33. April 4, Monday #2
“You taught him love has conditions,” she accused quietly. “That if he falls apart, someone who loves him might shame him back into usefulness and call it saving him.”
“Zoey—”
“No.” Her voice stayed calm, but her hands trembled. “Do you have any idea how hard he works to be needed? To be useful? To make sure everyone around him is okay before he even lets himself breathe?”
Mitch’s face tightened.
“Of course, you do,” she said. “You benefit from it.”
His gaze snapped up. “That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” she asked. “You call him your brother. Your best friend. Your fiercest defender. And the second he found one sliver of happiness that wasn’t centered on you, you went straight for every fear he has.
You weaponized everything you know he hates about himself.
You knew exactly where to twist the knife. ”
“He lied to me,” Mitch said, hoarse.
“Yes. And he was wrong for that. I was wrong for that.” She held his gaze. “But you don’t get to turn your hurt into proof that he was always going to disappoint you. You don’t get to make that the headline of his life.”
Mitch swallowed hard.
“And you treated me like your mother.”
His gaze flicked to hers, guilty.
She held it without flinching. Without apology.
His shoulders dropped. “Yeah. Okay. I deserved that.”
“You made me your assistant, your house manager, your secretary. Whatever you needed, I was in charge of it. The only thing you needed to do was play hockey and feel slightly misunderstood.”
He inhaled like the words hurt. Good. They should.
“But I’m not here to rehash our marriage,” Zoey said.
His brows lifted. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“I’m not,” she insisted, and meant it. “There was a time when I would have begged you to see all the ways you hurt me. I would’ve needed you to validate it so I could believe my own memory. I don’t need that anymore.”
Mitch said nothing.
“I do need you to understand something about Ilya,” she continued. “Because you still have access to him. Because he still loves you. Because he will take your anger and turn it into a life sentence if you let him.”
His expression shifted. Guilt. Fear. Both.
“He’s a grown man,” he protested weakly.
“Yes,” Zoey said. “A grown man who spent years being the designated load-bearing wall for everyone else’s emotional architecture. You know that better than anyone.”
The corner of Mitch’s mouth twitched despite himself. “That’s…a hell of a sentence.”
No way was she giving Kayla credit.
“I’ve had coffee now,” she said.
“Barely.”
She ignored that. “You don’t have to be okay with what happened between us. You don’t have to bless it. You don’t have to stop being hurt on a timeline that’s convenient for anybody else. But you do need to stop using your hurt as proof that loving me is some kind of moral failure on his part.”
Mitch looked down at his mug.
“He thinks he failed you,” she said. “He thinks he failed Christian. Fido. Those puppies. Kira. Probably a partridge in a pear tree if one wandered into the arena looking sad.”
Mitch made a strangled sound—half laugh, half something else.
“He thinks loving me is another failure,” Zoey added, voice tightening. “And you helped nail that coffin shut.”
His eyes lifted, pained and ashamed at once.
“I didn’t make him fall in love with you.”
“No,” she agreed quietly. “You didn’t. But you made it a lot easier for him to believe it was wrong.”
Silence settled.
The diner moved around them. Forks clinked. Someone laughed at the counter. The angry kitchen man shouted about onions.
Mitch stared at her for a long time.
“You love him,” he said finally.
Zoey’s chest ached.
There it was.
She could dodge it. Make it smaller. Soften the blow.
She didn’t.
“Yes,” she said simply.
Mitch looked away.
“I love him,” she repeated, softer. “And I’m furious with him. And I don’t know if he’s capable of walking back toward me in a way that matters. But yes.”
His jaw worked. “He left you.”
“He did.”
“After all that bullshit about me not deserving you, he walked away too.”
Pain flashed through her, but it didn’t flatten her.
The bitter part of her wanted to lash out at him and tell him that he had contributed to that leaving but she bit her tongue.
“Yes,” she agreed instead. “He hurt me. A lot.”
“Then why are you sitting here defending him?” Mitch demanded.
“Because loving someone doesn’t mean pretending they didn’t do damage. It means knowing the difference between the damage and the person.”
Mitch went very still.
“I can be happy without him,” she said, hearing the truth of it as she spoke.
“I need you to understand that. I’m not sitting around waiting for a man to unlock my life.
I have a job I love. Friends who bully me into eating vegetables.
A foster license still moving through the system.
Kids to show up for. A home I’m learning how to build. ”
Her eyes burned, but she kept going.
“But I would be happier if he were there,” she admitted. “Not because I’m incomplete without him. But because some people make the life you’re already building feel warmer when they walk into the room.”
Mitch stared at her.
Something in his face softened in a way that hurt to look at.
“You never talked about me like that,” he said.
She smiled sadly. “No.”
He absorbed that.
To his credit, he didn’t argue.
“I hate this,” he admitted.
“Yeah.”
“I hate that he gets to be the better man.”
He always was. Not that she was going to say that.
Zoey’s mouth curved faintly. “He spent last night breaking my heart, crawling around a parking garage, probably hating himself the whole time, trying to find ghost puppies. Let’s not canonize him yet. He’s a mess, too.”
Mitch snorted before he could stop himself.
The sound eased something between them by half an inch.
Then his smile faded.
“Is he better for you?” he asked.
Zoey thought of Ilya’s hand steady at the small of Jayden’s elbow.
His voice in the dark garage, calling softly to a terrified dog.
Him wearing Kayla’s glasses and accusing her spice rack of lacking creativity.
The way he’d looked at her like wanting her was both the easiest and scariest thing he’d ever done.
“When he lets himself be,” she said, “yes.”
Mitch nodded slowly. “Okay.”
It wasn’t approval. It wasn’t peace.
But it was closer to acceptance than they’d been yesterday.
Zoey picked up her fork and cut into her pancakes because she was hungry and it wasn’t like this conversation was going to get less weird.
Mitch watched her for a second. “You’re really going to eat during this?”
“I have cried out half my body weight in the last twenty-four hours. I need sustenance.”
“Fair enough.”
She took a bite. It tasted like heaven.
Mitch leaned back. “What do I do?”
“With Ilya?”
He nodded.
Zoey set down her fork.
“You apologize. Not dramatically. Not so he’ll absolve you and make you feel better. You tell him the truth. That you were hurt. That you’re still hurt. That what he did was messy. But that you should never have used his worst fears against him.”
Mitch stared into his coffee.
“And the other thing?” she added.
His eyes flicked up.
“You apologize for the way you tried to save him back then,” she said. “For making sobriety or compliance or ‘being good’ the price of your love. You say it was wrong. And you don’t ask him to comfort you about it.”
His throat worked. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I know.”
“And then,” she said, lifting her coffee, “you leave him room to decide what he wants to do with that.”
Mitch gave her a tired look. “That your advice for yourself too?”
Her hand paused around the mug.
Because yes. Maybe it was.