"You can't have both." I pull my wrist free — gently, not cruelly, because I don't have cruelty left either. "Xavier is your brother in every way that matters. You are not going to choose me over him. And you shouldn't."
"Why does it have to be a choice?"
"Because he made it one." I swing my leg over the bike. "Go back to him. Be the friend he needs right now. Be the person he leans on. That's where you belong."
"What about what you need?"
I start the engine. The vibration moves up through my hands, my arms, settles somewhere in my chest where the crying used to live. "What I need doesn't matter anymore," I say, and mean it in a way I didn't mean it an hour ago. "Take care of him, Zay. Take care of yourself."
I ride away before he can respond. I don't look in my mirrors.
I end up at my father’s old hideout apartment at the edge of the city the way you end up somewhere when you're not going anywhere — not by decision but by the eventual exhaustion of forward motion, the moment when your body sayshere, stop here, this is where you survive the night.Beige walls, floral bedspread that's seen better decades, the chemical bite of industrial cleaner trying and failing to cover the accumulated sadness of a thousand temporary lives.
I lie on top of the covers because getting into them feels like something a person with a plan would do, and I don't have a plan. I stare at the ceiling as the light outside goes from afternoon to evening to nothing. My phone buzzes at intervals — Zay, then Asher, then Zay again — and I leave them all unread. I can't hold their words right now. Can't absorb anything else tonight.
Around midnight, knuckles on the door.
I ignore it.
Three more knocks, harder. "Val, I know you're in there. Your bike's outside."
Asher.
"Go away," I call, and my voice sounds like a person who has been crying for seven hours, which I suppose is accurate.
"Open the door or I'm picking the lock. You have ten seconds."
I count to six out of stubbornness, then drag myself up, cross the room, flip the locks.
He takes in the room in one sweep — the dark, the untouched takeout I'd ordered and not eaten, me in the same clothes I waswearing when the world ended this afternoon — and says, with perfectly calibrated dryness: "Nice place."
"It's temporary."
"Where are you going?"
"I don't know yet. Away."
He sits in the single chair, elbows on his knees, and looks at me with those eyes that see too much and give away very little. "Running won't fix this."
"I know." I sit on the bed's edge. "But staying won't either."
"He's hurt?—"
"He hates me." I say it plainly, because the plainness is easier than the alternative. "I saw his face, Asher. That wasn't hurt. That was the moment someone decides they're done. That was — finality." I look down at my hands in my lap, the hands that swung a pipe six months ago and have been holding that secret ever since. "I killed his brother and lied about it. There's no forgiveness at the end of that sentence."
Asher is quiet. The kind of quiet that is thinking rather than absence. Then: "Marcus was going to rape you."
"Yes."
"You defended yourself."
"Yes."
"You blocked the memory because it was traumatic."
"Yes." I lift my head. "But none of that is the part I can't forgive myself for. The blocking wasn't a choice. The lying was. I chose,every single day for weeks, not to tell him. I chose my own safety over his right to know what happened to his brother." I hear my voice going flat and let it. "That was a coward's choice."
"It was a terrified person's choice," Asher corrects, with the quiet firmness that is one of the things I have loved about him — the way he argues without heat, as though the truth doesn't need theatrics. "There's a difference."
