Page 418 of Power Play

Bliss flinched, but I forced myself to continue because Charm deserved more than a treatment plan held together by the hope that I might change my mind.

“It has to be for her. Push that every time she talks about me or starts believing getting well is a road leading back to us. She deserves to get better even if I never become part of her life again. She deserves a future that doesn’t depend on whether I can trust her.”

“Ryan—”

“I can’t be part of her recovery.” My throat closed around the words. “I thought loving her meant I could open every locked door and stand there until she walked through. I know better now. I can open the cage, but I cannot make her walk through it.”

Bliss’s tears spilled over.

“I can’t promise I’ll forgive her,” I continued. “I can’t promise that time, treatment, distance, or anything else will make me trust her again. Charm cannot build her recovery around the idea that some healed version of her earns me back.”

“She knows,” Bliss whispered.

“Make sure.”

“I will.”

I looked at my brace while every instinct inside me fought the boundary I needed to hold. Part of me wanted her location. I wanted the name of the center, the visiting hours, and every detail about the people responsible for feeding her when she said she wasn’t hungry. I wanted to know who sat with her through panic attacks and whether anyone understood how quiet she became when the hatred inside her turned inward.

Wanting those things didn’t give me the right to enter her treatment or make myself the reward waiting at the end of it.

“I hope she gets better,” I said. “I hope she builds something so good that she no longer needs me to make any part of it real.”

Aura wiped beneath her eyes. “She won’t forget you.”

My hand pressed against Encanto through my shirt.

“That isn’t the same as needing me.”

“No,” Aura said. “It isn’t.”

I was created out of love. My father loved my mother, and through all his failures, I believed he loved me too. My mother loved us both enough to keep going after he died. I was blessed to have her until I was eleven.

Then the world took her, and brutality raised whatever survived.

Foster homes taught me that food could be withheld, doors could lock from either side, and every promise came with an expiration date nobody had to disclose. Hockey taught me to hit before I was hit. The barrio taught me never to show anyone where the wound was deepest. By the time I was old enough to understand what love should be, I’d already learned that it came after survival and after the instinct to cut away anything capable of killing me.

Charm reached the part of me that remembered those first eleven years. She found the man created out of love beneath the one raised in brutality.

He wasn’t dead, even if he felt that way tonight. He was broken, furious, and lost somewhere beneath El Cuchillo’s armor. I didn’t know whether Milwaukee would help me find myself or only give me somewhere else to hide.

I only knew remaining in Kimball Falls would keep ripping open the same wound.

“I should go.”

Rider stood first but didn’t pull me into him immediately. He looked at me with the quieter understanding he carried beneath every joke, and for the first time that night, he seemed unable to find one.

“You’re going to call,” he said.

“Probably.”

“Every day.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Twice a week.”

“Once.”