RETH
Ian comes in without knocking. Seven days in, and they don't lock the door anymore.
I notice it the way I notice most things lately—slowly, a half-beat behind everyone else, the recognition arriving after the fact instead of in the moment it should.
The lock used to click every night around the same hour, Sophia or Ian doing it without comment, and I never said anything about it because some part of me wanted it locked.
Needed the door to do the deciding I couldn't trust myself to do.
Three nights ago, nobody locked it.
I didn't notice until yesterday morning, my hand finding the handle out of habit, testing it the way I'd tested it every day since the driveway, and it just turned. No resistance. No click of a mechanism that wasn't there to begin with.
I stood in that doorway a long time. Just looking at the hallway like it might still be a trick.
Seven days.
The shaking's gone now, mostly—what's left is something quieter, a tremor that only shows up when I'm tired, or when I haven't eaten, or when I let myself think too long about anything that happened before.
My legs hold my weight without complaint. My stomach's stopped rejecting food outright, even if nothing tastes like much of anything yet. The doctor calls this progress. Calls it the body remembering how to be a body again.
Then there’s the other thing. The flatness. The way the mountain outside this window used to look like something worth standing in front of and now just look like scenery, technically beautiful, registering nowhere.
There’s a clinical term for it. Anhedonia. Like the word itself is supposed to make it easier to carry. Like naming a thing changes what it weighs.
It doesn't.
What's changed is smaller than that. Quieter. The cravings used to announce themselves—loud, physical, a hum at the base of my skull. Now it’s more of a vibration than a noise, a feeling that never fully shuts off.
But it changes by the hour. Sometimes it’s easy to get through it. Sometimes it’s not.
What hasn't changed is the guilt.
If anything, it's gotten louder the quieter everything else got, like it was always going to be the last thing standing once the noise cleared out around it.
When I close my eyes, I still see her standing in the corner—the wrong version, the ruined one, hair dark and wet, the gap in her throat that breathes when nothing in that room should still be breathing.
She doesn't come every night anymore. That's supposed to be progress too. But when she does, she still looks surprised. Still looks at me like I'm the one thing in her life she didn't see coming.
I didn’t kill her. I know it’s true the way I know my own name is true—Ian's told me, more than once, gentle and certain, that the footage showed Valeria's hands and nobody else's. I believe him the way you believe a fact someone else witnessed for you. Secondhand. Borrowed.
It doesn't reach the place in me that was standing in that room when it happened, the place that still remembers blood on my hands and can't fully separate whose blood it was or how it got there.
Knowing the truth and believing it in your body are two different things. Nobody tells you that until you're the one trying to do both at once and failing at the second one nightly.
"Brought you coffee." Ian places my cup on the table.
"I didn't ask for coffee." The flatness has me acting like a dick.
"I know. That's what makes it a gift and not a transaction.
" He sits, takes a sip from his own mug, watching me over the rim.
"You gonna come sit down, or are we doing the brooding-silhouette-against-the-window thing again?
Because I gotta tell you, the lighting's good, very dramatic, but I'm starting to feel like I'm in a perfume commercial nobody asked for. "
I don’t respond.
“How long are you planning to ignore her?”
Something pulls tight in my chest, a reflex I don't choose, my jaw clenching hard enough I feel it in my temples. I don't have an answer that doesn't sound like an excuse, and I'm tired of the sound of my own excuses, so I just stand there and let the silence answer for me instead.
"You know what's funny," he says, conversational, like we're discussing the weather, "is that I've watched you walk into rooms full of armed men without blinking.
Watched you take a bullet in the shoulder and keep moving like it was a paper cut.
And the one thing—the one thing—that's got you standing at a window like a fucking ghost is a woman who makes terrible cupcakes and cries when the bread doesn't rise. "
"That's not what this is."
"No?" He tilts his head. "Then what is it?"
I don't say anything.
"Because from where I'm sitting," Ian continues, "it looks an awful lot like a man who survived something unsurvivable and decided the smartest move now is to make sure nobody who loves him has to actually look at it."
"I can barely fucking look at it. How can I expect her to?”
“You don’t have to expect anything. You just need to get out of your own goddamn head for a while and realize you've got a woman neck deep in this shit along with you, and I don't think she deserves getting doors slammed in her face."
I straighten. "I'm not trying to hurt her."
"I know that. She knows that, too, probably. But intent and impact are different animals, my friend. You can love someone with your whole rotten, busted heart and still leave them standing in a hallway feeling like garbage."
I finally turn from the window. Look at him. "What do you want me to do, Ian?"
"I want you to stop deciding for her." He sets his mug down, all the humor gone now, just the two of us and the thing underneath it.
"She's not asking for you to magically forget whatever the fuck happened down there. She’s not asking the whole truth wrapped in a pretty fucking pink bow.
She's asking you to stop disappearing on her every time it gets hard. That's it. That's the whole ask."
"I don't trust myself around her."
"Then tell her that." He stands. "That's a sentence, Reth. Give her that one goddamn sentence. At least, maybe she’ll understand. But right now, all she’s got is you shutting her out, not knowing why, and I’m betting she’s looking at herself for answers, wondering if it’s her.”
“It’s not her,” I say, roughing a hand through my hair. “It’s never her. She’s the only thing—” the words get lodged in my throat, and I rub a hand across the back of my neck. “She’s the only thing that got me through it. Until…” I can’t even fucking say it out loud.
“Until what?”
Until I cut her open and watched her die.
The words sit behind my teeth and won't come out as anything more than a sound—broken, wordless, my hand pressing hard against my sternum like I can keep the rest of it locked in by force.
Ian doesn't move. Doesn't fill the silence the way he usually does. He just stands there and waits, and the waiting is somehow worse than if he'd pushed.
I inhale deep, forcing the image of her in that cell out of my head. If I let it sit too long, the craving spikes, like my fucking nervous system remembers it’s the only thing that can take it away.
“I don’t want to hurt her,” I manage to say, and it’s the realest fucking thing I’ve said since I got back.
“I know.” Ian leans back against the wall. “The problem is she wants to help you. You don’t want her to. And that helplessness is not working out great for her cooking skills.”
“I know her,” I start. “She has this…this deeply rooted need to fix things. And I can’t be fixed.”
"See, that's where you're wrong, idiot. She doesn't want to fix you. She just wants to help you keep the pieces together. That's it, man."
I glance down at the floor, to the side, at the goddamn ceiling. "She deserves better than my pieces."
"On that, we can agree." He nods, smug look on his face. "Unfortunately, she seems to like your pieces a lot, broken as they are. Don't ask me why. I've stopped trying to make sense of her taste in men."
"Helpful."
"I try." He pushes off from where he's been leaning, crosses toward the door, then stops himself, like there's one more thing he hasn't finished saying. “I’ve known you a long time, Reth. And the woman whose been fucking sleeping outside your door every night is the best thing that’s ever happened to you. Fuck it up, and you and I’ll have a problem.”
“You care for her,” I say as he reaches for the doorknob.
He stops. Turns to face me. Then nods.
No deflection. No joke to soften it. Just the nod, plain and unguarded, and something steady in his eyes that tells me to not do anything other than to accept it as fact.
I don't move from the window, that familiar crawl starting underneath my skin. I roll my neck, hear something pop, dig my thumb into the muscle at my shoulder, needing somewhere to put the restlessness before it turns into something worse.
Ian watches me do it. Doesn't comment.
"How did you find me?"
His expression shifts—something careful moving behind it, the particular stillness of a man deciding how much weight a sentence can carry before he says it. "You're not gonna like it."
"Of course I'm not." I press my palm flat against the cool glass of the window, grounding against it the way the doctor told me to, something solid and real to anchor to. "But tell me anyway."
Ian studies me a beat too long—the kind of pause that's wrong on him, because Ian never has to choose his words. They just arrive already loaded and ready.
"Rowan."
I straighten. "Rowan?"
He nods slowly, crossing his arms, leaning back against the doorframe like he needs the support of it. "We were still in Japan when he called. Said he knew how to get to you. Said we should meet."
“That doesn’t make sense.” It really fucking doesn’t.
“Surprised me, too. Fucker had everything we needed. Rotations. Codes. Which guards could be bought." Ian's voice goes flat, careful. "All this inside knowledge, and he handed it over like it was nothing."
Rowan doesn't make deals he doesn't structure to his own advantage.
Doesn't pick up a phone for anyone unless the math already favors him three moves out.
I've watched him operate for years—every conversation a chessboard, every kindness a down payment on something he'll collect later with interest. The idea of him reaching out to Ian unprompted, handing over intelligence on his own wife's operation, doesn't fit the shape of the man I know.
Unless it does.
"What did he want in return?"
Ian raises a brow. "What makes you think he wanted anything?"
"It's Rowan. He doesn't do anything if it doesn't benefit him directly."
Ian stands, slides his hands in his pants pockets. "He didn’t get what he wanted.”
“Then what did he get?” Because Rowan would never walk out without getting something. "Ian."
"It's not what you think."
"You don't know what I think."
"I know you're already three steps down the wrong road with it." He exhales, scrubs a hand over his face. "Let's just say I'm a very generous negotiator."
“Ian?”
He doesn't look at me. Looks past me, out the window, at the mountain going gray in the last of the light. "Doesn't matter right now."
"You saying that confirms that it fucking matters."
"Reth—"
"What did it cost?" My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.
Ian's jaw tightens. For a second, I think he's going to give me the same deflection he's been running for days.
Instead, something in his face just—gives.
"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.