Chapter 11
Tobias
I used to count the hours until he came home.
It started without me noticing. Somewhere between the second week and the third, Vance's presence had become the axis around which my days turned.
The sound of his key in the lock. The heavy tread of his boots in the hallway.
The way he'd pause in the doorway, scanning the room before his eyes found mine.
For a few brief days, that pause had felt like coming home. Like being seen.
Now I counted the hours he was gone because they were the only hours I could breathe without the weight of his absence crushing my chest.
The blackout had changed everything.
That night, huddled together on the floor with flickering candles, I told him things I'd never told anyone.
About my family. About Elizabeth. About the hollow years of performing a version of myself that had never been real.
He held my hand in the darkness, and when the power came back on and we stood too close, faces inches apart, I was certain he was going to kiss me.
He hadn't.
He stepped back, creating distance between us. He said goodnight in a voice that sounded like gravel.
And in the morning, he was gone.
On the first day, I told myself it was work.
He'd mentioned catching up after the power outage, systems to check, reports to file. The hotel didn't run itself, and he was head of security. Of course, he had responsibilities.
I made breakfast for two anyway, setting his plate across from mine. I waited until the eggs went cold before scraping them into the trash.
On the second day, I told myself it was coincidence.
He came home late, after I'd already eaten. He mumbled something about overtime and went straight to the shower. I heard the water running for a long time, longer than usual, as if he were washing off something that wouldn't come clean.
When he emerged, he didn't look at me.
"How was your day?" I asked.
"Fine."
"I made pasta. There's some in the fridge if you're hungry."
"I ate at the hotel."
He crossed to the couch, turned on the TV, and that was it. The entirety of our conversation: three sentences followed by a wall of silence.
I went to bed and stared at the ceiling for hours, replaying every moment of the blackout, trying to figure out what I'd done wrong.
By the third day, I knew.
It wasn't work. It wasn't coincidence. It was me.
Something had shifted during that storm; a line had been crossed that I couldn't uncross, and now he was pulling away. I'd revealed too much, wanted too much, let him see too much of the desperate, hungry thing inside me.
And he was running.
I tried to fix it.
That's what I did, wasn't it? Fixed things. Made myself useful. Smoothed over problems until they disappeared. The Langford family specialty: make everything look perfect, even when it was rotting from the inside.
I cooked his favorites: the carbonara that had made him grunt with approval, the roasted chicken he'd eaten seconds of without being asked.
I cleaned things that were already clean, organized drawers that didn't need organizing, and filled every moment with activity so I wouldn't have to sit with the growing certainty that I'd ruined everything.
He came home later and later, left earlier and earlier. The spaces between us stretched until I could barely remember what it felt like to be close to him.
I started leaving the bedroom door cracked at night, telling myself it was for airflow. Really, it was so I could hear him moving around the apartment, to know he was still there, still real, still mine in some small way, even if he couldn't stand to look at me.
Most nights, I fell asleep listening for footsteps that never came close enough.
The worst part was how much I needed him.
I'd never needed anyone like this. Never let myself need anyone, because needing meant vulnerability, and vulnerability meant pain. The Langfords didn't need. They used, leveraged, and strategized. Needing was weakness.
But somewhere in those weeks of shared dinners and quiet evenings, of learning how he took his coffee and which books made him smile, Vance had become essential.
Not like air or water—nothing so simple.
More like gravity. The force that kept me tethered to the earth when everything else wanted to spin away.
Without him, I was floating. Untethered. Lost.
And he didn't even seem to notice.
I started to understand what I was to him.
A project. A problem to be solved and then set aside. He'd rescued me from the wedding, given me a place to hide, and now the hiding was supposed to end. I was supposed to figure out my life, get a job, find somewhere else to live. That had always been the plan.
I'd just been foolish enough to think the plan had changed.
The night I waited up for him and fell asleep on the couch, I woke to his hand on my shoulder and his voice saying my name. For one perfect, sleepy moment, I forgot to be guarded. Forgot to pretend I wasn't desperate for his attention.
"I wanted to see you," I said. "You've been gone so much."
And I watched his face close like a door slamming shut.
"Go to bed, Tobias."
Not "stay." Not "I missed you too." Just my name and a command, delivered in a voice so cold it burned.
I went to bed. But I didn't sleep. I lay in the dark and felt something inside me start to crack.
The next morning, I began to plan my exit.
Not dramatically. Not with tears or confrontations.
Just quietly, practically, the way I'd been taught.
I had no money, but I had skills. I could find work somewhere.
A restaurant, maybe. I'd gotten decent at cooking.
Or a cleaning service. Something that would pay enough for a room, a bed, a life that didn't depend on the charity of a man who couldn't bear to be near me.
I started folding his clothes.
The clothes he'd lent me. The Army t-shirt I'd worn since that first morning, soft from years of washing, smelling like detergent and something that was just him. The sweatpants I'd rolled up at the ankles because they were too long. The socks I'd borrowed and never returned.
Each item I folded was a piece of him I had to give back. Each crease I smoothed was a goodbye I wasn't ready to say.
I didn't hear him come in.
"What are you doing?"
His voice came from the doorway, and I didn't look up. Couldn't look up. If I looked at him, I'd break, and I was so tired of breaking.
"Organizing."
"Those are my clothes."
"I know. I've been borrowing them." Fold. Smooth. Stack. "I thought I should give them back."
Silence. I could feel him watching me, the weight of his attention like a physical pressure, but I kept my eyes on the fabric in my hands.
"Why?"
"Because I've been here too long." The words came out steady. I was proud of that. "I've been taking advantage of your kindness, and I should figure out what comes next. Find a job. A room to rent. Something."
"You don't have to do that."
"I do." I finally looked up, and the crack inside me widened at his expression.
Guilt. Surprise. And beneath it, something that looked almost like pain.
"You've made it clear you don't want me here.
I'm not going to keep forcing myself on someone who can barely stand to be in the same room with me. "
"That's not what's happening."
"Isn't it?" I set down the shirt I was folding. My hands were shaking. I hadn't noticed until now. "You leave before I wake up. You come home after I've given up waiting. You won't eat the food I make. You won't talk to me. You flinch every time I get too close."
Each word was a wound I inflicted on both of us. I watched them land, watched him absorb them, watched him stand there in the doorway with his jaw tight and his hands clenched at his sides.
"I've spent days trying to figure out what I did wrong." My voice cracked. I let it. "Trying to fix it. Trying to be less needy, less present, less everything. But nothing works. You still look at me like I'm a problem you don't know how to solve."
"Tobias..."
"I'm not stupid." The words tore out of me, ragged and raw. "I know when I'm not wanted."
He flinched. Actually flinched, like I'd hit him.
And then he was moving. Crossing the room in three steps, taking the stack of clothes from my hands and setting them aside on the dresser.
"What are you doing?"
"Stop." His voice was wrecked. Broken in a way I'd never heard. "Please. Just stop."
I looked up at him. He was close now, closer than he'd been in days, and his gray eyes were wild with something I couldn't name.
"Why?"
"Because you're wrong." The words scraped out of him. "I wasn't pushing you away because I don't want you."
I waited.
"I was pushing you away because I want you too much. And that terrifies me."
The world stopped.
Or maybe it was just my heart. Or my lungs. Or every part of me that had spent the past week dying slowly, starving for something I thought I'd never have.
"What?" The word barely escaped my lips.
"I don't do this." He was standing so close I could feel his heat, could see the pulse hammering in his throat. "I don't let people in. I don't need anyone. That's how I've survived. My whole life, that's been the rule."
"And I changed that?"
"You changed everything." His voice cracked. "The apartment. The food. The way I think about coming home. You made me want things I'd trained myself not to want."
I stared at him. This man who'd been avoiding me for days, who'd made me feel invisible, unwanted, like a burden he was too polite to discard. And all along...
"So your solution was to make me feel like nothing until I left on my own?"
He didn't deny it. "Yes. And I'm sorry. I'm so fucking sorry."
"That's a terrible coping mechanism."
"I know."
"I cried myself to sleep three times this week."
His face went pale. "Tobias..."
"I reorganized your entire closet by color and season because I couldn't think of anything else to do with my hands that wouldn't end with me screaming."
"I didn't..."