“You have to understand?—”
“I do,” she said, and that stopped me more effectively than if she had raised her voice. “That’s why I said fine.”
I felt something cold move through me.
Fine?
That was all I got? Fine?
She looked at me for one second longer, and whatever she saw in my face seemed to confirm something for her.
“Tell me,” she said quietly, “you didn’t actually expect me to negotiate this.”
I said nothing.
Her mouth curved, but there was no warmth in it. “Or beg, maybe. Is that what this speech was for? So you could nobly destroy us and I could make it easier for you by crying on cue?”
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
She crossed the room then, calm enough that every step felt like judgment, and started gathering her things from the chair by the sofa. My shirt came off over her head with quick, efficient movements, folded and set down. She dressed without hurry, and the fact that she could stand there and put herself back together while I came apart watching her was almost unbearable.
“This decision reveals a lot,” she said at last.
I swallowed. “Reveals what?”
She looked at me fully then, and whatever was in her eyes was not tears. Tears would have been easier.
“That you’re one of them.”
The words landed with brutal force.
I laughed once, short and disbelieving, because otherwise I might have stopped breathing. “That’s not true.”
“No?” she asked. “A man deciding what is best for me without asking whether I’m willing to choose it myself, dressing it up as protection and expecting me to be grateful? It feels very familiar from where I’m standing.”
“That is not what I’m doing.”
“It’s exactly what you’re doing.”
She picked up her bag.
My whole body went rigid.
“Emily.”
She paused at the door, but only because she was polite enough to let me say one last thing that would not matter.
“Please don’t do this like I’m some villain in your story,” I said, hearing too late how weak it sounded.
For a moment, her true feelings flickered across her face.
Disappointment.
“You don’t need my help for that,” she said. “You’ve done perfectly well on your own.”
Then she opened the door.