Chapter 4

　　Cole's POV

　　I didn't know what hurt more, watching Sabrina shatter, or the sickening realization that I had seen this coming for years.

　　I drove us to the St. Regis and checked into a suite on the top floor. Neutral ground. No memories that belonged to either of us.

　　When we got to the room, she didn't sit. She stood in the center of the carpet in the wrinkled dress she had left the hospital in, and she looked small in a way that had nothing to do with her height and everything to do with what had been stripped from her in the past eight days.

　　She walked to the minibar without a word and pulled out a bottle of vodka and twisted it open and drank too fast, like she was trying to outpace something moving inside her. When she reached for a second, I stepped in and caught her wrist.

　　"Hey. Easy."

　　She looked up at me. Her eyes were hollow and red-rimmed and absent of anything steady.

　　"I just want it to stop," she said. "The noise in my head. I need it to stop."

　　I guided her to the edge of the bed and she sat without resisting. Her fingers moved in her lap, turning the hospital bracelet over and over, the same one they had put on her wrist before my blood went into her veins.

　　"He never came," she said. "I was in critical condition. And he was buying blue balloons for her."

　　"He's a fool," I said. "A particular kind that doesn't know what he's discarded until it's gone."

　　She wrapped her arms around herself. "Why wasn't I enough? Six times I tried to give him a family. I keep thinking it must be something in me."

　　"Stop." I dropped down in front of her, leveling my eyes with hers. "You are not the problem. Leon not seeing your worth is not evidence of what you're worth."

　　She searched my face like she was looking for something solid to hold onto. "You see me, don't you?"

　　"I always have."

　　The words came out before I could stop them. The moment they landed, the air in the room changed. Not dramatically. Just enough.

　　She reached forward, her fingers finding my jaw, cold and unsteady.

　　"Then make me forget him," she said. "Just for tonight. I don't want to feel like this. I need something else. Anything."

　　"Sabrina—"

　　"Please." Her voice broke open on the word. "I know what I'm asking. I know it isn't fair to you. But I can't be alone with this right now."

　　She kissed me before I could form an answer.

　　It wasn't measured or careful. It was the specific kind of desperation that builds when grief runs out of every other exit, and every part of me that had spent years maintaining a respectful distance told me to step back and be the friend I had always been.

　　But she pulled me closer, and the pull of it had nothing to do with want and everything to do with the need to not be let go of again, and I understood that. I had watched her be let go of too many times.

　　I didn't take control of it. I didn't turn it into something it wasn't.

　　I stayed. I let her hold on. I let her take the steadiness she needed without pushing further than she could carry.

　　When I carried her to the bed, she didn't resist. I was careful with her the way you were careful with someone still healing, keeping her close enough that she wouldn't feel the particular terror of open space.

　　What followed was quiet and slow and grounded in something real. Her need to feel like she still existed to someone. I gave her that without asking for anything in return.

　　She cried somewhere in the middle of it, not from sadness exactly, but from the release of something held too tightly for too long. I held her through it, steady and unmoving, letting her feel the full weight of what had been taken from her without making her face it alone.

　　When it was over, she lay against me with her breathing still uneven, her hand pressed flat against my chest.

　　"I was always just an obligation to him," she murmured.

　　I tightened my arm around her. "You were never an obligation. He just failed to understand what he had."

　　She shifted slightly. "I thought if I loved him enough, he would change."

　　"You can't love someone into being who they're not," I said.

　　She didn't argue. A few minutes later, her breathing evened out, and she slept.

　　I stayed awake.

　　Even in sleep, her fingers never completely let go of my shirt. Every few minutes they tightened, as though she was chasing something in a dream she couldn't outrun. I brushed a strand of hair away from her face, careful not to wake her. The crease between her brows never fully disappeared. Whatever peace she had found tonight was fragile, borrowed from exhaustion more than comfort. She deserved mornings that didn't begin with loss. She deserved a life that didn't ask her to keep proving she was worth staying for.

　　I watched her face in the dim light of the room, finally free of the strain she wore even when she was smiling. For ten years I had told myself that stepping back was what respect looked like. That letting Leon take precedence was what friendship required.

　　But looking at her now, with the cost of all that stepping back written across her face even in sleep, I understood it clearly for the first time.

　　It had never been about respect.

　　It had been the easier path.

　　Leon had chosen Zara. A woman who had laughed at the very shoes he wore when he couldn't afford better. He had chosen her over the one who had sold her jewelry and stayed through seven years of hospitals and grief and given him six reasons to be better than he ever managed to be.

　　I looked at Sabrina.

　　Then I made the decision I should have made a long time ago.

　　I choose her.

　　And I'm going to make sure he spends the rest of his life regretting what he let go.