I don't remember leaving his penthouse.
I don't remember the cab ride either—the streets that must have blurred past, the driver who probably asked questions I didn't answer, the fare I somehow paid without reaching for my wallet. Grief has a way of stealing time like that, pocketing moments you'll never get back and leaving only the destination.
Somehow I'm standing outside my mother's apartment, mascara streaked down my cheeks in what I'm sure is a very attractive raccoon aesthetic, hands shaking like I've had seventeen espressos and zero emotional stability. The familiar door with its chipped paint stares back at me, waiting.
I don't even knock before it swings open.
Mom takes one look at me—one single look that catalogues every disaster written across my face—and pulls me inside without a word. No questions. No demands for explanation. Just arms that have held me through worse, guiding me toward the worn sofa that's witnessed every crisis of my entire life.
The apartment smells like home. Lavender fabric softener and the ghost of whatever she cooked for dinner and something underneath that's just her—warmth and safety and unconditional love wrapped in a two-bedroom walk-up that's never once made me feel small.
She makes tea. Of course she makes tea, because that's what mothers do when their daughters show up looking like emotional crime scenes. The kettle whistles, cups clink, and she settles beside me on the sofa with the patience of someone who's waited out my silences before.
I open my mouth to deflect, to crack some joke about having a minor existential crisis, nothing to worry about. What comes out instead is a sob so ugly it surprises us both.
"I'm in love with someone," I manage between ragged breaths. "Someone who's getting married in three weeks. To someone else. Someone appropriate and polished and everything I'm not, and I thought—I actually let myself believe—"
The words tangle and break. Mom doesn't push. She just waits, one hand rubbing slow circles on my back, giving me space to fall apart at my own pace.
"He lied to me." The confession tastes like ash and broken promises. "He's been lying from the beginning about things that mattered, and I was so busy believing I could be enough that I didn't see it. I didn't want to see it."
I can't tell her everything—not the billionaire part, not the arrangement that started as theater and became something devastatingly real, not the heir clause that guaranteed I was never actually in the running. So I give her the bones of it, the stripped-down version of a girl who fell for someone she couldn't keep.
"He made me feel special," I whisper. "Like I was the only person in the room. But it was always behind closed doors. Always in private, where no one could see. And I told myself that was okay, that eventually things would change, that he'd choose me when the time was right."
Mom listens without judgment, her face soft in the lamplight. When I finally run out of words, she asks the question that breaks me completely.
"Did he make you feel safe, baby? Or did he make you feel small?" Her voice is gentle, curious, not accusatory. "Did loving him feel like sunshine, or did it feel like waiting for a storm?"
I open my mouth to answer and find I can't. Because the truth is so much more complicated than either option.
"Both," I finally admit, and the word comes out cracked down the middle. "He made me feel precious in private and invisible in public. He made me feel chosen and hidden in the same breath. Like I was everything to him as long as no one was watching, and nothing the moment someone turned their head."
The tears are falling freely now, and I've given up pretending I have any dignity left. Mom's hands cup my face—rough from decades of nursing shifts, gentle as they've always been when it mattered most.
"Love shouldn't require you to disappear, Floris." Her thumbs brush away tears that keep replacing themselves.
"It shouldn't ask you to shrink, to hide, to accept crumbs from someone else's table and call it a feast. You deserve someone who's proud to stand beside you in daylight. Someone who doesn't treat you like a secret he's ashamed of."
"But I love him," I whisper, like that explains anything, like that excuses everything.
"I know you do, baby. That's what makes it hurt so much." She pulls me closer, tucking my head against her shoulder the way she used to when I was small enough to fit there easily. "But loving someone who can't love you back the way you deserve isn't romantic. It's just lonely with extra steps."
I break then—really break, the way I've been holding back for days, maybe weeks. Ugly, heaving sobs that shake my whole body, that sound like something dying and being born at the same time.
I feel twelve again. Broken in a hospital bed with machines beeping and my mother's hand in mine, wondering if the hurting would ever stop. The scars on my thigh throb with phantom pain, muscle memory of a different kind of devastation.
Mom holds me through it, stroking my hair, murmuring words that don't need to mean anything except I'm here, I've got you, you're not alone. "You'll survive this," she says softly. "You've survived worse. And you came out of that stronger than anyone I've ever known."
"It doesn't feel like surviving," I manage. "It feels like drowning on dry land."
"That's how surviving feels at first. Like you're dying. And then one day you wake up and the water's receded, and you're still standing, and you realize you were swimming the whole time even when you thought you'd forgotten how."
I don't know how long we stay like that—me crying into her shoulder, her holding me together with nothing but love and practice. Time does that thing it does during grief, stretching and compressing until minutes could be hours.
When I finally pull away, I'm hollowed out but somehow lighter. Like I've been carrying stones in my pockets and finally let them drop, even if the absence aches.
"Thank you," I say, voice rough from crying. "For not saying I told you so. For not asking questions I can't answer."
"That's not what you needed." Mom smooths my hair back from my face. "You needed somewhere safe to fall apart. The rest can wait."
I hug her one more time—fierce, desperate, grateful—and then I leave.
The walk to the subway feels different than the cab ride here. More present. More painful, but more real. I'm aware of my feet on the pavement, the evening air cooling my tear-swollen face, the city continuing around me like it doesn't know my heart is scattered across a penthouse floor miles away.
I check my phone for the first time since Maverick's text this morning.
Twenty-seven missed calls. His name, repeated over and over, filling my notification screen like a desperate mantra. Twenty-seven times he reached for me. Twenty-seven times I wasn't there to answer.
I stare at the number until my screen dims. Then I slide the phone back into my pocket and keep walking. I don't call back.