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She has a ring to choose. She has a nursery to plan. She has a baby coming in the spring, and a mother who’s already planning to help, and a future she’s building on ground that used to be mine — not Michael, not him specifically, but the having-it-figured-out. The believing something was solid and it was. I was eighteen when I thought I understood what my life was going to look like. I was so sure. I had the plan. I had the person. I had the whole shape of it, and I trusted it, and the trust was the thing that broke me. Not the betrayal. The gap between the plan and the real.

Maddison has the plan now. She didn’t plan it carefully — she never plans anything carefully — but she has it. And my parents are beaming. And I smiled through every bite of the lemon posset. And I said of course at the bottom of the stairs. And tonight my mother held my sister’s hands at the dinner table and I watched and I performed happiness, and the performance was perfect, and nobody saw the cost.

Nobody except Theo, who saw everything, and said nothing, and held my hand under the table, and that was the part that made it harder. Being seen while you’re performing is worse than not being seen at all. He looked at me and he knew, and I knew he knew, and I still smiled, and that is the specific, bone-deep exhaustion of being the girl who’s fine.

I’m so tired of being the one who’s fine.

The crying comes the way it always comes when I’ve held something too long. Not a crash. Something quieter. My back finds the tile and I slide down until I’m sitting, knees up, the water falling over me and covering the sounds, the way I’ve always needed sounds covered, and I let go of the fine, and I let it come.

It isn’t pretty. It doesn’t feel cathartic. It feels like four years of very carefully managed grief finally finding the one room in the house with no audience, and sitting down in it.

I don’t hear the bathroom door open.

I just feel the shift in the air, the specific presence of another person in the room, and then the shower door opens, and Theo steps in.

He’s stripped down — shirt gone, jeans gone, just himself — and he doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t ask if I want him here, because he already knows the answer and he came anyway. He reaches down and pulls me up — not urgent, just steady, the way he does everything — and then he’s behind me, his arms coming around me from behind, my back to his chest, and he holds on.

“Let it go, Margo.” Low. Into my wet hair. “You can fall, right here, and I’ll catch you. Every fucking time.”

The water is still going. It covers everything.

He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t try to fix it. He just holds me, steady and warm in the steam, both arms around me like he’s keeping the pieces from going too far, and something in my chest that has been in a fist for four years slowly, incrementally, releases.

He waits until the crying starts to slow. Until my breathing comes back down toward something regular. Until I’m still in his arms instead of shaking.

Then, into my wet hair, quiet:

“It kills me. Watching you in there and not being able to do anything about it.” A pause. “Worst night I’ve had in a long time, and it’s not even my family.”

I make a sound that is almost a laugh. It surprises me. “I’m sorry you had to —”

“Don’t.” Steady. Even. “Don’t apologize for that.”

I lean back against his chest. The water runs over both of us. The room is full of steam and the specific quiet of a house that’s gone to bed around us.

“It’s not him,” I say. I need to say it. I need to hear myself say it in a room where I can’t lie to myself. “I don’t want Michael. I haven’t wanted Michael in a long time. That’s — I know that. I’m not crying over him.”

“I know,” Theo says. Like he already knew. Like he figured this out before I said it.

“It’s the —” I stop. I try again. “It’s the future I thought I was going to have. Not with him specifically. Just — the having-it-figured-out. The thinking something was solid. And then finding out it wasn’t, and having to rebuild the whole plan, and Maddison just — she has it. The plan. She didn’t even build it carefully, she just walked into it, and everyone’s thrilled —” My voice does the thing, goes out from under me once. I let it. “And I was fine. I have been fine. I’m doing so well and I know that. But tonight it just —”

“Yeah,” he says.

That’s all. Yeah. Like he’s been in that room too and didn’t need the full sentence.

I stand with him in the water and I breathe. The heat is doing its work. So is he.

“Your sister said something,” he says. Not a question.

“At the stairs.” I close my eyes. “‘I’m so glad we can move on from the past’.”

A beat of silence.

“She didn’t apologize,” he says.

“She never apologized.” I close my eyes. “And it’s not that she didn’t know she needed to. She decided she didn’t have to. When I confronted her — when it all came out — she didn’t say sorry. She told me Michael had feelings for her that were different from what he had for me. She said it like that explained everything. Like he’d just made the correct call.” The water is running cooler now. I don’t move. “She’s lived like that ever since. Like she didn’t do anything wrong, because the heart wants what it wants, and it wanted her. Not me. Her.” A pause. “She’s not oblivious. That’s what I’ve had to accept. She knows exactly what she did. She just decided it was justified.”

A beat of silence.