Page 13 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

Mara goes still with the spoon in her hand. “Garrett said that?”

I nod, staring at the steam rising from the soup because looking at her might make the rest of me come loose. “He didn’t say it like that exactly. He was calm. He was careful. He sounded like everyone else was already in agreement and he was the only one kind enough to explain it to me.”

“That sounds like Garrett,” Mara says, and there’s enough anger in her voice to make me look up. She smooths it down immediately, not hiding it, just keeping it from hitting me. “I don’t know what happened. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I can solve this from one motel room and a stack of paperwork. But I know that man likes being the person who explains everyone else’s life to them.”

“I don’t know what to believe.” My hands start shaking around the water bottle. “I know Sloane. I know Idris. I know the way Theo looked at me in the laundry room. I know they wouldn’t just cut me out because heat got hard. But I heard his voice. I heard it, Mara. What am I supposed to do with that?”

Mara sets the soup on the nightstand and takes the water before I crush the bottle. She puts one arm around my back and leans her forehead against my temple for a second. “Right now, you don’t have to decide what’s true forever. You only have to decide what keeps you out of jail today.”

The word jail empties the room of air.

She picks up the protective order and taps the edge of it once, careful not to make the paper sound too sharp. “This is real in the system even if every word behind it is rotten. That’s the part we have to respect because this has teeth. If you keep calling, if you go back to the house, if you try to force contact while this is active, they can arrest you. That doesn’t mean Sloane’s right. It doesn’t mean Idris wanted this. It means the door in front of youhas a police officer behind it, and you can’t keep throwing your body at it.”

“I can’t just leave them.”

“I’m not asking you to leave them in your heart.” Mara’s voice bends at the edges, but she keeps it steady for me. “I’m asking you to take a breath somewhere they can’t put cuffs on you for loving them. Give it a week or two. Let me figure out who handles this kind of order. Let me talk to someone who isn’t Garrett. Let us see what options you actually have before you burn the last four hundred dollars sitting in this room waiting for a phone call that might get you arrested.”

A sound comes out of me, half laugh and half sob as I reach for the soup. The first spoonful tastes like salt and cardboard. My stomach turns, but Mara waits, and I force down a second. Then a third.

“There’s a doctor,” she says once I’ve eaten enough that my hands stop trembling quite so visibly. She takes my phone gently, waits for me to nod before she unlocks it with the code she knows from a dozen emergency grocery runs and late-night rides. “A bond specialist two towns over. Beta-focused. I called on the way because I needed to do something besides imagine you dead in a ditch.”

“Mara.”

“I know.” She swallows hard and keeps scrolling. “They had a cancellation tomorrow morning. We’re taking it. You don’t have to decide about bond removal or opening or anything permanent. You need someone to talk to you about the pain, the meds, what happens if you keep it closed, and how to keep your body from eating itself while your life is on fire.”

My fingers go to my shoulder again. The bite aches under my shirt, pulsing like it knows Sloane’s name even when I won’t let the bond open enough to answer. “I can’t open it.”

“I know.”

“If I open it and there’s nothing there, I’ll die.” I say it flatly because it feels factual, not dramatic. “If I open it and he’s relieved I’m gone, I won’t survive knowing that inside my own body.”

Mara’s face crumples for one second before she reaches for me again. “Then we ask how to keep it closed without letting it kill you. That’s all. One appointment. One step.”

Mara makes the appointment with her shoulder pressed to mine. I listen to her give my name, my designation, the words bonded Beta, acute closure, legal separation, severe distress.

When she hangs up, the silence rushes back in. My phone screen shows two missed calls from Dash, both from yesterday, both with voicemails I still can’t listen to all the way through. Beneath them are older calls from Sloane, but those are from before everything, from mornings when he called me from the grocery store because he forgot which cereal Theo liked and wanted to hear me laugh while I told him he was overthinking oats. I can’t look at those. I turn the phone facedown on my thigh.

“You’ve still got a few days before the Halston deadline,” Mara says carefully. “But you can call them now if you already know what you want.”

“I don’t know what I want. I just know I can’t stay here.”

“Are you going to choose the closer campus or the farther one?”

“Farther.” The word scrapes. “Oakhaven, the sister campus. They offered temporary housing for two weeks and then help with apartments. Dash said HR could make the start date immediate if I needed it.”

Mara doesn’t answer right away. She looks around the motel room instead, at the carpet, the dead bolt, the paper on the table, the little pile of cash beside my bag because privacy doesn’tmatter anymore when every practical piece of me is falling out where people can see. “Then take it.”

The words hit harder because she says them gently.

I shake my head. “That sounds like giving up.”

“No.” Mara shifts closer, and her voice turns fierce again. “Giving up would be spending the last of your cash on this room while the police wait for you to make one more call they can punish. Giving up would be letting Garrett’s paperwork decide the size of your world. Accepting the offer is buying time. It’s getting somewhere with a locked door, a paycheck, and a doctor who can keep your bond from tearing you apart while we figure out what the hell happened.”

“What if they think I chose it?” I ask. The question has been sitting in me for two days, heavy and poisonous. “What if Sloane comes looking and sees I accepted, and it proves everything Garrett said? Career over pack. Distance over Theo. Me walking away when heat got hard.”

Mara’s expression softens into something unbearable. “Then Sloane can learn what it feels like to read paperwork and be wrong.”

I bend forward, pressing both hands to my mouth, and the sob that finally comes is silent at first. Then it isn’t. Mara catches me before I fold too far, arms around my shoulders, cheek pressed to my hair, and I cry in a way I haven’t let myself cry because crying means my body still believes someone might answer.