Ruby's POV
I hadn’t slept in two nights.
Not deeply.
Not safely.
Jake had stopped sleeping beside me, which should’ve been a relief. And in some ways, it was. No arms draped over my stomach like chains. No lips on my shoulder whispering false comfort.
But his absence didn’t mean peace.
It meant uncertainty.
And in Jake’s world, silence was strategy.
I could feel him tightening the leash again. Watching me through the eyes of others. Adjusting routines. Rewriting his own mask while he figured out how to re-stabilize the version of me he thought he’d rebuilt.
The idea came to me somewhere between midnight and dawn. Just a whisper of a thought, curling up from the back of my mind like smoke through a cracked window: If he’s cracking on the outside… maybe he’s slipping on the inside
