Chapter 45
AFTER THE BELL (LIZ)
By the time we get back to the Cherokee, my skin feels too tight.
The climb upstairs is silent except for the strike of our feet on stone and the blood still pounding in my ears. Eden keeps pace beside me, purse strap looped around one wrist, her mouth set in a careful line that says she knows I’m one wrong word away from burning the whole place down.
Good.
Because if she says one soft, soothing, reasonable thing to me right now, I might actually bite her.
When we reach our floor, I stalk down the hall, keys in hand, and barely make it inside the apartment before I spin to face her.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Eden closes the door behind us quietly. Too quietly. “Liz—”
“No.” I throw my bag onto the console table so hard it skids and nearly knocks over the bowl Joy gave us last Christmas. “You do not get to start with my name in that tone. And you do not get to stand there acting as if this was some unfortunate misunderstanding.”
The softness goes out of her expression. “I said I was sorry.”
“Sorry isn’t cutting it.”
The words come out louder than I mean them to, but I don’t care. My whole body still feels tuned too high, every nerve ending sparking.
I pace three steps toward the kitchen and back again.
“You found out last night. And you still let me go through my whole day and walk into that gym blind while everybody else apparently had a front-row seat to the plan.”
“I didn’t have a front-row seat,” she snaps, enough steel in her voice to stop me for half a second. “Jessica texted and said she wanted somebody close by in case things went sideways.”
I laugh, sharp and joyless.
“In case things went sideways.”
“Liz—”
“No, really. Amazing. I’m thrilled there was a contingency plan for my trauma.”
“That’s not fair.”
I look at her.
“Not fair?” I repeat.
“No. It’s not fair.”
I move closer before I can stop myself, anger dragging me across the room. “You know what isn’t fair? Being treated like a problem men need to solve while everyone around me nods along because the intentions are good.”
“That’s not what happened,” she says sharply.
“That’s exactly what happened.” My voice rises. “Travis used to decide what I needed, what I could handle, what I should know, what would ‘upset me unnecessarily.’ Leo just did it with better lighting and legal paperwork.”
I stop short.
The second his name leaves my mouth, something twists hard in me.
I hate that.
I hate that fury is not the only thing in me.
Eden sees it. Of course, she does.
She gentles a notch, which only makes me angrier.
“Liz,” she says more carefully, “those are not the same thing.”
“They felt the same.”
Because they did. The room goes silent. I look away first, heat stinging my eyes.
The apartment is clean, still, full of warm lamplight.
Everything looks offensively normal: a folded throw on the couch, two mugs in the drying rack, the stupid ceramic lemon bowl on the counter.
My whole life is sitting here intact while something in me still feels flayed open under fluorescent lights.
Eden comes farther into the room, moving carefully. “Okay,” she says. “They felt the same. I’ll give you that.”
I fold my arms across my middle so tightly, it almost hurts. She leans against the back of the dining chair and studies me.
“But they weren’t,” she adds softly.
I laugh, a short, ugly sound. “You really believe that?”
“Yes.”
That takes me aback enough that I actually look at her. Eden is many things—warm, funny, occasionally chaotic. But when she plants her feet like this, she doesn’t budge.
I should know; I’ve watched her go toe-to-toe with Nate, with her brother, with people twice her size and ten times as loud.
She lifts one shoulder. “You can yell at me for not telling you. You should. But I’m not going to stand here and let you turn Leo into Travis. He isn’t.”
I have to work to get anything past my teeth.
“That’s not what I said.”
“It’s exactly what you said.”
I look away.
Because yes, it is what I was saying. Intellectually, morally, practically, I know the difference. But some old, damaged part of me still goes feral at the idea of a man making a call about my life without me in the room.
“He decided for me.”
Eden doesn’t flinch. “Yes. He absolutely made a decision for you. And if you want to be furious about that, that’s fair. Be furious.” She pauses, then continues, “Travis decided for you so he could keep you. Leo made that call to get Travis the hell out of your life.”
I shake my head instantly. “You don’t know that.”
Her brows rise. “For real? He was never planning to tell you. If you hadn’t found out, he would’ve just handled it. You never would’ve known.”
I blink at her.
“That’s supposed to make it better?”
“No.” She stays steady. “Just different.”
I start pacing again, because being still feels impossible.
She waits patiently until I stop moving.
“Look,” I say. “I walked into that situation and realized that every single person there knew what was happening except me. Jessica knew. Ray knew. Lukas knew. Nate knew enough to drive me there in total monk silence. Everybody knew except the person whose life was at the center of it all.”
Eden winces a little at that. “You’re right,” she says.
The answer knocks the wind out of me.
“What?”
“You’re right.” She stays steady. “You should’ve known. He should’ve told you. You should have had a choice before any of that was put in motion.”
I stare at her. That is not what I expected.
My anger stutters, not because it’s gone, but because for a second it doesn’t know where to land.
Eden pushes off the chair and comes closer, stopping well short of touching me.
“But that still doesn’t make him Travis.”
The words come in softer, and somehow that makes them worse.
Because they’re not dismissing what I feel. They’re asking me to hold two things at once, and right now I can barely hold one.
I look past her toward the dark kitchen windows. My reflection stares back—pale, wide-eyed, and brittle.
“He set it up,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Jessica. Cameras. Witnesses.”
“Yes.”
I turn back to her. “How is that not control?”
“Because he didn’t do it to trap you.”
The whole place seems to hold. My mind flicks back to the gym. Not to Travis. Not even to Leo. To the setup.
The folding table. The papers in neat rows. Black pens. Clipboards. Waivers. Legal waivers for a documented fight. The cameras. One on a tripod. One from the rafters. Jessica with her legal pad. Ray. Another man I assume was the referee. The cutman with a full medical kit.
Not a street brawl.
Evidence.
Undisputable evidence.
Travis admitted on camera to putting his hands on me while I was pregnant. Admitted I lost the baby. Threatened me on video with witnesses present. Documented. Recorded. Legally admissible.
With the fury turned down enough to think, I can finally see it. Leo didn’t set up a fight. He set up protection. Permanent, documented, indisputable protection. The kind Travis can’t rewrite later.
Leo freed me.
And then he didn’t follow me out.
No footsteps. No door. No hand closing around the moment and trying to make it mean what he wanted.
I can hear the refrigerator humming, a car passing on the street, my own breathing.
Eden watches me, waiting.
I shake my head slowly. “You don’t know that he wasn’t going to—”
“Did he come after you?”
I stare at her.
No.
“Did he call?”
No.
“Did he send Nate after you with some message about how he fixed everything and now you need to listen?”
No.
Travis would already be at the door, blowing up my phone, or rewriting the whole thing into a performance where his violence became my debt.
You should be grateful.
You should calm down.
You should come home.
Look what I did for you.
The thought makes something cold crawl over the back of my neck.
Eden sees it.
Her voice softens. “He’s not here, Liz.”
I close my eyes.
Exhaustion punches through all the anger, and I feel every hour of this day at once—anatomy this morning, the gym, Travis, Leo’s face when I said “pregnant” and “baby” and “shoved me into the table,” the way he locked down so completely it stopped looking human, the sound the room made after that.
My knees suddenly feel unreliable.
“Hey,” Eden says, quick now.
She reaches for me, and this time I let her.
Only long enough for her hand to close around my forearm and guide me backward until the back of my legs hit the couch.
I sit because the alternative is swaying.
She disappears into the kitchen, comes back with water, and presses the glass into my hand without comment.
I take a sip because my mouth tastes like metal and old grief.
For a minute, neither of us says anything.
Then I whisper, “He knows now.”
Eden sits in the armchair across from me. “Yeah.”
I stare down into the water.
“I never told him the whole story.”
“I know.”
The feeling isn’t quite shame. More like exposure. Like a locked room in me got kicked open under stadium lights.
“I didn’t want him to know like that.”
“I know.”
Then, because fury is simpler than grief, I lift my head. “I’m still livid.”
Eden gives me a tired half smile. “I’d be worried if you weren’t.”
Despite everything, a sound almost like a laugh catches in my throat, then dies.
I scrub a hand over my face.
“He decided for me,” I say again, quieter this time. “Again.”
Eden leans back, studying me. “Maybe.” I look up. She holds my gaze. “Or maybe he decided about Travis and left the rest to you.”
In the soft lamplight, with a glass of water in my hand, my pulse finally slows. The silence between us swells with everything I’m not ready to name.
Anger. Relief. Grief.
And something more unsettling than all of them.
The growing certainty that she’s right.