Anger flashed in her eyes — the first real crack in the clinical steadiness. “Then ask me. Ask me what I want.”
I looked at her. The way she held herself, straight and open, not retreating. This woman who’d cried in a parking lot while I held her and then trusted me with six months of her life. “I know what you’d say,” I said.
“Then you know I’d tell you to stay.”
“I know.” My voice came out rough. I pushed through it. “That’s why I can’t ask.”
“Holden—”
“You’re the best thing that’s happened to me.” Each word cost something. “I know that. I’ve known it since the day Dutch brought you in to see Glitch.” I breathed. “I did this to you. To us. I’m not going to ask you to stay and watch me try to crawl back from it.”
She was staring at me. I could see the words forming — the argument, the clinical language she could deploy to deconstructeverything I’d just said and find where the logic broke down. She was good at that. She’d find it.
“You planned this,” she said quietly. “Every word. Before you knocked.”
I took a step back into the corridor. “Take care of yourself, Bea. Please.”
“Don’t—”
I turned and walked to the stairs. I didn’t look back. My hands were shaking again by the time I got to my bike. I sat on it for a minute with my hands on the handlebars and my forehead nearly touching the chrome, just breathing, before I could make myself start the engine.
She was still in the doorway. I knew without looking.
I started the engine and pulled out into the street. Kept my eyes forward.
Chapter 11
?
— Bea —
Istood in the doorway for a long time after his bike disappeared around the corner.
The coffee was getting cold on the table behind me. The door was still open. I was still holding the frame with one hand, which is how I knew my body had not yet received the message that this was over, that he was gone, that I was supposed to close the door and begin whatever came next.
The thoughts came in the wrong order, which is how shock works. I know this from professional experience. The brain doesn’t process catastrophe in a logical sequence.
He’d asked me to leave the night before.
He’d cheated on me while I was gone.
He didn’t remember it.
He’d broken up with me before anything I said could reach him.
He’d looked at me the whole time with this terrible, focused grief, like a man walking toward something he’d already decided. Not reckless—deliberate. He’d been deliberate about ending us.
That was the part I kept landing on and leaving again. Not the infidelity. The exit.
He hadn’t given me a chance to speak, to argue, to tell him he was wrong. He’d walked into my apartment in his riding gear, delivered four facts and a verdict, and then left. As ifprotecting me from himself required removing the possibility of me choosing him anyway.
Which was exactly what he would do. That was the thing. That was so completely Holden—the control, the certainty that he knew best, the decision made in isolation and presented as already final. He’d have planned it on the ride over. Rehearsed the words. Chosen an exit before he knocked.
The same brain that had planned every contingency for every run as road captain had just planned the way to end us.
I shut the door and sat down on the floor. Just sat down where I was standing, the way you do when your legs stop cooperating. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
I knew what came next if I stayed on the floor alone. I’d been here before — not this exact grief, but this exact place — and I knew where the silence led when I let it get too big.
