SERENA POV
I was quiet for a long moment, listening to the distant wind brushing against the kitchen windows, letting the echo of his confession settle.
"Not pride," I said, my voice low, cutting through his grief with absolute clarity. "Not tactical strategy." I reached into my pocket, pulled out the rusty iron nail, and set it on the table between our cold mugs, right beneath his hovering hand. "Something much simpler and more inconvenient than either of those things."
He looked down at the nail, then up at me, his chest heaving.
"I kept thinking about whether you were coming," I said. "Not whether to hope you were. I had already decided on day two not to spend any functional energy on hope; hope is a volatile variable that disrupts analytical focus. But I kept thinking about it anyw
