Chapter 4 #3
There was no transition. No gradual realization. One second she was smiling, the next her expression softened, sharpened, focused—all at once. The kind of awareness that came from knowing someone deeply enough to read what they weren’t saying.
Her smile softened. “What’s wrong?”
I hesitated. Deflect. Downplay. Control.
The old sequence slid into place so naturally it almost soothed me. If I kept it small, maybe it would stay small. If I named it lightly, maybe it wouldn’t swallow the rest of the afternoon whole.
“Nothing,” I replied lightly. “Just finals.”
Her expression didn’t change—which was so much worse—because she wasn’t fooled. Not even slightly. “Beatriz,” she crooned, gently but firmly, “don’t do that thing where you pretend everything is fine when it very clearly isn’t.”
Micah made a small noise of agreement beside me.
I shot her a look.
She ignored it.
“I’m just stressed,” I tried again.
“About?” Lo’s voice was light, but her brow furrowed with concern. The question was simple. Impossible to dodge without making it obvious.
I swallowed.
The pressure of Micah beside me felt steady. The weight of Lo’s attention through the phone felt just as real.
Micah nudged my foot under the table. Do it.
I closed my eyes briefly. Then forced the words to tumble from my lips before I could second guess myself again, “I haven’t heard back from any of the jobs I applied to.”
The words hung there. Once spoken, they took on shape.
Before, they’d been a looping panic in my own head, formless and relentless.
Now they existed outside me, sitting right there on the scarred wooden table between my chai, my laptop, our notes, and the cracked edge of my phone case. A fact. A fear. A confession.
Lo’s expression shifted immediately, her focus sharpening. “How many applications?”
“All of them.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
Silence. Not empty. Processing.
“I feel like I did everything right,” I admitted quietly. “And it’s not working.”
Her gaze softened. “That doesn’t mean it won’t.”
“It might.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged. “It might.”
That wasn’t comforting. It was honest. And somehow, that made it easier to breathe.
Because honesty didn’t try to soothe me with guarantees that didn’t exist. It didn’t pretend certainty where there wasn’t any. It just… held space for reality.
“I don’t want to come to you for help,” I added, the words slipping out before I could stop them.
Micah stilled beside me.
Lo’s brows lifted slightly. “Why?”
“Because I don’t want anything handed to me.”
Understanding flickered across her face. Not offense. Not frustration. The kind that made my throat tighten before she even spoke, because it meant she heard the wound beneath the words, not just the words themselves.
“Oh, bebê,” she murmured softly.
That word. Soft. Familiar. Rooted in something deeper than this moment. It slipped past my defenses in a way nothing else could, settling somewhere vulnerable and unguarded.
“I don’t want them to be right about me,” I continued. “I don’t want to be the girl who got her job because of connections.”
“You won’t be,” she stated firmly.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I wouldn’t let that happen.”
Across from me, Micah said nothing, but when I glanced at her, I found her watching me with that same unbearable steadiness. Not pity. Never pity. Just love so matter-of-fact it almost made me angry. Love that expected me to stop making myself harder to hold.
“Let me ask you something,” Lo continued. “If you got a job tomorrow—one you earned, one no one could question—would you still be worried about what people think?”
“Yes.”
She smiled slightly. A sad smile. A knowing one. The kind that belonged to women who had already lived long enough to understand the futility of trying to outrun judgment.
“They will always think something,” she said. “That’s not a problem you can solve.”
I stared at her. “That’s not helpful.”
“It’s not supposed to be helpful,” she replied lightly. “It’s supposed to be true.”
A tiny laugh escaped Micah then—under her breath, fond and unsurprised. Because of course Lo would say something maddeningly unadorned and somehow make it land exactly where it needed to.
I huffed out a breath.
Lo leaned slightly closer to the camera, her expression softening again.
The angle shifted enough for me to catch more of the room behind her. A dark jacket slung over the back of a chair. The edge of a man’s hand setting down a mug just outside the frame. A warm, masculine shape moving in the background. Ezra, probably, quiet as ever, present without inserting himself.
“You are not the girl who was handed anything,” she continued. “You are the girl who worked for everything and happened to have people who love her along the way.”
There it was. The difference I still struggled to accept. In my mind, support and stain had become too closely linked. If someone helped, the accomplishment counted less. If someone opened a door, it meant I had failed to earn the room behind it.
But Lo was looking at me like that logic was nonsense. Like love wasn’t contamination. Like being cared for did not erase competence.
“That’s not the same thing.”
I didn’t respond.
Because I didn’t fully believe her.
And maybe she knew that. Maybe that was why she didn’t push. She just watched me with that impossible tenderness, giving me room to wrestle with it without trying to pry the answer out of me before I was ready.
She watched me for a moment longer before blurting, “Come to Northbend.”
The words landed softly. Like an offered hand. Like a place made gently, intentionally, for me in a future I had been too scared to look at clearly.
“What?”
“Come to Northbend,” she repeated. “After you graduate.”
I blinked. “Lo—”
“Listen to me,” she continued, her tone steady now. “You don’t need to have everything figured out the second you walk across that stage.”
“I kind of do.”
“You don’t.”
“I have my visa—”
“And you will handle it,” she cut in calmly. “But you don’t have to do it alone.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t—”
“Come to Northbend,” she repeated. “Be close. Build something on your own terms. If something comes up, you decide what to do with it.”
Northbend wasn’t an abstract place in my life.
It hadn’t been for a while. I knew the way the lake looked just before it froze over, that deep, glassy stillness right before winter settled in for real.
I knew the back hallway in Lo’s house where the floors creaked no matter how carefully you stepped, the one she always swore she was going to fix and never did.
I knew the kitchen—wide and warm and always somehow full—where holidays stretched longer than they were supposed to because no one ever wanted to be the first to leave.
I knew where Ezra kept the good coffee. I knew how early he woke up, how the house always felt quietly awake before the sun came up because he’d already been moving through it, steady and unhurried.
I knew the lake path he insisted on clearing himself after the first snowfall, like it mattered that the space stayed usable, that nothing sat untouched for too long.
And Lucy—Ezra’s daughter.
I hadn’t spent enough time with her yet to call it effortless, but there was something there—something easy, something that felt like it was just waiting for more time to settle into place.
Late-night conversations in the kitchen during my last visit.
Shared looks over Lo’s chaos. The kind of almost-friendship that didn’t need much to tip into something solid.
It wasn’t a question of whether I fit there.
It was whether I would let myself.
The idea settled differently than everything else had. It wasn’t a solution. It wasn’t a guarantee. It wasn’t someone stepping in and fixing things for me.
“You’re not locking yourself into anything,” Lo continued. “You’re giving yourself a place to land while you figure out your next move.”
A place to land. The words echoed.
I swallowed against the sudden burn in my throat. Across the table, Micah covered my hand with hers fully this time. Warm. Solid. Uncomplicated. Her thumb pressed once against my knuckles.
“I don’t want to rely on you,” I admitted.
“You’re not relying on me,” she countered. “You’re choosing proximity to people who care about you.”
“What about Ezra?” I asked quietly.
Because his presence wasn’t small. It wasn’t something that could be ignored or brushed aside. He existed in a world of power and influence whether I wanted to engage with it or not.
Lo’s smile turned knowing.
Before she could answer, the shape in the background moved again.
Then Ezra stepped partly into frame, one broad hand braced on the back of Lo’s chair, his expression warm in that quiet way that always made him seem steadier than the room around him.
He looked like himself even through a phone—grounded, unhurried, composed in a way that never felt performative.
Lo glanced up at him, smiling before turning the camera slightly.
Ezra’s voice came low and even, the kind that never had to fight for attention to command it. “You should come to Northbend, Bea.”
He didn’t say more. Didn’t sell it. Didn’t overstep. He let the words land as they were, then squeezed Lo’s shoulder once and stepped back out of frame with the same quiet certainty he seemed to bring to everything.
Lo’s smile softened, like she knew exactly what his brief appearance had done. “Ezra would never make you feel like you owe him anything,” she replied. “And he would never give you something you didn’t earn.”
I looked down at the table. At Micah’s hand over mine—steady, grounding. At my laptop, the half-finished paper waiting with a patience I didn’t feel. At the phone in my other hand, Lo’s face framed by that warm, familiar kitchen I had stood in more times than I could count.
“I don’t know,” I murmured.
“That’s okay,” she replied easily. “You don’t have to know today.”
Silence stretched again.
But this time, it wasn’t heavy. It opened. Like something shifting just enough to let light through. Like a path I hadn’t let myself consider fully finally settling into focus—not new, not foreign, just… there. Waiting.
Micah nudged my foot again. This time, gentler.
I looked at her.
She smiled. Small. Certain.
And in that quiet, steady moment—with her hand over mine, with Lo watching me without pushing, with Ezra’s calm certainty still lingering in the space he’d left behind—I felt the decision settle into place before I could question it.
Northbend wasn’t a possibility. It was going to be my future.