Chapter 5 Let Go
1290 Words
She hadn't meant to end up at the window.
It was past two in the morning. Insomnia had crept in from the edges of sleep the way it always did—gradually, then all at once—and she'd lain in the dark listening to Lorenzo breathe until the apartment felt like it was pressing inward from all sides. Then she'd slipped out from under his arm—first time in weeks he hasn't woken up—and padded through the dark to the living room.
Free was in his crate. She could hear the small sounds of his sleeping: a sigh, a shift, one muffled dream-bark. She didn't wake him.
She went to the window.
The city below was all light and movement, that magnificent indifference that never slept. She pressed her forehead against the cold glass and felt the chill of it moving through her skull, and she thought the same thought she always thought standing here at night.
If you opened it.
It came quietly. It always came quietly. No urgency, no dramatic interior voice—just a flat, factual suggestion, the way you'd think if you turned left here you'd get there faster. Simple logic. One action, one outcome. No more locked doors, no more mornings waking up with her throat tight, no more of this particular and exhausting business of being herself.
Her fingers found the window latch.
"Mia."
Lorenzo's voice came from behind her like a thunderclap.
---
He crossed the room in three steps. His arms locked around her from behind—hard, urgent, his whole body a single urgent reflex—and she was wrenched backward before she'd processed that he was there. His grip was almost painful, his heartbeat slamming against her spine at a frequency she'd never felt from him before.
He was shaking.
Lorenzo Monto, who had built an empire on composure, who had sat across tables from men who wanted him dead and never blinked—he was shaking.
"What were you doing." Not a question. The words came out pressed flat. "What were you about to—your hand—"
"I wasn't going to jump." Her voice came out small.
"Don't." His arms tightened. "Don't lie to me. Not about this."
He turned her around. Both hands came up to cup her face—tilting it up, forcing her to look at him—and she saw it then. All the walls down. No composure, no cold authority, no the-room-belongs-to-me. Just him. Raw and scared and barely holding it together, his eyes glossy in the dark.
"Promise me," he said. Low. Desperate. "Mia. Promise me you won't."
She looked at him.
I wasn't. The truth was more complicated than that. She hadn't been about to jump. She'd been standing there thinking about it, which was its own category of damage—the fact that the thought had become as familiar as the view, that she'd started to consider it the way you consider a door.
"I wasn't going to jump," she said again. "But I was thinking about it. That's different." The tears came up without warning. "Lorenzo. I think about it every time I stand here. Because I can't figure out another way out. Because I can't—I can't survive in this apartment. I can't survive you—"
"I'm right here—"
"You can't watch me every second." She pulled back enough to look at him. "You'll fall asleep. You'll have a call to take. You'll be in the other room for ten minutes and I'll be at this window, and some night you won't get here in time." A breath. "Letting me stay here is not the same as keeping me safe. You are not the same as safety."
The silence that followed had a texture to it.
He stared at her. She watched something move across his face—slow, tectonic, like something shifting underground before the earthquake shows on the surface.
"Free," he said finally. His voice had gone rough. "You have Free—"
"If I could leave and take nothing," she said, "I would. That's how much I need to go."
His face went very still.
---
LORENZO
She meant it.
He could always tell—it was the same instinct that let him read rooms, read people, read the second before violence that looked identical to every other second. There was no performance in her voice. No leverage. No play. Just a woman who had run out of other options looking at him with completely quiet eyes.
And in the space of that single breath, every version of the story he'd been telling himself came apart.
She'll come around. She just needs time. She's okay. She'll be okay.
He'd built those stories carefully. He'd reinforced them every morning, every night she fell asleep in his arms, every time Free made her laugh and he'd thought—see. She's still here. She's coming back to herself.
She wasn't coming back. She couldn't come back, not in this apartment, not with him.
Because you're what she's coming back from.
He'd known it. He'd known it since the bathroom floor, since the white gauze, since the hollow way she'd stopped arguing with him. He'd just kept running from the knowing.
Coward.
He looked at her face. At the complete absence of anything that might be called fight. She wasn't even angry anymore—she'd passed through angry into something quieter and more final. And he understood, with a clarity that felt like a knife going in clean:
If he kept her here, she would die. Not someday, not maybe. She would die in this apartment, in this beautiful cage he'd built for her, and the last thing she'd ever feel was the cold of that window latch under her palm.
He didn't want that.
More than I want to keep her—I don't want that.
He pulled in a slow breath. Let it out.
"Okay," he said.
She went very still.
"I'll let you go."
"You—" A beat. "What?"
"Go." Each word cost something he couldn't price. "I mean it. Get out of here. Just—" His voice gave out for a second. He pushed through it. "Please stay alive. That's all I'm asking for. Just live."
His eyes burned. He didn't care.
Her breath hitched.
"Free?" she asked. Barely a whisper.
"I'll keep him. Unless you want him."
She shook her head slowly. "I can't. Not right now. I can't take care of anything right now."
He nodded. Once.
He released her face. Stepped back. There was a roaring in his ears that wasn't sound—or maybe it was, maybe it was the specific noise of everything he'd been holding collapsing inward.
He turned and walked down the hall. Got as far as the kitchen doorway before he stopped.
"I'm sorry."
He said it to the wall. His voice came out wrecked. He didn't turn around. He couldn't.
Sorry was the smallest possible word for what he was. For the three years of taking and locking down and never once asking what she needed. For the fact that the only reason she was standing at windows at two in the morning was that he had put her there.
He didn't hear her answer.
In the morning, she was gone.
He stood in the entryway for a long time after the door clicked shut. Free sat on the floor beside him, looking up at him with those liquid-brown eyes, then back at the door, then back at him.
Waiting.
"She's not coming back," Lorenzo told him.
The dog looked at the door.
Lorenzo sat down on the cold floor, and they waited together anyway.
- Writer
