No fucking reason.
That’s what I told myself when I forgot to add sugar to Damien’s coffee and he gave me that stare. I just made him another cup and sensed his eyes on my back, probably cataloging it, filing it away for later.
I left the kitchen and went to the bathroom before he could say anything. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and stood over the sink long enough to even out my breathing while I told myself the same thing I always do.
I am fine. I have a good life. Damien loves me the way men like Damien love anything. With possession. With convenience. With the smug satisfaction of a man who owns the couch, the apartment, the bed, and thinks the woman inside is another thing that proves he has won something.
So why does my chest still feel like it’s been packed with broken glass?
I don’t answer that because I already know that Zane Rivera walked out of prison today.
I wonder if he’s changed.
Seven years is a long time to be anywhere, let alone somewhere like that. Long enough that the boy I knew might not exist anymore, buried beneath whatever prison made of him.
Or maybe he’s exactly the same.
Maybe he still carries himself as if the world owes him a fight and he’s got nothing to lose by collecting.
With me, he was soft in a way I don’t think even he had a name for. The way he held my face. The way he looked at me. He made me feel wanted in a way I didn’t know was possible. He made me feel like loving someone wasn’t something that destroyed you.
He taught me that.
And then he sat across from me in that visitation room, one week after they sentenced him, looked me dead in the eyes, and told me I was nothing. That I’d never been anything. That everything between us had been a lie.
I know Rainer picked him up today. He told me last week, when I went around to the workshop, sitting across from me with his coffee, saying it plain and simple, the way Rainer says everything.
I just wrapped my hand around the mug of tea he had made me, and nodded as if the information had landed nowhere. As if the sound of Zane’s name didn’t still have the power to reach inside my chest and rearrange things.
I didn’t tell Rainer it was the last time I’d be around.
We just sat there and talked the way we always did. About the workshop. About the car he was working on. About what I had been doing and nothing in particular.
After the sentencing, Rainer told me I could stay in the upstairs apartment for as long as I needed. Zane would want that, he said. And I stayed. For a while, I stayed.
But the apartment was everywhere he had ever been. His jacket on the hook by the door, a thing I couldn’t bring myself to move. The smell of him, which faded so slowly that I started to dread the day it would be gone entirely. The mug he always used. Every corner of that place held a version of him, some memory pressed into the walls.
I would lie in that bed every single night and cry until there was nothing left, and then cry again when morning came because another day had started and he still wasn’t in it.
I tried to hold myself together in that apartment.
I tried for months, but grief has a way of wearing you down when you’re sleeping inside it.
In the end, Rainer knew things without being told. He showed up one afternoon, sat down across from me, and slid a piece of paper with an address on it across the table. He said his friend was renting a small place and that it was clean and quiet. Then he reached into his pocket, put down an envelope of cash, and told me it wasn’t a discussion.
He drove me to three different second-hand stores on a Saturday morning and didn’t say much as I picked out what I needed.
A lamp. A small table. A bed.
He paid for everything without making a big deal of it, just handed over the money and carried the things to the truck like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
I got a job. I built something small, quiet, and entirely mine. A life that fits inside four walls, and I told myself every day that it was enough.
Most days, I almost believed it.
I owe Rainer everything, the same way Zane does, in that bone-deep way you can’t put a number to and can’t ever fully repay.
He never asked for anything in return. Not once. Not a single time did he hold out his hand, remind me of what he’d done, or use any of it to make me feel small.
