I don’t answer immediately. That would be too easy.
“She came to me for advice,” I say at last. “And I missed it. I thought she was being vague to protect someone’s secrets. I didn’t know the secret was hers.”
“And now you carry the aftermath,” Mila says gently.
“I carry the blood,” I say flatly. “And the silence. I was supposed to keep her safe.”
She leans forward. “You think if you had seen her more clearly, she’d still be alive?”
“She was always the one who saw me,” I say. “She understood things no one else could. And I didn’t give her the same in return.”
There’s a quiet between us, not clinical, not strategic. Just…human.
“You’re not the only one carrying that kind of guilt,” Mila says, pauses, then continues. “I didn’t notice when my mother’s health started failing. I dismissed her fatigue, her shortness of breath. I was too busy diagnosing everyone else to see the one person I should’ve known best.”
The confession sits between us, raw and exposed.
We are two people shaped by the same wound.
“Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to you,” I say. “You don’t pretend it doesn’t hurt.”
She blinks once but doesn’t look away. “And maybe that’s why you keep fighting me.”
“Because it does,” I finish.
Her voice softens. “And maybe because you want it to stop.”
The session timer goes off, shrill and sudden. We both jolt.
“Time’s up,” she says, but makes no move to leave. We’re still too close, the air between us electric.
“Mila.” Her name comes out like gravel. “This thing between us?—”
“Can’t happen.” But she’s swaying toward me even as she says it.
“It’s already happening.” I reach out, let my fingers ghost over her wrist—barely a touch, but she shivers. The same spot I gripped before. The same place that made her gasp. She remembers, I see it in the way her breath catches, the way her eyes flutter closed for just a second.
“Still feel it?” I murmur. “I do. Still feel your pulse under my fingers. Still remember how you leaned into it before pulling away.”
A beat.
“You feel it every time you walk in here. Every time you leave. Every time you lie awake thinking about?—”
“Stop.” She pulls back, but her eyes are dark with want. “I’ll see you Monday.”
She’s at the door when I speak again. “Mila?” She turns at the sound of my voice. “Wear burgundy again.”
She pauses, hand on the doorknob. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to spend the weekend imagining taking it off you.”
The door slams behind her.
But I saw the way her hands shook. The way her breath hitched.
I move to the window, watching her cross the grounds below. She looks back, once, then steps into her car.
My phone buzzes. Her number—the new one she thinks I don’t have.
