Page 42 of You, Only You

"You're talking about yourself in the third person."

"Because it's easier. Because talking about it in the first person still makes me..." She took a breath. "The point is: it didn't work with me. I moved to Portland. I stopped answering your calls. Not because I didn't love you, but because being loved by you felt like being smothered. Like I couldn't breathe without you checking whether the air was safe."

The pressure behind my sternum intensified. I put my hand flat against the counter, anchoring myself.

"And now you're doing it to her," Nicole said. "To this woman who, from everything you've told me, is brilliant and stubborn and brave and completely capable of taking care of herself. You're doing the exact same thing, and if you don't stop, she's going to do what I did. She's going to leave. Not because she doesn't care about you. Because caring about you comes with a cost she can't pay."

"What cost?"

"Her autonomy. Her sense of self. The ability to be a person instead of a thing you're keeping safe." Nicole's voice was firm."You don't get to love someone by taking away their choices, Will. That's not love. That's fear wearing a love costume."

Fear wearing a love costume. The phrase hit me with the force of something I should have understood years ago.

"I don't know how to stop," I said. The admission came out raw, unplanned. Not a strategic disclosure. Just the truth, ugly and simple. "The controlling. It's how I... it's how I function. It's the only thing that makes the fear manageable. If I'm not doing something, monitoring something, building some kind of..."

"Then you have to sit with the fear."

"What?"

"You have to just... feel it. Without doing anything about it. Without turning it into action. You have to let yourself be afraid and not fix it." Her voice softened, finally. "That's what therapy taught me, you know. After Vance. The fear doesn't go away. You can't control it out of existence. You just learn to sit with it until it gets smaller. But you have to sit still. You can't fight your way through it."

"Sitting still isn't exactly my skill set."

"No kidding." A wet laugh. "But you have to learn. Because this woman, Lindsey, she's not asking you to stop being afraid. She's asking you to stop making your fear her problem. There's a difference."

I didn't respond for a long time. The apartment was silent around me. Through the wall, I could hear nothing from the guest room, no sound, no movement, and I had to physically stop myself from going to the door to check.

Sit with it, Nicole had said. Let yourself be afraid and not fix it.

The fear was enormous. It filled the entire penthouse, every room, every corner. The fear of losing her. Not to Reeves, not to violence, but to my own inability to be what she needed. The fearthat I was fundamentally incapable of loving someone without trying to put them in a cage.

I sat with it. I stood at the window and I let it wash over me and I didn't reach for my phone or my laptop or the security system controls. I just stood there and felt afraid.

It was terrible. It didn't get smaller. Nicole might have been wrong about that part.

But I stayed.

"You still there?" Nicole's voice was gentle now.

"Yeah. I'm here."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. She asked for space. I'm going to... give her space. And not check the security cameras to see if she's okay."

"Is that hard?"

"You have no idea."

"Actually, I do." A pause. "When I first moved to Portland, I had to stop myself from calling you six times a day. Because calling you meant you'd know I was struggling, and knowing you, you'd have been on the next flight. And I needed to figure it out alone. Even though alone was scary. Even though every part of me wanted someone to show up and make it okay."

"I would have come."

"I know. That's why I didn't call." Her voice held seven years of complicated love in it. "Sometimes the bravest thing you can do for someone is let them be strong without you. Even when it kills you. Even when every instinct says to intervene."

"That sounds like something you'd read on a bumper sticker."

"It's something my therapist said. And then I put it on a bumper sticker. Margaret was not amused." A genuine laugh this time, and I felt something in my chest loosen. Not the fear. The fear was still there, huge and immovable. But something next to the fear. Something that made room.