I called Lilac.
She answered on the second ring.
“He broke up with me,” I said.
“I’m on my way. Ten minutes.” She hung up before I could tell her she didn’t have to.
This time, I didn’t mind someone making a decision for me.
She showed up in eight. Colt had driven her — I could see the truck idling at the curb when I opened the door, him behind the wheel, scanning the street the way he scanned everything. He lifted a hand to me through the windshield.
“The boys are with Betty,” she said before I could ask. “Colt’s going to wait. Don’t argue with me about it, and don’t argue with him.”
I hadn’t planned to.
I started to sink back down to the kitchen floor where I’d been. Lilac went with me — and halfway down, I caught her, caught myself, and redirected us both to the couch before her knees hit the tile. “Not the floor. Not right now.”
“Bea—”
“You just found out. The floor is cold, and you need to be taking care of yourself, and I will not be the reason—”
“Today isnotabout me.” Her voice was calm and absolute. She took my hand and pulled me down beside her on the couch. “Don’t do that. Don’t make my pregnancy the thing you take care of right now instead of letting yourself feel this. I’m fine. I’m warm. I’m here.Youare the thing happening today.”
I opened my mouth to argue and then didn’t, because I was too tired and because she was right.
She sat with me for two hours. She didn’t say much. Poured me water. Let me talk in circles, let me be angry, let me say some things I’d probably regret and some things that were probably true. She’d been through her own version of watching a man you loved make choices about your life without asking you.
“He confessed,” I said at some point. “He came over and told me immediately. He didn’t try to hide it.”
“That’s something.” She made a short, dry sound. “Opposite of most cheaters. They spend months lying about it. Trying to hide it.”
“Is it?” I didn’t know if it was. It meant he was honest. It also meant he’d decided the honest thing was to end it — that confession and verdict came as a package, one walking in on the heels of the other, and I hadn’t even had my coffee yet.
“You don’t have to figure out what it means today,” Lilac said.
“I know.” I pulled my knees up. “I just—he was already falling apart. Danny died in his arms and he was drowning. I was coming back to help him and instead he—” I stopped.
Then the anger came.
“It’s my fucking job.” The words came out harder than I meant them to. “Helping people through this — through grief, through the worst nights of their lives — that is literally what I do every day. I could have helped him. I would have helped him.That’s all I wanted to do, and he walked in and took that from me before I could even try.” I pressed my fist against my chest. “And now he’s dealing with Danny’s death on his own. Dutch and Indira are grieving. The whole club is. And Lindsay — I held that woman’s hand last night, I sat with her for hours, and now I can’t even—” I shook my head. “Who’s checking on any of them? Who’s making sure Holden’s actually okay?”
Lilac was quiet for a moment. “You are,” she said. “Even now. You’re still trying to figure out how to help everyone else.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that.
Lilac looked at me for a moment with that calm, particular expression she had when she was sitting with something complicated. “Maybe,” she said carefully, “those aren’t separate things.”
I waited.
“He was afraid you’d stay anyway,” she said. “So he made sure you couldn’t.”
I felt tears building. “He didn’t even let me decide. Either time.” I pressed my fingers against my eyes. “He sent me away last night and ended it this morning. I didn’t get a say in any of it.”
“No.” Lilac’s voice was quiet and careful. “He didn’t.”
She knew something about that — choices made for you while you couldn’t speak. It was a different thing, a worse thing, and she wasn’t making it equivalent. But she understood the specific texture of it: decisions handed down instead of made together.
“I keep trying to find the merciful interpretation,” I said. “And I can. He was in shock. He was punishing himself. He thought he was doing right by me.” I wiped my face. “But it doesn’t matter. Because I still didn’t get a say.”
