s yours, and don’t pay attention to your own life because you’re too caught up in theirs.”
“That’s got nothing to do?—”
“You think you’re helping.” He’s close now. Close enough that I can see the detail of the buff across his face, the particular darkness of the indigo line around the black of his pupils. “You think you can heal them. Make them whole again. But you can’t. Nothing can. Their lives are glass, Sophia. You can try to put it back together, but the cracks? It’ll always show. Break again under the slightest pressure. Because you can’t unfuck a life that’s already been destroyed.”
The room goes very quiet.
Years.
The word drops between us, and my body braces for the hit, stomach dropping, skin crawling, the scream that should already be climbing my throat.
None of it comes.
Because my eyes have already locked on the way his shoulders have gone rigid, coiled like cables under unbearable strain. His fists are curled so tight the knuckles have bleached white, and every breath he takes looks like it’s carving him open from the inside, costing him something he’ll never get back. The careful armor he usually wears is cracking right in front of me. It’s raw and so painfully human, my chest squeezes with a sharp, unexpected ache that steals my breath. I can’t look away.
“What happened to you?”
The question slips out soft and trembling, and the second it does, his pain crashes into me like it belongs to me too. My heart twists so violently I feel it in my throat—a fierce, aching tenderness I have no right to feel for the man who stole my life. It drowns everything else, the years he watched me, the fear, the rage. None of it survives this. All that’s left is this terrifying need to reach him, to pull the broken pieces closer even though I know they’ll cut me.
“The scars on your arm,” I say.
His jaw tightens.
“I know what self-harm looks like.”
“You don’t know shit.”
“I know what it means when someone needs that kind of control over their own body.” I keep my voice level. The voice I use when something fragile is in the room. “Every line. The exact spacing.The identical length. They’re too deliberate to be random. Too consistent.”
“You need to stop.”
I push off the wall, closer. “One per…something.That’s what I think. One per event. One per person. One per?—”
“I said stop.”
“Am I wrong?”
His eyes are sharp enough to pierce glass. “You need to leave this alone.”
“I can’t.” And I mean it. Not as a provocation. As a fact. “I’ve sat across from many people who learned to do this to themselves, and I have never once been able to leave it alone because leaving it alone means leaving them alone inside it, and I won’t do that.”
“I’m not your patient.”
