"It's not for you to carry," he says. Quiet. Looks at me. "You’ve carried enough, and it’s about goddamn time the world gives you a motherfucking break."
"I’m not gonna let this go. You know that, right?”
He pushes off the doorframe, moves toward the door like the conversation's over, but he stops with his hand on the frame, and when he speaks again his voice has dropped into something I don't recognize—careful, controlled, the sound of a man holding a door shut on something with his whole body weight. "Just trust me on this one. Please."
"You can’t trust Rowan, man. Whatever he?—”
"Drop it, Reth."
He leaves before I can push further.
I stand at the window a long time after the door closes, the unanswered question sitting heavy in the room, the specific shape of his stillness when I asked it telling me more than anything he actually said.
Something was traded.
Something he won't let me see the price of.
20
SOPHIA
I'm three muffins deep into another failure when I hear the stairs.
Not the careful, weighted footsteps I've gotten used to over the past week—Ian's deliberate tread, the doctor's brisk efficiency, Andrei's near-silent movement through the house. These are slower. Uneven. Someone testing whether their legs are going to do what they're told.
I don't turn around right away. I keep my hands in the bowl, flour ghosting up to my elbows, the dough underneath my fingers too wet again because I keep adding extra liquid out of some misplaced hope that this time it'll fix itself.
"You're burning something."
His voice. Low. Closer than I expect.
I look at the oven, then at him, standing by the counter in sweatpants and a shirt that hangs looser than it used to.
"I'm not burning anything."
"You are. I can smell it." He nods toward theoven without moving. “Third rack, probably. You always put the tray too low when you're not paying attention to what you're doing."
I stare at him. "How do you know that?”
"I watched you bake a thousand times, Cherry-red." He says it plainly, no apology in it, like the surveillance and the intimacy are just facts that happened, neither good nor bad, just true. "You do it every time you're somewhere else in your head. Third rack. Burnt bottoms. You never notice until the smoke alarm does."
I open the oven. He's right—the bottom of the tray is already going dark. I pull the muffins out, set them on the rack to cool even though they're already lost, the same useless mercy I've extended to every other failed batch this week.
"You used to watch me bake," I say. Not accusing. Just turning the fact over. "What else did you used to watch?"
"Everything." He crosses into the kitchen, slow, careful with his balance, and stops a few feet from me. "The way you talk to yourself when you're stressed. The way you forget you're hungry until you're furious about it."
"That's a strange thing to remember about a stranger."
"You were never a stranger to me." His eyes hold mine, steady despite everything else about him that's been unsteady for days.
I wipe my hands on the towel at my hip, buying myself a second, because something about the directness of him right now—present, lucid, actually here instead of somewhere behind his own eyes—is doing something complicated to my chest.
"You finally decided to leave the room.” My gaze meets his.
"I wanted to see you not through a door."
The honesty of it lands harder than I'm prepared for.
