“No, but it gives her a language besides silence.”
Seth stands there staring at the bag.
“I don’t want to push her.”
“You're not pushing her,” Beau says. “You are offering her a way out of the place she's stuck. She can say no. She can say yes. She gets to choose. That is the point.”
Choose.
The word lands heavy in the room.
The door creaks softly when I push it open.
Both of them turn.
For a second Seth just stares at me. His eyes flick over my face, down my bare legs, to the oversized shirt hanging off one shoulder.
“Brooke,” he says quietly. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You didn’t.”
Beau glances between us. His eyes linger on Seth for a moment.
“I’ll leave you two to it.”
He claps Seth once on the shoulder as he passes, then walks out of the room without another word. The door shuts behind him.
Now it is just us.
Seth takes a slow step toward me. His hands stay at his sides, uncertain, and that hesitation cuts deeper than anything I overheard.
“Are you okay?”
The word twists inside my chest.
Okay.
Like it is somewhere I can walk back to if I just try hard enough.
I open my mouth to give the answer I have been giving for days. The one that keeps him calm. The one that lets him believe I am healing.
It never comes out.
“I heard what he said,” I tell him.
Pain flickers through his eyes. “He shouldn’t have said that.”
“He wasn’t wrong.”
The words fall between us before I can soften them.
Seth flinches anyway. He drags a hand through his hair, his fingers catching like he wants to rip something out.
“I’m trying,” he sighs. “I don’t know how to do this right.”
I see how exhausted he is. The shadows under his eyes. The tension in his shoulders that never leaves anymore. He thinks he has to hold everything together for both of us.
“I don’t want you to want the old me back.”
