Silence dropped back into the space she left behind.
For a while, he and I didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Didn’t look away.
Two men. Same problem. Very different feelings about it
Rafael’s voice came first. “Whatever you think this is,” he snapped, “you are not making decisions about my daughter’s life in the middle of a restaurant.”
I leaned forward slightly, my hands resting flat against the table, my gaze locked on his.
“I’m not making decisions for her,” I said. “I’m not walking away from it either.”
Something flickered across his expression then—too brief to name, but not nothing.
I held his gaze for one more second. Then pushed back from the table.
The cold atthe back of my neck.
The sky had dropped lower, heavy and gray, the air thick with the kind of quiet that came before more snow. Cars pushed slow along the street, tires grinding through packed ice, exhaust curling up into the cold like it couldn’t decide where to settle.
She stood ten feet from the door. Back to me. Armswrapped tight across her body, shoulders pulled in like she was holding herself together by force alone.
I let the door shut behind me without rushing her, the sound dull against the cold air as I closed the distance slowly, my boots crunching against the thin layer of snow that had already started to settle again.
“Bea.”
She didn’t turn.
Her head dipped slightly instead, like hearing her name cost her something. “Don’t,” she warned, her voice rougher than I’d ever heard it. “Just—don’t.”
I stopped a few feet behind her.
“I didn’t know you hadn’t seen it,” I whispered.
Her shoulders tensed. Then dropped. A breath pulled in too sharp, too fast, before she let it out slowly through her nose. “I didn’t look. My dad showed up before I could.”
I closed my eyes for half a second, the cold biting into my face, pulling everything into sharper focus whether I wanted it or not.
“I figured that out late,” I admitted.
When she finally turner, her eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the cold, her expression fractured, open in a way she never allowed. “You don’t get to decide how this happens,” she snapped. “You don’t get to decidewhenI tell people. You don’t get to decideanythingabout this.”
“I didn’t?—”
“You did,” she cut in, stepping toward me now, the distance between us closing in sharp, uneven movements. “You stood there and you decided you knew what was happening and you just—called the play. Without all the information. Without doing your research.”
It is.
The thought hit hard.
Immediate.
And I didn’t say it.
Didn’t let it come out.
Because this wasn’t about being right.
This was about what I’d just broken.