“Ready, Ella?”
“Ready, Ella,” he echoes, soft, pleased with himself. “I’ll be around. I’ll find you.”
“I’m pretty busy,” she says.
“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure of it.”
She goes rigid against me. My arm tightens. I move her toward the door before I do the other thing.
We walk out.
The cold hits and she keeps moving, arms crossed over her bag, and I match her step without thinking about it. Half a block before I catch the shaking.
I slow down and lift the bag off her shoulder.
She lets me. Doesn’t look up.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“For what?”
“You didn’t have to—”
“He had his hands on you.”
She goes quiet.
“He’s an asshole,” I say.
“He’s my ex.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” I look down at her. “You don’t deserve—”
I stop.
You don’t deserve any of it. Not the way he looked at you like he still owned part of you. Not the years you’ve spent deciding the way it ended was a thing about you. Not the breath you let out when you saw me — like you’d been waiting on someone, and didn’t know it was always going to be me.
None of that is mine to say on a sidewalk. Most of it isn’t mine to say yet at all.
“Let’s get you home,” I say.
She nods.
My arm goes back around her. She doesn’t ask me to move it. She doesn’t move away. She just lets herself be there, warm against my side, and the shaking goes out of her slow, and I catch the second it stops.
How long I’ve wanted this. Not the fear, not Kyle’s hand on her, none of that — just her weight against me and her not stepping out from under my arm.
And it puts me back in the hallway. A year in. Standing outside her door with my hand up to knock, because I’d been doing that more and more, finding reasons, and that day I didn’t even have one. I just wanted to be on her side of the door. I’d spent months not understanding why a woman I barely knew had become the thing every day arranged itself around, why losing track of her for an afternoon sat wrong in my chest, why I’d built a whole life eight feet from hers and called it nothing.
Then I heard her through the door. Talking to that plant. Something ordinary, I don’t even remember what. And it landed all at once, the way the floor lands when you misjudge a step in the dark.
Mine.
Not a hope. Not a question I was working toward. An answer that had been sitting there the whole time, waiting for me to stop looking away from it.
I backed off. Hand still up. Didn’t knock. Crossed the hall to my own door and shut it and stood there with my heart going like I’d run somewhere.
That was two years ago.
