Page 66 of Beautiful When He Breaks

Ignoring Blakely should feel like a victory.

That’s the stupid part. That’s the part I keep getting hung up on while I move through the next two weeks with my phone face down, and my nerves shredded thin enough to snap if somebody looks at me too closely.

Objectively, it’s working. Luca told me to stop answering, to screenshot everything, to let the silence do its job while Killian handled whatever dark, terrifyingly competent thing he’s handling in the background. So, I stopped. I muted the thread first, then blocked the number for half a day, then unblocked it only long enough to keep collecting the messages because Luca said evidence matters. Since then, the texts have been stacking up like a countdown.

At first, they were almost normal.

B: Where are you?

B: Call me.

B: You’ve got a lot of nerve ignoring me after everything.

Then they shifted the way I knew they would. The tone went colder, then sweeter, then colder again.

B: You don’t get to disappear on me.

B: You think football boys are going to protect you.

B: I miss you.

B: We need to talk.

B: Don’t make this ugly.

The fake concern makes my skin crawl worse than the threats do. The entitlement in every word feels so familiar by now that sometimes my stomach drops before I’ve even unlocked the screen. I can tell what kind of message it is from the length alone. The short ones are worse. The long ones mean he wants to hear himself talk. The short ones mean he wants me to be afraid.

I am afraid.

That’s the other stupid part, because I’m also angry now in a way I wasn’t before. Talking to Luca cracked something open. Maybe it was hearing the whole story out loud in one ugly line, or the simple relief of being believed without having to explain myself.

Whatever it was, I’m not trapped in exactly the same way anymore. I know I’m done. I know this has an end now, even if I don’t know what shape the ending takes. But fear doesn’t just pack up because logic asked nicely. So I keep ignoring the messages, and it keeps working, but my body still reacts to every vibration in my pocket.

By Thursday, I’m so keyed up that I nearly take Eli’s head off with a bad pass in practice.

He catches it anyway, plants his feet, and sends me a look over his shoulder that’s half irritation and half concern. That concern is the problem. I can handle his annoyance. I’ve known how to handle his annoyance since we were kids, and he used to cross his arms and glare at me when I stole fries off his tray in the cafeteria. What I cannot handle this week is Eli noticing too much—not with everything already humming under my skin.

“Wake the fuck up, West,” Luca barks before Eli can say anything.

I mutter something in Afrikaans under my breath and reset for the next rep.

The whole week feels like I’m half second behind my own life. Too alert and too brittle. Every loud sound punches a little deeper. Every text from an unknown number makes my pulse jump. Every time I leave a building, I check the lot twice before I get in my car. I hate that most of all. I hate the vigilance. I hate the way it shrinks the world without asking permission. Ignoring him is the right move, and it still feels like carrying a live wire in my pocket.

Eli notices by Wednesday.

Not directly. He doesn’t corner me with some big, impossible question I’m not ready to answer. That would almost be easier. Instead, he notices in the Eli way, in the accumulation of little things.

He catches me jiggling my knee at the kitchen table while Mila dozes in her swing. He notices that I leave my phone upside down even when Mrs. Alvarez texts the group with one of Mila’s dramatic post-bottle faces. He looks at me for too long when I flinch at the front door slamming.

We’re in the den when he decides to corner me. It’s late enough that the rest of the house has spread out into its usual evening patterns. Eli’s on the couch sorting through Mila’s tiny laundry because caring for Mila has turned all of us into deeply strange versions of ourselves. I’m across from him in the armchair, pretending to scroll while my leg bounces fast enough to count as cardio.

“Jules.”

I look up too quickly. “Yeah?”

He’s holding one of those absurdly small socks between two fingers, his brow pulled together. “You’re doing the thing.”

I force a shrug. “Very specific.”