Before all this started, there had been someone.
Of course there had.
Men like Adrien rarely leave a woman with just bruises. They leave habits. Silences. Deeply unhelpful instincts. I had run from him eight months earlier after two years spent learning that some men do not need to hit you every day to teach your body fear. He liked control in cleaner ways. The hand around the wrist just a second too long. The “jokes” about what I owed him. The quiet monitoring of my phone. The soft, terrifying certainty that everything in my life had become conditional on his approval and I would not fully realize the size of the cage until the day I tried the door.
I had tried the door.
He had let me go too easily.
At least that’s what I thought.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” I said.
Kai’s expression didn’t change.
“You need to.”
“No.”
He waited.
That was another thing about him. He did not crowd answers. He made room for them in a way that somehow felt more intimate than questions.
“Tell me his name,” he said.
“I’m scared of what you’ll do.”
The words hung there.
A weaker man might have smiled at that.
Kai did not.
Instead he said, very quietly, “You’re scared of him. Not me.”
I looked at him.
Then at the floor.
Then at my own hands.
“I’m scared of everything,” I whispered.
Something in his face shifted.
Not pity.
Never that.
Restraint.
Costly restraint.
Then he said, “Let me be the one thing you don’t have to be scared of.”
If you have never been starved of safety, that sentence may sound simple.
If you have, it is almost violent in its tenderness.
I met his eyes.
And told him.
“Adrien.”
Kai did not react visibly.
That was somehow worse.
He simply absorbed the name as if it fit into a structure he already understood.
“And you left him.”
“I ran.”
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