Who she knows. Who she'd trusted. Who she'd let in.
The cold turned into something harder and more specific.
"When?"
"Soon. They'll want to move while the licensing complaints are still active, while she's already under pressure. Stack everything at once and see if she folds."
I handed the phone back.
Malakai pocketed it and looked at me with the sort of patience that meant he was waiting for me to catch up to something he'd already figured out.
"Say whatever you're thinking," I said.
"I'm thinking you've been useless all week and whatever happened between you and Nadia is eating you alive." He said it without judgment, only the facts. "And I'm thinking the reason you haven't gone to fix it is that you talked yourself into believing she's better off without you."
"She probably is."
"No. She's not." He crossed his arms. "You remember what I told you about Amelia and me? How close I came to losing her because I convinced myself I was protecting her by keeping my distance?"
"That's different."
"It's the same thing with a different excuse." He held my gaze. "You love her. I've watched you for months. I know what it looks like. And she's over there dealing with a corporation coming after her business, her reputation, and now your history, while you're here being a coward."
The word landed cleanly.
"I told her it might have been a mistake," I said. "She won't want to hear from me."
"Then you'd better figure out how to say something worth hearing." He uncrossed his arms. "Because they're going to use your record against her. You can either let that happen from a distance, or you can be there when it does."
I looked at him. Looked at the man who'd nearly thrown away the best thing in his life for reasons that probably sounded solid at the time.
"What did you do?" I asked. "With Amelia. When you'd already messed it up. What did you actually do?"
"I stopped trying to protect her from me," he said. "And started trying to deserve her."
He walked to the door of the mobile office. I stayed where I was, turning that over.
All this time I'd been telling myself I was the risk. That loving me was the gamble she shouldn't take, that eventually she'd realize it too, and the kindest thing I could do was make it easier for her to walk away.
I'd been so convinced I was protecting her.
And while I'd been busy doing that, Elevate had been building a file. They were going to take my record and my name and use it to destroy something she'd spent years constructing. And she was going to stand there dealing with it alone because I'd handed her back to alone and then driven forty minutes away to prove I didn't care.
I cared.
That was the entire problem and always had been.
I pulled out my phone. Put it away. Pulled it out again.
There was nothing I could say in a text that would cover any of this. Not what I'd done, not what Elevate was planning, not what I needed her to know.
But I had to do something. Say something that mattered, not to make myself feel better, but because she deserved to know what was coming. Because the formal complaints and the background file were things she needed to fight, and fighting them was harder alone.
I'd told her she wasn't alone.
Then I'd made her alone.
I put the phone in my pocket. Left the mobile office. Walked out into the yard where the crew were already moving and told myself that stopping being a coward wasn't the same as knowing what to say.
