Not transformed. Not noble. Not healed by a single scene at the breakfast table. Nothing that false or convenient.
Just wrecked.
He set the duffel by the door.
“I’m not doing this for him,” he said, nodding at David.
“No one said you had to,” David replied.
Ethan looked at me.
“If I go, are you still pressing charges?”
It was the first practical question he had asked all morning.
I appreciated that more than an early apology I would not have trusted.
“I’m documenting everything,” I said. “I’m freezing my credit. I’m changing the locks. I’m making a statement with Amelia and the bank. Whether criminal charges move forward may depend on what else comes out about those broker papers. As for the assault, I am not lying for you anymore.”
He absorbed that slowly.
Then, very quietly, “Am I ever coming back here?”
That question, from any other mouth, might have sounded manipulative.
From his, right then, it sounded like terror.
I answered with the hardest truth I had.
“That depends on whether one day I can feel safe with you again. And that will not happen because you say sorry once. It will happen only if you become someone different from the man who hit me.”
