“You okay?” I ask.
“Yes.” A beat. “Are you?”
The question is a blade wrapped in velvet.
“I’m fine.”
“Mm.” I hear her exhale, slow and controlled. “I’m not calling to fight.”
That’s not comforting. That’s a warning.
“I’m calling because I want to understand what that was.”
I lean back in my chair, staring out the window overlooking the street below. Cars move like they’re obeying laws. People walk as if nothing will happen to them today.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, and regret it immediately.
Silence crackles.
Then she says evenly, “I’m not fragile.”
My throat tightens. “I never said you were.”
“You didn’t have to.” Her tone doesn’t change. “You walked in like you were about to pull me out by my hair.”
I shut my eyes for a second. “That wasn’t what that was. I walked in?—”
“No.” She cuts in, still calm. “You took over. You didn’t even ask me what was happening.”
My hand curls around my pen until my knuckles ache. “Ivy?—”
“You don’t get to decide who’s a threat,” she says. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”
Each word lands clean and brutal.
I swallow. “I saw the way he was looking at you.”
“And?”
“And I didn’t like it.”
I expect her to snap back, but she doesn’t. She takes a breath like she’s making herself stay grounded.
“After everything,” she says quietly, “you don’t trust me?”
That hits harder than anger ever could.
Because she’s right. This isn’t about a stranger in a café. It’s my insecurities from my past coming back to haunt me, threatening what we’ve been building.
I rub my thumb along the edge of my desk. “I trust you,” I say, but it comes out flat. I hear the tone even as I say it—how insufficient it sounds.
“Do you?” she asks. “Because it didn’t feel like it.”
I sit forward again. My voice stays steady out of habit, not calm. “I don’t like unknown variables.”
There’s a beat of silence before she speaks. “Ah.” Her tone shifts, slightly dry. “So I’m a variable.”
“No.” I exhale. “The situation.”
