MY ALPHA BIKER SAVIOUR

JUNE I decided to die on a Tuesday, which felt insulting even as I stood there — I'd always pictured something more dramatic than a Tuesday for the end of me. The railing was cold under my palms, colder than the night air, colder than my own bare feet on the ledge. Eleven stories down, the backyard glittered like something out of a magazine — there were string lights threaded through the oaks my father planted, a jazz trio playing somewhere in the background, something slow and expensive, laughter rising up in waves loud enough to reach me even here. It was Aidan's party, held in the house my father had left me, under lights strung by a staff I might as well have been one of and I hadn't been given so much as a seat at my own dining table. I'd spent the whole day making sure of it. I scrubbed the marble foyer until my knuckles split. I stood over the stove for six hours so the caterers wouldn't have to touch my father's Sunday recipes themselves, the ones he used to make me when I was small enough to stand on a kitchen chair and stir the pot for him. I'd arranged the centerpieces with my own hands, wrist aching and then Aidan had looked me over in my cleaning clothes and told me to go upstairs before the guests arrived. Not unkindly, dismissive was more like it. That was almost the worst part. He'd said it the way you tell staff to get lost . I closed my eyes and let the wind find every place my dress didn't cover. I thought of my father constantly these days, but tonight my mind kept circling back to the two people who owed him everything and had given him nothing back for it. I remembered the winter he'd driven two hours through ice to bring Natasha home from the county placement office — fourteen years old, shaking in a donated coat, no one else willing to take the call — and how he'd sat with her at our kitchen table every night that month until she stopped flinching every time a door slammed somewhere in the house. I remembered standing in the lobby of his company watching him shake Aidan's hand, twenty-two years old, a secondhand suit and nowhere else to go, and hearing my father say, this one's not just an employee, this one's family now. He'd built them both a home out of nothing. He'd given them a family that wasn't required to want them. And three years after he died, the two of them had built me nothing but a cage inside the very house he'd left me. It hadn't happened all at once. It never does. I remembered the first time Natasha called me "the help" to a table full of her friends and laughed like I was in on the joke too. I remembered an anniversary dinner where Aidan introduced me to a room full of investors as "my wife, she handles the catering," and how the table had laughed, and how I'd smiled along, because the alternative was making a scene in my own dining room. One small cruelty at a time, stacked so gradually I'd stopped noticing the weight of them, until I couldn't remember what it felt like to be spoken to instead of about. I'd found them together the night of my grandfather's funeral — Aidan and Natasha, tangled in my own sheets while half the mourners downstairs were still finishing their coffee and even then, Natasha hadn't had the decency to look ashamed. She'd just looked bored, like I was the one being unreasonable. I was tired of being the fool who trusted them anyway. Tired of the sorority sisters who'd stopped returning my calls the same month as the funeral and my father's old business partners who'd suddenly forgotten my number too, like grief was contagious and they couldn't risk catching it. I'd always thought failure was supposed to feel like something — burning, breaking, some kind of collapse. Instead it just felt like this. Quiet. I opened my eyes one last time and stepped up onto the ledge. "You planning on jumping, or is this just a very committed way to get some air?" The voice came from behind me, low, unbothered, like he was commenting on the weather. My whole body tensed up. I didn't turn around — turning around meant looking down, and looking down meant I might lose whatever thread of nerve had gotten me up here in the first place. "Leave," I said. "You're not going to change my mind." "I wasn't planning to try" I heard the click of a lighter, smelled cigarette smoke curl into the air and something about how casual it was — like he was settling in to watch a sunset instead of a woman on a ledge — made my chest go tight with something close to fury. I'd seen him before. At parties like this one, always in the corner, always in a suit that fit like it had been sewn onto him, always with that same unreadable look in his eyes, like he was already three moves ahead of whatever conversation he was having. One of Aidan's new business contacts. A name I'd never bothered to learn, because men like him never bothered to learn mine either. He was undeniably attractive. One of the men, Natasha and her friends secretly gushed over glasses of champagne. "Why kill yourself?" he said, conversational, like it was the next logical question, "when the people who did this to you get to keep living exactly how they want?" I almost laughed. I'd read about this — the talking-down, the gentle voice, the trained composure of someone trying to keep a person on the right side of a ledge. I didn't have the energy left to be anyone's rescue project. Today was the only day I'd had to myself in longer than I could count, the only day Aidan and Natasha had been too busy playing host to notice me missing, and if I didn't do this now, there wouldn't be a next chance. There was never a next chance. There was only ever more of this. I closed my eyes again and let the wind push at my back like it wanted to help. "Your father would be disappointed in you." The words hit me like a hand around my throat. I froze. Nobody had mentioned my father l to me in three years — not my so-called friends, not Aidan's family, not even the therapist I'd stopped seeing after Aidan said it made the household look unstable. I turned, finally, just enough to see him properly. Cigarette between two fingers. Eyes the kind of dark that didn't give anything back. "You knew my father?" "I did." He said it simply, like it cost him nothing. "He never mentioned raising a quitter." Something in me cracked open. "Quitter?" My voice came out jagged, too loud for the dark. "You want to talk to me about quitting? Do you have any idea what I have survived?" I was crying now and I didn't care, didn't try to stop it, three years pouring out of me all at once. How I cooked for people who wouldn't look at me. How I cleaned a house I wasn't allowed to sit down in. How some nights ended in ways I still didn't have words for, ways that left me staring at the ceiling until morning, and how I got up the next day and did it all again because there had never been anyone to tell. "I have tried. Do you understand that? I have tried everything. I have no one left. So don't stand there in your nice suit and call me weak, because you have not lived even one day of my life." My breath hitched. "I'm going to see my father. He'll protect me. He always protected me. This—" I swept a hand toward the drop, toward the party, toward all of it—"this is the only choice I have left." I turned back toward the ledge to finish what I'd come up here to do. My foot slipped. The scream that tore out of me wasn't a decision, it was just instinct, animal and raw, and for one endless second there was nothing under me but eleven stories of open air and then a hand closed around my wrist like a manacle and yanked, and I was slammed back against a chest that didn't so much as stagger under the impact. "Here's how this works," he said, low, right against my ear, like we had all the time in the world even though my feet were still dangling over nothing. "You've got two options. Option one, you're the girl who let them win. Bullied into the ground until there was nothing left to do but jump, and they get to keep their laughs, their money, their little party downstairs, forever. Option two." His grip didn't loosen. "You let me pull you up, and you take it all back. Every single thing they ever took from you. You make them pay for it." I was still half over the edge, my pulse a war drum in my ears, and from here — from this impossible angle, suspended between the ground and the sky, I could hear them. Aidan's laugh, unmistakable, carrying up from the tent. Natasha's voice right behind it, bright and easy, like nothing in the world was wrong. And I realized, with a clarity that scared me more than the height did, that I didn't actually want to die. I wanted my life back. I wanted to breathe air that wasn't thick with other people's cruelty. I wanted to walk through my own front door and not flinch. "Well?" His voice didn't change, didn't soften, like my answer meant nothing to him either way. "I'll drop you right now if that's really what you want. Make it quick. Or you climb up, and you live — and you make every single one of them regret they ever touched you." Somewhere below, glass shattered against stone, and someone laughed like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. I didn't answer right away. I couldn't. My whole body was shaking, my fingers dug into his sleeve like it was the only solid thing left in the world, and somewhere underneath the fear was something else, something I hadn't let myself feel in three years. Not hope, exactly. Just the smallest, sharpest edge of it. "Five seconds," he said. "Choose."