I've broken a lot of things. I've never broken a man just by saying no.
We rode back to the compound in silence, my mind turning that single sentence over and over until it wore smooth and terrible in a way I couldn't make peace with. It can kill him. Not "it hurts." Not "it's difficult." Kill. As if the word I said or didn't say in the next few days held more weight than any decision I'd ever made in my life, more weight, somehow, than I felt equipped to carry.
I found Nadia at my old apartment — the one I hadn't lived in for weeks, the one that still smelled faintly of my father's aftershave from the last time I'd cleaned out his things — because some old instinct told me I needed distance from the compound to think clearly, and Nadia was the only person in my life who existed entirely
