5. Calliope #3
“I don’t know what I want. I just know I can’t stay here.”
“Are you going to choose the closer campus or the farther one?”
“Farther.” The word scrapes. “Oakhaven, the sister campus. They offered temporary housing for two weeks and then help with apartments. Dash said HR could make the start date immediate if I needed it.”
Mara doesn’t answer right away. She looks around the motel room instead, at the carpet, the dead bolt, the paper on the table, the little pile of cash beside my bag because privacy doesn’t matter anymore when every practical piece of me is falling out where people can see. “Then take it.”
The words hit harder because she says them gently.
I shake my head. “That sounds like giving up.”
“No.” Mara shifts closer, and her voice turns fierce again.
“Giving up would be spending the last of your cash on this room while the police wait for you to make one more call they can punish. Giving up would be letting Garrett’s paperwork decide the size of your world.
Accepting the offer is buying time. It’s getting somewhere with a locked door, a paycheck, and a doctor who can keep your bond from tearing you apart while we figure out what the hell happened. ”
“What if they think I chose it?” I ask. The question has been sitting in me for two days, heavy and poisonous. “What if Sloane comes looking and sees I accepted, and it proves everything Garrett said? Career over pack. Distance over Theo. Me walking away when heat got hard.”
Mara’s expression softens into something unbearable. “Then Sloane can learn what it feels like to read paperwork and be wrong.”
I bend forward, pressing both hands to my mouth, and the sob that finally comes is silent at first. Then it isn’t.
Mara catches me before I fold too far, arms around my shoulders, cheek pressed to my hair, and I cry in a way I haven’t let myself cry because crying means my body still believes someone might answer.
Mara doesn’t tell me to breathe until I start choking on it. Then she presses the water back into my hand and talks me through one sip, then another, her voice low and steady. By the time I can see the room again, the soup has gone lukewarm and the afternoon light has shifted across the carpet.
I pick up my phone before I can think myself out of it. Dash’s name sits below the missed calls, unfamiliar and formal and clean. He knows the woman he helped out of a police station, a candidate with a strong interview and a life messy enough to require emergency lodging.
Mara stays beside me, one hand resting against my knee, solid enough to keep me from floating away. I call Dash and he answers on the third ring. “Dr. Monroe?”
His voice is careful. I close my eyes because even kindness has weight when I’m this hollow. “It’s Calliope. I’m sorry I missed your calls.”
“You don’t need to apologize.” There’s a pause on his end, quiet enough that I can hear paper shifting, maybe him moving away from whatever work I’ve interrupted. “Are you safe?”
I look at Mara. I look at the order on the table. I look at the cash by my bag and the phone warning still crouched at the top of my screen. Safe feels like too large a word for this room, but unsafe has started to mean something worse than loneliness. “I’m somewhere with a lock.”
Dash exhales softly. “That’s a start.”
“I need to accept the position.” My voice wavers, but the sentence makes it out. “The sister-campus one. Oakhaven. If it’s still available, I’ll take it.”
“It’s available.” He answers quickly enough that I know he’s been waiting without trying to make me feel waited on.
“I’ll notify HR and ask them to send everything in writing.
You don’t have to remember details over the phone.
I’ll include temporary housing, reporting time, benefits contacts, and travel options in the email. ”
My throat tightens around benefits contacts because I have to redo everything. I have to rebuild the administrative pieces of my life too. “Thank you.”
“Calliope,” he says, and the sound of my full name from someone who doesn’t want anything from me makes my eyes sting again. “You can take this one step at a time. The offer isn’t going to vanish because you need an hour to breathe.”
I can’t tell him that breathing is the thing I’m worst at now.
I can’t tell him my chest only knows how to hold shut around a bond that keeps trying to tear itself open.
I only say thank you again, and he lets that be enough.
When the call ends, my hand stays around the phone for a long time, waiting for regret to arrive with teeth.
Mara takes it from me before I can open Sloane’s contact. She doesn’t hide it. She sets it on the nightstand, screen down, then moves the soup back into my hands. “Eat the rest.”
“I accepted,” I say, because my brain hasn’t caught up to my body yet.
“I know.” Mara sits close enough that our shoulders touch. “Tomorrow, we go to the doctor. After that, we figure out the phone, the bank, and the cards. Then we figure out the order. We’re not fixing your whole life tonight.”