Page 148 of Filled

She tells me about her mother. Rebecca. The drinking that started before Dakota has clear memories, the slow slide from functional to gone. Making her own dinners at seven years old. Forging Rebecca’s signature on permission slips because her mother couldn’t hold a pen steady by evening. Lying to teachers about the same clothes three days running, learning which lies teachers wanted to believe.

“The loneliness was the worst part,” she says. “Worse than hunger, worse than the mess. Being invisible in your own house. I used to stand right in front of the TV to make her look at me. She’d just tilt her head to see around me.”

“And your dad?”

“Gone at three. I don’t remember him at all. There was one photo in a drawer and she never talked about him, so eventually I stopped asking.” She pulls Dante’s hoodie sleeves down over her hands. “Gerald showed up when I was fourteen. And here’s the thing nobody understands. For six months, it was better. He worked construction, didn’t drink, and paid bills on time. The refrigerator had food in it. I thought we’d been rescued.”

“Then the mask evaporated like fog on a sunny day,” I supply.“And after everything he did he was there for eleven more years anyway, because my mother needed him and I needed mymother, and I told myself I could handle it as long as he never touched me again. And he didn’t. He just watched. Waited. And when she finally died, he waited exactly two months before he tried the door again.” She meets my eyes. “That’s the night I came here. That’s the whole story.”

I reach across and cover her hand. Her fingers are cold. She lets me hold them.

“You know what’s messed up?” I say. “We did the same thing. Both of us. Somebody made our bodies a battlefield, and we took the violence they poured into us and gave it rules. A cage. A referee. Tape on our hands. I turned my temper into a talent for a job that I could be proud of. You turned survival into an impressive record that earned you a spot at Oath.”

“Twelve amateur wins.” A ghost of a smile. “Every one of them was his face.”

“Every drunk I choked out at those clubs was my old man’s voice telling me I’d never be anything.” I squeeze her hand. “Controlled violence to burn off the anger and betrayal we lived through. We should get it on a T-shirt.”

She laughs and wipes her eyes with the hoodie sleeve. “Can I tell you what actually scares me?” she says. “More than Gerald showing up?”

“Tell me.”

“That one of you wakes up someday and does the math. Too damaged, too much work, too many nightmares. And they decide I’m not worth it.” The words come fast now, like she’s been holding them under pressure. “Everyone leaves, Cruz. My father left. My mother chose the bottle every single day of my life. She chose Gerald over my safety. Nobody has ever once looked at the full picture of me and stayed. So I keep waiting. I keep watching the door.”

“Sweetheart.” I wait until she looks at me. “I’m terrified of the same thing.”

She blinks.

“You think I trust this?” I gesture at nothing. “I’ve never had it either. People who know the worst of me and pick me anyway. Some part of me is braced every morning for the text that says it’s over, everybody sobered up, thanks for the memories. Good things don’t stay. That’s the reality I grew up in. I keep waiting for this one to follow.”

“So we’re both sitting here waiting for the other one to run?” she confirms.

“Pretty much. Whole lot of watching doors in this relationship.”

“That’s so stupid,” she says.

“It’s incredibly stupid.” I pull her hand up and kiss her knuckles. “Here’s what I figure, though. Staying is a fight too. Maybe the only fight that counts. Everything in the cage, you train for. Combinations, defense, cardio. Nobody trains you to believe somebody when they say they’re not leaving. You just gotta walk into that one raw and take the hits.”

“You’re better at fortune cookies than Victor,” she teases.

“I learned from the best.”

We clear the plates, moving around my small kitchen like we’ve done it a hundred times. Then we end up on the couch, and she folds into my side under my arm, and I put on some movie neither of us tracks for a single scene. There’s no heat to it. First time we’ve been alone with a locked door for a whole night, and neither of us reaches for the other that way.

Her breathing evens out somewhere around midnight, her head heavy on my chest, one hand fisted in my shirt like she’s making sure I stay put. I stroke her hair and stare at the ceiling and think about what we’re building. Five people, all broken along different fault lines, all let down by the ones who were supposed to hold the line for us. Now we hold it for each other.

I fall asleep on that couch with her in my arms, both of us fully dressed, my neck at an angle I’ll pay for in the morning. And there’s nowhere else I want to be as much as here, for her.

When I wake up, she’s still there.

That’s the whole thing right there. She heard the worst of me at that table, gave me the worst of her back, and in the morning she’s still here, one leg thrown over mine.

She stirs when I shift. “What time is it?”

“Little after seven.”

“Your couch is terrible.”

“My couch is a war hero. Show some respect.”