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“I panicked.”
“I know.”
“I was hurt.”
“I know that too.”
“You keep saying you understand, but you’re still leaving me because of it.”
“I’m leaving because you keep making me the rock you crush whenever survival takes over.”
My breath catches.
“You reach for pieces of me when you need to feel safe,” Ryan says. “My love, attention, body, loyalty, and forgiveness. You take whatever quiets the fear, then call the need love.”
“I do love you.”
“I know.”
His certainty stops me.
“That is what you keep missing,” he says. “I believe you love me. I also believe your meaning of love is broken.”
The corridor shifts beneath my feet.
Ryan doesn’t look away. “I’m not saying it’s destroyed or ruined. Destroyed and ruined things get thrown away. Broken things can be repaired, but only after someone admits the fracture exists.”
“How is my love broken?”
“You love weakest when you enter survival mode.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if you stop treating love like a feeling and look at what you do with it.”
His words return me to every tutoring session where Ryan refused to let me search for the answer someone else wanted.
“Look at Bliss and Luke,” he says. “You knew something was wrong. You had a fucking file on him, Charm. You collected enough information to understand that man was dangerous, but Bliss gave you a boundary, and you trusted the boundary more than her safety.”
“I was trying to respect her.”
“I know.”
“She wasn’t ready to tell us everything.”
“I’m not saying you failed her. I’m saying love would’ve screamed fuck that boundary and allowed Bliss to hate you for outing him if it meant keeping her alive.”
My throat tightens. “She trusted me.”
“And you protected the trust because losing it scared you more than acting on what you knew.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“It doesn’t have to be fair. It only has to be true.”
I look toward the windows at the end of the corridor. Morning sunlight stretches across the floor, too bright and ordinary for a conversation tearing apart everything I believed about myself.
“Aura and Easton were falling apart, and you chose a side. We were in deep by then and you were hiding me, you thought siding with Easton was what I needed from you because he was my friend.”
