Page 203 of The Clinch
I turn back sharply. “No defense? No explanation?”
“There’s one,” he says quietly. “But it doesn’t change that I should’ve told you.”
Something in me, wired tight for a fight, loosens by half an inch and leaves behind an ache.
“Okay. Then explain.”
He looks down at the counter for a second, not searching for words so much as choosing which ones won’t make this worse.
“I knew he wouldn’t stop,” he says. “I knew if I kept letting him circle you, he’d keep finding ways in. And if I put him down in the street, or outside the hospital, or anywhere without witnesses, I’d become the problem.”
I wrap both hands around the mug even though I’m not drinking it anymore.
“So you built a cage.”
His eyes lift to mine. “For him.”
The distinction lands between us like a third presence.
“And I walked into it while everybody there except me already knew exactly how it worked.”
His face tightens. “I know.”
“It felt the same.”
He goes still. “The same as Travis.”
“Yes.” My voice sharpens. “The same shape. Everybody deciding what I could handle. Everybody arranging my life around me and calling it care. I walked into that room, and all I could hear was the old script. A man decides. A woman adapts.”
Something moves across his face then. Pain, maybe. Or just acceptance of a blow he knows he earned.
“I get that.”
“No, you don’t.”
He takes that too. Because he knows I need him to.
I set the mug down and start pacing before I can stop myself, three steps toward the living room and back again.
“I know you’re not Travis,” I say, because I’m too tired now to lie even to myself. “I know that. In every obvious way. But that room lit up the same nerve anyway, and I hated you for it.”
His eyes stay on me. He doesn’t move.
“I know.”
“And you should’ve told me.”
“Yes.”
There it is again. No but. No slick moral case. Just yes.
I press the heel of my hand to my sternum because something under it feels bruised.
Neither of us speaks.
Then I say, quieter now, “You made a decision about how to handle Travis. But you left the rest to me.”
His face changes in some tiny way I only catch because I’m looking straight at him. “I never meant to take away your agency.”
