Page 197 of The Clinch
If he texted to ask whether I was okay, I don’t know whether I’d ignore him or throw my phone into the East River.
But there’s nothing.
No pressure. No emotional invoice. No, “I handled him, now let me handle you too.”
I turn back slowly. “Did you text him?”
“No.”
“Did Nate?”
“No.”
“Did he ask—” I stop.
Did he ask if I cried? If I slept? If I hate him now?
Eden looks at me like she already knows the rest. “No,” she says. “He didn’t.”
I sit down at the kitchen table because suddenly my knees don’t feel entirely reliable.
A man who wanted to trap me would check the trap.
A man who believed he was owed something would come to collect.
A man like Travis would have been at the door by sunrise.
But Leo?—
Leo built something around the threat, not around me.
The difference opens in my head slowly, reluctantly, like a door I’ve been bracing shut with both hands for months.
I think about what happened again, not as it felt when I walked in—staged, absurd, enraging—but as it was—witnessed, recorded, built to expose him and finish it.
Not a fight over me.
A case against him.
And when it was over, Leo didn’t come after me. He didn’t turn the rescue into a claim. He didn’t say “now you owe me.”
He did decide for me, yes. But not the way Travis did.
Travis decided to erase my will. Leo decided to eliminate a threat. Those are not the same thing. Even if they scraped across the same scar on the way in.
Eden watches me carefully. “You see it now.”
It isn’t a question. I hate that. I also hate that she’s right.
“A little,” I admit.
Her posture eases, just barely.
I drag both hands over my face. “I’m still furious.”
“I know.”
“He should have told me.”
