“Absolutely.”
I look at her. “Then why are you looking at me like I am the problem?”
“I’m not looking at you like you are the problem,” Cassie says. “I’m looking at you like you’re about to write the ending before you know anything about the middle.”
I turn away.
She keeps going anyway because Cassie has never once in her life respected a closed emotional door if she thinks there is a chance she can kick it open with love.
“Last time, he made a choice for both of you,” she says. “A terrible one. A dickhead masterpiece, honestly. Ten out of ten for dramatic damage. Zero out of ten for basic human communication.”
My throat burns. “I don’t want to be that girl again,” I say.
Cassie’s expression softens at the edges. “Which girl?”
“The one waiting for him to decide what I get to know.” I look at the phone on the cushion. “The one staring at a screen, trying to figure out if she has already lost him and if anyone thought to tell her. The one who kept it all so neatly contained while she fell apart on the inside and called it being fine.”
“You’re not that girl anymore, Sky.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because that girl would have swallowed this whole,” Cassie says. “She would have let it sit inside her, rot, and smile through it, never saying a word to anyone, including me.”
Her shoulder presses into mine and she looks at me steadily. “You would have kept it to yourself until it poisoned you, then called that being strong. You told me. That is not nothing, Sky. That’s not the girl you used to be.”
I look at her. “Don’t be proud of this version of me. She’s unstable.”
Cassie’s mouth smirks. “My favorite women always are.”
I look down at her hand on my wrist. The pressure grounds me.
“What do I do?” I ask, the question feeling too small for how much it costs me to say out loud.
Cassie’s face loses the last trace of teasing. “You fucking ask him.”
“I did.”
“No.” She tilts her head. “You waited by your phone, hoping he would suddenly develop the emotional vocabulary of a fully functioning adult. That is not asking. That’s just wishing on a man, which, historically, has a terrible return rate.”
I glare at her.
She ignores it with the practiced ease of someone who has been on the receiving end of my glare for sixteen years and has never found it persuasive.
“Ask him properly,” she says. “And in case you need a definition, that means you find out what is going on without wrapping the question in so much barbed wire that he bleeds before he can answer it.”
I reach for my phone, then stop before touching it.
My fingers hover above the screen.
The old instinct fires immediately, loud and familiar.
Do not text first.
Do not let him see that it got to you.
Keep it all contained and controlled. Keep the surface smooth and let nothing through that could hurt you later. That instinct kept me alive in places, but it also left me lonelier and heartbroken than I needed to be for longer than I should have allowed.
But I am not that girl anymore. I owe her that much, the ten-year-old with her bag still packed at the foot of the bed, who swore she would never let anyone make her invisible again. I am in control of my life. I am not about to let a man, even Zane Rivera, dictate how I move through it.
