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“No.”

“You shouldn’t be alone.”

I pulled the door harder. “You were right,” I said. “Now let me go.”

“Sloane—”

“I can’t stay here.”

She let go of my door, and I closed it. I hit the locks, then started the engine.

Patty stood there, her hands covering her mouth and tears streaming down her face.

I backed out too fast. The tires scraped gravel. Several people had moved into the parking lot, though nobody approached the car.

Through the crowd, I could see Hudson. He watched me leave and didn’t try to stop me. That fact followed me all the way home.

The drive existed in broken pieces. A stoplight. My hands shaking against the wheel. A horn behind me when I failed to move quickly enough.

Hudson’s face.

By the time I got to my apartment, my chest ached and my eyes hurt from crying. I stumbled inside, locked the door, and leaned against it. The quiet met me immediately.

My apartment now felt empty in a way it never had before.

Hudson’s sweatshirt was still on the back of my couch. The Great Wall photograph sat in its frame. Caldwell’s drawings were on the wall beside my desk.

I ripped none of them down. That would have required believing the memories were false, or that I regretted them.

They weren’t false, and I didn’t regret them.

That made everything worse.

I slid to the floor and stayed there until my legs went numb.

After all the work I had done to become part of their lives, I had ruined it in less than a minute.

Not Karen or the coin.

Me.

Maybe I was destined to be alone. The thought came easily because it was familiar. Loneliness had always been easier to accept as destiny than as the result of choices I could have made differently.

For the first two days, I did nothing. I didn’t answer my phone.

Patty called eleven times.

Hudson didn’t call once.

I had been removed from THE PACK group chat before I even made it home that night. The notification had been like a punch to the gut, but I couldn’t blame them. They had to protect the privacy of their family and, more than likely, they were questioning who the hell I really was.

My work suffered. Clients received revisions with missing files. I sent one email without an attachment, then sent another with the wrong attachment, then spent twenty minutes staring at the screen while trying to remember what project I’d intended to finish.

I ate toast. Then nothing.

On the third day, Patty left groceries outside my door. She didn’t knock. A note sat on top of the bag.

Eat. I still love you.