“He makes me feel safe,” I said. “In a way I don’t think I ever have.”
Rhys cocked his head. “So why do you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re waiting for it to go wrong.”
“Because…” My breath stalled, chest pulling tight around it. “Because I know better.”
His brows drew together.
“Safe doesn’t stay. It feels real while it’s happening, and then something shifts, or breaks, or disappears, and you’re left trying to figure out what you missed.”
My gaze flicked up briefly, meeting his.
“And I’m really good at missing things.”
“Arch.”Rhys held my gaze for a second longer, something tightening through his shoulders before he leaned back,dragging a hand down his face like he was deciding how hard to push. “No.”
I blinked. “No?”
“No. We’re not doing that. Not today.”
My fingers caught on a napkin, worrying the corner until it split, the tear running uneven.
“What happened to Abel wasnotyour fault.”
My mouth opened, instinct already kicking in, ready to argue it, twist it, make it mine and?—
“You were nine,” he stressed. “Nine, Arch. Not some criminal mastermind who orchestrated a disappearance in under a minute. You were a kid with a popsicle and bad luck.”
My jaw locked, teeth pressing together hard enough to feel it behind my eyes.
“Hell. I was probably eating dirt at nine. Like, recreationally. For fun.
A breath broke out of me before I could stop it.
“Exactly,” he said, stabbing a finger at me. “That’sthe level of decision-making we’re working with here.”
The napkin gave way completely.
“You didn’t miss something. Something was taken. Those are not the same thing, and you don’t get to blur them together just because it’s easier to blame yourself. And your dad—” he went on, refusing to back off, “—that wasn’t something you could fix either. Neither was your mom deciding to stop living her life.”
“Rhys—”
“You’ve been carrying all of it like it’s your job to make sense of it. Like if you just think hard enough, you’ll find the moment where you could’ve changed it. But that’s not how it works, Arch.”
I wished it did.
Iwishedthere was a version of this where everything came down to one moment I could isolate, study, and pull apart until itmade sense. Something I could trace back and fix if I just looked hard enough.
That part of me existed. It was the one that read too much, that picked things apart, that understood how grief moved through people and how memory warped under pressure. I’d sat with it long enough to know what it was supposed to look like.
My brain had already sorted it.
It wasn’t my fault.
But that didn’t change the other part—the one that didn’t care about logic or patterns or whatshouldbe true. The one that still circled the same fifty-eight seconds like it could wear them down into something different if it just didn’t stop.
