"I don't need you to coddle me," she says, but there's no strength behind the words. Just exhaustion and pain that's too large for her professional training to process.
"I know you don't need it," I reply, settling beside her on the table's edge. "But I'm offering it anyway."
She tries to shift away from me, to maintain the physical distance that mirrors the emotional walls she's spent so long building. But her body is still unsteady from what happened between us, and the movement sends her swaying toward my chest despite her intentions.
For a moment, we sit in awkward proximity—her trying to pull away, me trying not to reach for her, both of us suspended between comfort and distance while Casey Holbrook's death sits between us like an accusation.
"This is what happens," she says, her voice flat with the kind of devastating clarity that comes from shock. "This is what happens when you let people close. They get hurt. They die. And it's always, always because of choices you made thinking you were protecting something that mattered."
The words carry echoes of her father's death, of watching me walk away, of nine years spent building walls high enough toprotect herself from exactly this kind of loss. She learned early that connection equals vulnerability, that caring about someone gives the world permission to use them against you.
Casey's death proves she was right to be afraid.
But even as I watch her try to retreat into the cold professionalism that's kept her functional, I can see it's not working. The mask keeps slipping, revealing glimpses of the woman underneath—someone who, despite all her careful distance, still cares enough to break when people she loves are threatened.
Still human enough to grieve.
"Come here," I say, extending one arm in invitation rather than demand.
"No." But she's crying harder now, tears coming so fast she can't wipe them away quickly enough. "I can't. If I let you comfort me, if I let myself need you, then you become another thing they can use against me. Another person who dies because I made the wrong choice."
The logic is sound, strategically correct, completely fucking heartbreaking. Because she's not wrong—my presence in her life has made her a target. Our connection has painted a bulls-eye on anyone she cares about.
But she's also not seeing the full picture.
"They're not killing people because you care about me," I tell her, letting authority creep into my voice. "They're killing people because youmatterto me. This is about getting my attention, making me surface, forcing me into whatever game they're playing."
"Then leave." The words come out sharp and desperate. "Walk away again. Disappear back into whatever anonymous life you built, and maybe they'll stop."
It's the opposite of what she asked for nine years ago—for me to stay and fight for what we had. Now she's begging me to leave, to protect her through absence the same way I once thought I was protecting her through abandonment.
The reversal would be funny if it weren't so devastating.
"I'm not leaving," I tell her, and mean it with every fiber of my being. "Not when someone's using my work to hurt you. Not when they're targeting innocent people to make a point. And sure as hell not when you're sitting here blaming yourself for someone else's violence."
"I enabled the violence by protecting you—"
"You protected someone you cared about. That's not the same thing as enabling murder." I shift closer, noting how she doesn't pull away this time. "Casey Holbrook died because someone wanted to hurt you, not because you shared crime scene photos with a friend."
"But if I hadn't been investigating the similarities, if I hadn't been trying to hide your connection—"
"Then someone else would have made the same connections eventually, and you wouldn't have been in a position to help when they started killing innocent people." My hand finds her shoulder, steady pressure that anchors her to something other than spiraling guilt. "You're not responsible for other people's choices to commit violence."
The comfort seems to crack something fundamental in her resistance. Instead of pulling away, she leans into my touch—just slightly, just enough to suggest that some part of her wants the support I'm offering.
"She had a cat," Lila whispers, and the specific detail carries more weight than all her earlier accusations. "An orange tabby named Newton. She showed me pictures every week,complained about him knocking plants off her windowsill. Who's going to take care of him now?"
The question breaks something in my chest, because it reveals exactly why she's falling apart. Not because of professional failure or strategic miscalculation, but because someone she cared about is gone. Someone who brought light and warmth and normal human concerns into her carefully controlled world.
Someone who made her feel less alone.
And in that moment, watching her grieve for a friend who died because of her connection to me, I understand something fundamental about Dr. Lila North.
She's not a fucking sociopath. She's not the cold, calculating predator I was afraid she might have become during our years apart. She's someone who learned to hide her capacity for caring behind professional armor, but the caring itself never disappeared.
She just learned to protect it more carefully.
"I don't know," I admit, because offering false comfort won't help either of us process what's happened. "But Casey had family, friends. Someone will make sure Newton is taken care of."
