Page 36 of Deacon

Her apartment was warm and lived-in, though something inside me had forgotten how to settle anywhere lately. I took one end of the couch, tucked a leg beneath me, and wrapped both hands around the mug she pressed into them.

Evan perched in the armchair like a flamingo in designer shoes, all long limbs and contained anticipation. He watched Blue for perhaps five seconds before the pressure of his restraint began showing in his face.

Blue noticed too.

“I’ve been sitting on this,” he said, his voice far too careful to sound casual, “because you needed time. But now that you’ve had time…”

“Evan, you know I don’t…” Blue warned.

“Okay.” He raised both hands immediately. “But you need to talk this through, so we’re here and we’re listening.”

Blue lowered herself into the chair across from us, both hands moving toward her stomach as though she could brace herself against the conversation before it began. Anger lived in her face. Hurt sat beneath it, with something rawer threaded through both.

“He broke into my apartment,” she said, and the words still landed with a sharp edge. “Not emotionally or metaphorically. Literally. He took that choice away from me.”

Evan nodded without interrupting or trying to soften what she had said. Beneath all the glitter and nonsense, that was one of the things I loved most about him. When it mattered, he could hold a hard truth still and let it remain ugly.

“I know he thought he was helping,” Blue continued. “I know he told himself it was romantic, but that doesn’t make it okay. I didn’t give him permission to decide when I was ready to see him.”

I stayed quiet. Blue didn’t need anyone rushing in with explanations yet. She needed room.

“No,” Evan said gently. “It doesn’t make it okay.” He tilted his head, careful with her in the way only people who loved her knew to be. “But it does sound like a man who panicked rather than one who wanted to hurt you.”

Blue released a humorless laugh. “Intent doesn’t erase impact.”

“No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t.” He paused before adding, “I also don’t think he realized how much control he’d already lost over the situation. Or himself.”

“That isn’t my responsibility.”

“It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be.” Evan’s voice softened. “I just don’t think it was about power for him. I think it was fear.”

I spoke then because the distinction mattered. “Fear can still hurt people.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It can.”

Blue sat back and folded her arms beneath her stomach. “Which is why I don’t owe him understanding merely because he finally figured out what he wants.”

Recognition tightened something inside me. Sometimes the reason behind the hurt wasn’t the part that mattered most. The damage lived in what happened afterward, in everything that remained unsaid and all the years Jackson’s absence had demanded I survive alone.

“I’ve had time to unpack it,” Blue said. “The frustrating part is that I do understand why he did it.”

She looked tired rather than weak, carrying the worn expression people developed once the truth stopped being clean.

“I don’t forgive it,” she continued. “But I unfortunately understand it.”

There was a difference. I knew that too.

Blue closed her eyes for a second before looking at us again. “He told me Sadie isn’t pregnant with his baby. She set up the conversation. She knew exactly how to phrase everything so I would hear what she wanted me to hear.”

Evan came halfway out of the chair. “That bitch.”

“Evan.”

“If she didn’t already have her own basketball under her shirt,” he said, bright with outrage, “I would drop-kick her into next week.”

I winced. “Violence is not…”

“I said hypothetically.” He exhaled and dropped back into the chair. “Sorry. Continue.”