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I want to hear yours so badly that writing those words makes my hands shake, but I’m not ready to call you yet. I am scared, and I promised both of us that I would stop disguising fear as something prettier.

If I hear you say my name, I could fall apart, rush toward you, and mistake wanting you for being ready to keep you. This is the most important thing in my life. I refuse to destroy it by moving faster than the truth can carry us.

Before you hear my voice, there are things about the woman speaking with it that you need to know.

I stop reading and press the heel of my hand against my chest.

The refusal hurts. It also feels different from every time Charm let fear make a decision while pretending something else had forced her. She has named it, placed it between us, and refused to promise readiness she doesn’t possess.

I lower my eyes to the next page.

I need to begin with the night Lance attacked you because I have spent months understanding how completely I failed you afterward.

I am sorry for what happened to you, Ryan, although I won’t claim ownership of cruelty that belongs at Lance’s feet. I didn’t use your mother to humiliate you, expose the worst years of your life, or try to turn everything you survived into proof that you were born beneath me. I don’t want ownership of his choices simply because making myself responsible for all of it would place me back at the center.

What I own is that I watched him flay you open in front of everyone we loved and still found a way to make my feelings the loudest ones in the room afterward.

You told me it wasn’t my fight. I only heard that you had excluded me from your pain.

I didn’t hear what you were actually saying. I didn’t see the man who had just contained years of rage while Lance degraded his mother, his childhood, his heritage, and everything he had built. I saw Lance’s betrayal, the photographs, everyone keeping secrets from me, and the humiliation of discovering my recovery had been passed across a conference table. I was drowning in what had been done to me, and I demanded you climb into that water while you were already trying to survive your own.

You came to me needing something.

I know that now.

You asked me to walk with you because asking anyone to comfort you requires more vulnerability than most people will ever understand. You gave me the closest thing to help that you knew how to say, and I answered with cruelty because I was angry that you had protected a boundary I didn’t want to respect.

Then I entered your room and forced open everything you told me you couldn’t survive that night.

You tried to make me see you. I kept looking at myself.

The paper blurs.

I lay it against the desk and walk toward the kitchen, but there is nothing I need there. My hand closes around the edge of the counter while memory moves through me.

Charm folding her arms in the hallway.

Are you sure I’m allowed?

Me telling her I had come to her while I was fucking up and owed her nothing.

Her mouth twisting before she told me to go fuck myself.

The knock on my door. The questions. Her body breaking in front of the mirror until every part of me that had needed her disappeared beneath the instinct to drag her back.

I don’t regret what happened in that room.

I still resent what it cost.

The letter waits on my desk.

I return when I can see the words again.

You were right when you told me I was selfish. Understanding why I broke doesn’t erase the way I treated you while I was breaking.

I wish I had looked at you that night and seen what I can see now. You had already endured more than anyone should have asked from you, and you still held yourself together while the man who raised me tried to reduce you to every lie the world once told about your worth.

Your mother would have been so proud of you.