Good question. One I’ve been asking myself for three days while watching her maintain perfect distance.
“I don’t know. That’s what concerns me.”
Felix closes his laptop, giving me his full attention. “Do you want my honest assessment?”
“Always.”
“You broke something. That night at Damien’s estate, when you dragged her out, told her she couldn’t have friends—you broke whatever fragile trust was building. Now she’s protecting herself the only way she can. By not caring.”
“She cares.” I’m certain of that, at least. “She’s just hiding it.”
“Why?”
“Caring gives me power over her. She’s decided to take that power back.”
The analysis feels right even as I voice it. Janice isn’t broken or defeated. She’s regrouping. Building walls I can’t easily breach because they’re not made of anger or fear; they’re made of deliberate indifference.
The most effective defense against someone who thrives on reaction.
“So what are you going to do?” Felix asks.
“I don’t know yet.”
“You could apologize.”
“For what, protecting what’s mine?”
“For the way you did it. For not giving her any say in the rules you’re imposing. For treating her like property instead of—” He stops.
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of someone you care about.”
The words hang heavy between us. I want to deny them, want to maintain the fiction that this is all strategy and possession and nothing softer.
Felix is right. I do care. More than is safe, more than is smart, more than I know how to admit without revealing vulnerabilities I can’t afford.
Janice knows it. Has to know it, given how I react to her, how I lose control when other men so much as look at her wrong.
Which makes her withdrawal even more devastating.
She’s weaponizing the one thing I can’t defend against—her own absence.
***
Day five, and I’m reaching my limit.
I find her in the library—a room she’s claimed as her own over the past week. She sits curled in the window seat, afternoon light painting gold across her hair, absorbed in whatever she’s reading.
She looks peaceful. Beautiful. Completely content without me.
“We need to talk,” I say.
She glances up, expression carefully neutral. “About?”
“This. Us. The fact that you’ve barely spoken to me in five days.”
“I speak to you every day. This morning, I said good morning. Yesterday, we discussed the dinner menu. I’m not sure what else you need.”
