“Archibald, you’re obsessed with that man’s memoir. Youquotedit to me when I got dumped last month. I am legally entitled to ask.”
“That was contextual,” I argued. “And emotionally relevant.”
“You said,‘Resilience is not recovery.’”His nostrils flared with his laugh. “It was not that deep.”
“I was making a point.”
“You were being horny about trauma.”
I choked on my dumpling. “That is not—okay, first of all, jail.”
He smiled like he’d been waiting for that. “So?”
“He wasn’t… what people expect.”
“Meaning?”
“He doesn’t lean into the mythology. He doesn’t talk about surviving like it made him special. It’s just a fact. Something that happened to him and never really stopped.”
My gaze dropped.
“He makes it look simple. Like he took something awful and turned it into something people respect. Something useful. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to figure out how to carry my own mess without leaving pieces of it behind.”
“Healing doesn’t come with a syllabus, Min vän.”
“Doesn’t it though? There’s literally a class on his roster calledTrauma, Recovery, and the Limits of Resilience. Sounds pretty syllabus-adjacent to me.”
Rhys didn’t answer right away. He shifted, tugging at the cuff of his sweater like it was warmer in here than he’d expected. It was the dark green one he’d brought back from Sweden years ago. The sleeves were pushed up just enough to expose the thin line work along his forearm—a series of mountain peaks from back home.
Rhys wore his history where you could see it, but mine didn’t work like that.
“Easy is a performance, Arch. We only see the parts people rehearse. You don’t actually know what it cost him.”
I frowned. “How do you figure?”
“Archibald. He survived when other people didn’t. You really think there isn’t weight under that?”
“I didn’t say there wasn’t.”
“You didn’t have to, but now you’ve gone and met the very hot, very accomplished man who survived something awful and somehow still looks like he has his shit together.”
“That is not?—”
“And now you’re spiraling because it’s extremely fucking rude of him to be both intimidating and attractive.”
Heat crawled up my neck. “I’m not spiraling.”
“You adjusted your glasses three times.”
Goddamnit.
I opened my mouth, then closed it again.
“I’m not judging,” he said. “Rothwell is hot as hell andterrifyinglycompetent. I get it.”
My thoughts were scrambling, overlapping faster than I could sort them, like I’d shaken the alphabet and expected words to fall out.
Undergrad had trained me to notice patterns—and Henry Rothwell had been doing somethingveryspecific.
