34. Wolfe #2
“That night, on the phone with Ronan, I told him you were staying. I said it twice. I meant it both times.” I lean forward.
“Texting to me is mechanical. I don’t do emojis or emotion.
I don’t think about tone. And I don’t try to rationalize with someone who is beyond rationalizing with.
So I get how it sounded to you, but that’s not how I meant it. At all.”
Her eyes flutter open. They’re red-rimmed, still furious, and searching my face for something. A shudder ripples through me because I can’t tell if she finds it.
“I need to tell you something else,” I say. “Something I’ve never told anyone.”
“What?”
My chest tightens so hard I have to work to pull in a full breath.
This is the part I’ve been carrying since I was nineteen years old.
The part that explains every silence, every hesitation, every time I opened my mouth to tell Eva what she means to me and my body physically shut the words down.
She needs to hear it, something I’ve never told anyone.
“When I was nineteen, my father decided to run an experiment on me.”
Eva goes completely still. “What are you talking about?”
“He knew I was different. He’d known my whole life, and he resented it. The way my brain works, the way I process the world, the way emotions don’t come out of me the way they come out of other people—he thought all of it made me weak. And he wanted to find out exactly how weak.”
I stare at the grain of the kitchen table and trace the crooked line because looking at Eva while I say this might break me.
“He introduced me to a woman. Her name was Lydia. She was a few years older than me. She was beautiful and she was the first person in my life who didn’t treat me like I was broken.
She would sit with me while I coded and ask me questions about what I was building.
She touched my arm when she talked to me.
She remembered things I said and brought them up weeks later like they mattered. ”
I struggle to keep my voice is steady.
“I’d never had that before. Not from anyone outside of my brothers.
I didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like when someone wanted to be close to you, so I just let it happen.
We spent about four months together, and somewhere in the middle of it I started to believe that maybe the way my brain worked wasn’t a deficiency.
Maybe it was just different, and different could still be wanted. ”
“Wolfe.” Eva’s voice is barely audible. But I still can’t look at her.
“And then one night my father called me into his office and told me that he’d hired her.
That every conversation, every touch, every moment where I thought someone was seeing me and choosing to stay anyway had been bought.
He did it because he wanted to know if my emotions could be used as a pressure point.
Whether caring about someone made me controllable and exploitable to our enemies.
” I swallow hard. “And the answer was yes. Because I did care about her. And when he told me the truth, something inside my chest closed shut and I had no desire to get it open again.”
Eva crosses the room and takes my hands in hers. When I finally look up, her pained gaze is locked on my face, and there are tears running down her cheeks that she’s not bothering to wipe away.
“I’m telling you this because you need to understand what happens inside me when I try to tell you how I feel.
It’s not that I don’t feel it. I feel it so much that it terrifies me.
Every time I get close to saying the words, my body throws up a wall.
Not because I think you’re going to hurt me.
Because my nervous system learned at nineteen that letting someone in is the same thing as handing them a weapon.
And even though I know that’s not true with you, even though every part of my brain that thinks logically knows that you are the safest person I’ve ever been with, the part of me that got wrecked by my father hasn’t caught up yet. ”
“So that’s why you could never say it,” she says, her voice cracking. “I kept waiting for you to tell me what I could see all over your face and you just couldn’t.”
“That was the wound. Not indifference. It’s the opposite of indifference, actually. It was me feeling too much and dealing with a body that interprets intensity as danger.”
“You should have told me,” she says, lacing her fingers with my working ones. “All of it. The case file. Ronan. The plan. This. Especially this. You should have told me everything instead of letting me find it alone in the dark and draw my own conclusions.”
“I know.”
“I spent two weeks thinking I was nothing to you. A project. Something to manage. Do you understand what that did to me?”
“I don’t know exactly what it did to you. But I know what losing you did to me. And I think they probably caused the same amount of damage.”
She’s quiet for a long time. She stands in the middle of the kitchen, and I can see her processing everything, running it against what she found on my laptop, trying to figure out how to poke holes into it.
But she won’t find a lie. There isn’t one. Everything I’ve said is the ugliest truth I’ve ever spoken and it’s all I have left to give her.