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I hadn’t wanted to attend Thanksgiving dinner either, but this was Briggs’s first holiday without Lyric and technically my third shitty one in a row. I could endure a few hours, eat enough food to make Coach’s wife happy, and ensure Briggs didn’t spend the evening alone inside whatever memories the holiday dragged out of him.

He did better than I expected, and so did I.

We ate until neither of us could move comfortably, argued with Coach about tomorrow’s plans, and watched enough football to remind me why I prefer hockey. Briggs remained inside his apartment when we returned to the building, claiming he planned to sleep for fourteen hours unless indigestion killed him first.

Now I’m alone in bed with two thousand years of Roman political failure, an open bottle of mezcal I haven’t touched, and every reason I have spent the day avoiding my phone.

Charm and I agreed not to speak today.

The decision was responsible. Thanksgiving holds too much history for a casual conversation, and neither of us wanted to spend the holiday monitoring the time while wondering whether pain qualified as an emergency. We agreed to leave one day outside the rules we were still learning how to follow.

I have honored that agreement even though I’ve wanted to call her since I opened my eyes.

I’ve wondered where she was, whether Lance tried reaching her, and if she ate dinner with her mother or spent the day with Bliss or Aura. I pictured the lights burning above Encanto while she moved through the loft alone, then forced myself to stop inventing details about a life she will explain when she is ready.

I have missed her as much as she has missed me. The difference is that I kept to the rules because I’m not a fucking savage.

The phone vibrates again.

I mark my place in an argument about whether Rome collapsed from corruption, economic instability, or its inability to stop expanding, although I’ve retained more of the essay than I care to admit.

The notification isn’t a text. It’s an email from encantosicharm, a combination of her boutique, her nickname, and an unnecessary Spanish yes that could only belong to a woman confident enough to expect the rest of the world to understand her eventually.

I open it immediately.

The first line stops me.

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed.”

Charm quoting Darcy’s first proposal on Thanksgiving tells me enough before I read another word.

She is hurting.

I straighten against the headboard and begin from the top. The email stretches across the screen, longer than anything she has sent since we started writing. Her words are polished at first, but the control loosens as she continues. By the time she tells me she isn’t okay, I can hear her voice inside every sentence.

She doesn’t turn the confession into a crisis. She tells me she is safe, that she ate, and that she ended the conversation when her father crossed a boundary. She separates the pain from the choices she made inside it, asking me to witness a bad day without expecting me to rescue her from one.

Then she admits she spent the day hoping I would break our agreement and call.

My thumb stops against the screen.

I read the sentence again before forcing myself to continue.

She tells me when she knew she loved me. She takes me back to the night she arrived wearing lingerie beneath her coat and I refused to let sex become another place for her to hide. I remember every second of that argument, but I never knew what happened after she left. I didn’t know she recognized what my refusal meant before she reached Chicago or that she understood I wanted all of her badly enough to reject the fraction she was prepared to offer.

The knowledge settles heavily inside me.

I continue reading.

Her gratitude is relentless. She speaks about my forgiveness as though it represents strength instead of evidence that I stayed too long. She understands why I eventually severed the cord and doesn’t ask me to regret protecting myself. She remembers what happened in the study without rewriting either of our roles inside it.

Then she calls me home.

She doesn’t mean a place where she expects to disappear or a shelter I must hold together while she refuses to stand. She calls me the place where she has felt most known and says she wants to come home without asking me to carry her there.

My throat closes around the words.

I lower the phone and look toward the open book beside me, but the collapse of an empire isn’t the distraction it was twenty minutes ago. Charm has always been more effective at destroying my concentration than Rome was at destroying itself.