“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.”