Turn 11 of 12

Ask Meera to leave before something else happens

"Meera, you should go." The words come out wrong — too fast, too flat, stripped of the warmth you'd put in them if you weren't terrified. You set your mug down and stand, and the chair legs scrape the floor and the sound is ugly in the quiet kitchen.

"I appreciate you coming. I do. But I'm not — I'm not good company right now, and I think I just need to be alone."

She doesn't move. She sits in the chair with her coat still on and her coffee untouched and looks up at you with an expression that's shifted from concern into something harder, something with edges.

""You texted me at five in the morning that you did something. I drove here. And now you want me to leave.""

""I know how it sounds."

""How does it sound?"

You don't answer. You turn away from her and grip the counter behind you, the edge of it cutting into your palms. The Cecilia Aldenhof email glows on your phone screen and then goes dark. In the bedroom, through the hollow-core door, you can almost feel the laptop in the closet — seven confessions sitting in their ledger, the second one overdue, the air in the apartment tightening like a rope being pulled slowly taut.

""Rowan."" Meera's voice is behind you, closer now. She's stood up. You can hear it in the way the chair moves, the shift of her weight on the floor.

""I'm not leaving. Not like this. You're shaking, you won't tell me what's wrong, there's an email on your phone from someone you clearly don't want me to see, and you're asking me to go. That's not — that's not how this works. That's not how we work."

She says it gently, and that's worse. You close your eyes. You can feel it happening — the way she's reading you, seeing through every wall you're throwing up, every deflection, every redirect. She's always been perceptive, but this is different. This is her seeing through you the way she's never seen through you before, and the back of your neck prickles with the recognition that the second confession — *I want everyone who's ever looked through me to see me* — may not say PENDING anymore.

Your phone lights up. Another notification — not an email this time. A text from an unknown number. Then another. Then a third. The phone buzzes three times in quick succession, skittering against the counter, and Meera looks past you at the screen.

""Who's texting you?""

""I don't know.""

""Someone's blowing up your phone, Rowan."

The apartment door buzzes — the intercom, someone downstairs, someone you didn't invite. And then Meera turns back to you, and her face is different now, not worried anymore but struck, the way someone looks when they've walked into a room and found the lights on before they flipped the switch. She's looking at you like she's seeing you — really seeing you — for the first time, or like she's seeing something in you she's been missing for years, and there is no deflection left that can survive that look.