"He just wants to help," Adriel whispered. "He's right. They both are."
"They are not right." Her voice lowered, becoming almost tender even as the conviction sharpened. "They don't mean to hurt you. But they are. With everyhelpfulcomment, everylovingsuggestion. And you keep just… taking it. You sit there and absorb it and carry it home and let it convince you of things that are not true."
She paused. Studied his profile in the fading light.
"Did something else happen today?"
Adriel's jaw tightened. "Nothing," he said finally. "Just a bad day."
Jenna looked at him. He could feel it without turning his head.
"You are not what they make you feel like," she said, a repeat of the speech she'd been giving him since they were teenagers hiding in her room after a particularly brutal family dinner. "You are healthy. You are thriving. I hate that you can't see that."
Adriel said nothing.
He stared at the ceiling, jaw clenched, hands curled into the sheets. He thought about the stairwell and Landen's grip on his arm and the way his eyes had moved. His father's voice.The break room and the colleague's laugh, fresh as the first time.
Jenna watched the stubborn, defeated set of his body. The fight seeped out of her posture, replaced by a familiar, weary protectiveness. She reached out and squeezed his forearm, firm and warm, a tether to the present.
"I love you," she said. "You know that, right?"
He managed a nod. She gave his arm one final squeeze, then stood and left, closing the door softly behind her.
The rigid control he'd maintained in her presence shattered.
He rolled onto his side. Curled in on himself, knees drawing up toward his chest. Fumbled for the edge of the blanket, pulling it up and over his head, creating a dark, woolen cave.
The shame seeped deeper. Into the marrow.
He buried his face in the pillow and told himself, for the last time tonight, that he had imagined all of it.
He almost believed it.
Chapter 8
Landen
The Calloway crisis started at half past four.
Landen was on his way out, coat on, keys in hand, when Miriam appeared in his doorway with the expression that was reserved for situations that were going to ruin his evening.
"Calloway pulled the book. All of it. Says it doesn't work, he's rewriting from scratch." A pause. "Press lock is in three weeks."
Landen put his keys back on the desk.
He had the manuscript pulled apart and spread across the table within twenty minutes, standing over it with a red pen, trying to locate exactly where it had gone wrong and why it had taken the author until now to notice. The floor emptied around him gradually; coats grabbed, goodnights called across the pods, the overhead lights switching off in sections as the motion sensors lost interest. He didn't look up as he read and marked and read again, while the problem kept shifting every time he thought he'd found it.
He heard Adriel's desk chair push back sometime around six. The quiet sounds of packing up; papers gathered, the soft zip of a bag.
Landen looked up.
Adriel was standing beside his desk with his bag over his shoulder and his coat half on, one arm still searching for the sleeve. He found it, tugged the coat straight, then pulled the hem of his sweater down over his stomach in that automatic, unconscious gesture he always made, the one Landen had stopped pretending he hadn't found endearing.
He should let him go. There was no reason to keep him. He had senior editors for exactly this kind of situation.
"Adriel."
Adriel looked up, across the pod and through the open office door, and found Landen looking back at him.