The door had barely clicked shut behind Zoey before Leo found his voice again, too late, calling out into an empty hallway.
"Zoey, wait—"
Nothing. No footsteps returning, no answer, just the hollow, echoing silence of a hallway that had, until a few minutes ago, felt like the safest, most familiar space in his entire life.
He stood there for a long moment, hand still raised toward the closed door, feeling the words she'd said settle into him with the particular, devastating precision of a blow aimed exactly where it would do the most damage.
You and Adrian aren't so different.
He turned back into his apartment slowly, and the space that had, an hour ago, felt warm and familiar now seemed suddenly, unbearably full of her absence — the mug she'd used for coffee still sitting on his counter, a book of hers left open on the arm of his couch, small, ordinary traces of a life that had, until moments ago, felt like it was quietly, permanently merging with his own.
He picked up the mug, turned it over in his hands, and set it back down without quite knowing why he'd picked it up at all.
Both of you standing quietly in the shadows, watching someone make a fool of themselves.
The words looped, relentless, and beneath them, unbidden, came the old, familiar chorus he'd spent years trying to outrun — his father's voice, flat and dismissive, throwing clay figures into a trash can; Nancy's voice, disappointed and final, packing boxes in a silent apartment; and now, unbearably, Zoey's voice too, added to the same terrible harmony, confirming what some deep, exhausted part of him had always suspected was true underneath all the careful hope he'd allowed himself to build.
Maybe they were right. Maybe I really am someone who hurts people just by being close to them.
He sat down heavily at his kitchen table, head in his hands, replaying the conversation in relentless, unforgiving detail — every word he'd said, every word he should have said instead, every moment over the past months where he could have simply told her the truth and hadn't. He thought about the closet, about the exact expression on her face when he'd opened the door and found her there — he'd told himself, at the time, that it was endearing, that her presence in his home, however strange the circumstances, felt like a gift. He hadn't let himself consider, not fully, what it must have cost her to be that frightened of him and stay anyway, driven by some combination of curiosity and dread he'd never bothered to properly untangle.
He thought about the rooftop, about the exact moment he'd first suspected the depth of what she believed — the raw terror in her eyes before the mint spray and the tumble into wet clay had turned into something absurdly, unexpectedly tender. He'd chosen, in that moment and every moment after, to focus on the tenderness rather than confront the fear underneath it, because confronting it would have meant admitting how strange, how potentially damaging, the whole situation actually was.
He'd told himself it was kindness, not wanting to embarrass her. He wondered now, sitting alone in the growing dark, whether it had actually been something closer to cowardice — an old, familiar unwillingness to disrupt something good by introducing an uncomfortable truth, the same instinct that had kept him locking a door full of his own vulnerable work away from anyone who might judge it too harshly.
Maybe I really am like that. Maybe I really do just let people believe whatever's convenient, because the truth is too much work.
He moved through the apartment slowly, mechanically, not entirely aware of where his feet were carrying him until he found himself standing in front of the workshop door — the same door he'd opened, weeks ago, with such careful, hopeful vulnerability, the same room where Zoey had once sat beside him on the floor and made him a small, lumpy clay creature to prove that his work, his heart, mattered to someone.
He looked at the shelves through the doorway — the fox, the rabbit with the cracked magnifying glass, the hedgehog holding its strawberry, and there, beside them, still sitting exactly where she'd left it, her own clumsy, misshapen little figure.
He remembered, with a fresh, sharp ache, the exact words she'd said that night: if anyone can't see the value in something this careful and this alive, then their eyes are the problem, not your hands.
He wondered, standing there now, whether she still believed that. Whether anything she'd said that night had been real, or whether it had simply been easier, at the time, to be kind, the same way he'd found it easier to stay silent about her fear rather than address it directly.
He reached out and closed the door.
He didn't slam it. He simply pushed it shut, quiet and final, and turned the small brass lock with a soft, definitive click that felt, in the moment, like sealing something away far more significant than a room full of clay.
He sat down on his couch afterward, in the gathering dark, making no move to turn on any lights, Mochi eventually padding over to curl against his side with a soft, questioning meow that Leo didn't have the energy to answer.
"I know, buddy," he murmured, voice rough, scratching absently behind the cat's ears. "I don't really have an explanation for you either."
He didn't cry. He'd expected, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he might, but instead he simply felt hollow — a vast, echoing emptiness where the past two months of hope and warmth had briefly, foolishly convinced him he might actually be worth staying for.
Of course it fell apart eventually, some old, tired voice in his head informed him, quiet and almost gentle in its cruelty. Things like this always do, once people actually understand you well enough.
He thought about calling someone — his brother, maybe, though they'd never been close enough for this kind of conversation; a friend from the studio, though the specific shape of this particular grief felt too private, too tangled up in old family wounds, to explain to anyone who hadn't already seen the locked room and understood what it meant.
He thought, briefly, about Nancy — about the eerie, unwelcome parallel between this moment and the one years ago when he'd come home to find her apartment half-empty, her verdict on him already delivered and immovable. He wondered if this was simply his pattern now, the shape every relationship in his life was destined to take: an opening, a hope, a slow accumulation of trust, and then, inevitably, a moment where the other person looked closely enough to find him wanting.
His phone buzzed on the coffee table, screen lighting up in the darkness. He glanced at it without much interest — a message from Marcus, something about the final funding decision arriving within the week, a piece of news that would have, a month ago, consumed his entire attention with anxiety and hope.
He looked at it for a long moment, and found, to his own distant surprise, that he simply didn't have the capacity to care. The show, the deadline, the entire professional crisis that had dominated his thoughts for weeks — all of it had shrunk, suddenly, to something almost irrelevant beside the much larger, much more personal collapse currently unfolding in his chest.
He turned the screen face-down on the table and sat in the dark a while longer, Mochi a warm, silent weight against his side, the workshop door locked once more behind him, sealing away, for now, the fragile, hopeful thing he'd let himself believe in for a few short, precious months.
Somewhere outside, faintly, he could hear the ordinary sounds of the evening continuing on without him — traffic, distant voices, someone's music drifting up from an open window — and he found himself wondering, distantly, whether Zoey was sitting in her own apartment right now, just across the narrow street, feeling anything close to the same hollow, grieving stillness currently settled so heavily into his own chest.
He didn't reach for his phone to find out. He simply sat there, in the dark, letting the silence hold him, uncertain, for the first time in months, whether there would be any way back from here at all.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The door had barely clicked shut behind Zoey before Leo found his voice again, too late, calling out into an empty hallway.
"Zoey, wait—"
Nothing. No footsteps returning, no answer, just the hollow, echoing silence of a hallway that had, until a few minutes ago, felt like the safest, most familiar space in his entire life.
He stood there for a long moment, hand still raised toward the closed door, feeling the words she'd said settle into him with the particular, devastating precision of a blow aimed exactly where it would do the most damage.
You and Adrian aren't so different.
He turned back into his apartment slowly, and the space that had, an hour ago, felt warm and familiar now seemed suddenly, unbearably full of her absence — the mug she'd used for coffee still sitting on his counter, a book of hers left open on the arm of his couch, small, ordinary traces of a life that had, until moments ago, felt like it was quietly, permanently merging with his own.
He picked up the mug, turned it over in his hands, and set it back down without quite knowing why he'd picked it up at all.
Both of you standing quietly in the shadows, watching someone make a fool of themselves.
The words looped, relentless, and beneath them, unbidden, came the old, familiar chorus he'd spent years trying to outrun — his father's voice, flat and dismissive, throwing clay figures into a trash can; Nancy's voice, disappointed and final, packing boxes in a silent apartment; and now, unbearably, Zoey's voice too, added to the same terrible harmony, confirming what some deep, exhausted part of him had always suspected was true underneath all the careful hope he'd allowed himself to build.
Maybe they were right. Maybe I really am someone who hurts people just by being close to them.
He sat down heavily at his kitchen table, head in his hands, replaying the conversation in relentless, unforgiving detail — every word he'd said, every word he should have said instead, every moment over the past months where he could have simply told her the truth and hadn't. He thought about the closet, about the exact expression on her face when he'd opened the door and found her there — he'd told himself, at the time, that it was endearing, that her presence in his home, however strange the circumstances, felt like a gift. He hadn't let himself consider, not fully, what it must have cost her to be that frightened of him and stay anyway, driven by some combination of curiosity and dread he'd never bothered to properly untangle.
He thought about the rooftop, about the exact moment he'd first suspected the depth of what she believed — the raw terror in her eyes before the mint spray and the tumble into wet clay had turned into something absurdly, unexpectedly tender. He'd chosen, in that moment and every moment after, to focus on the tenderness rather than confront the fear underneath it, because confronting it would have meant admitting how strange, how potentially damaging, the whole situation actually was.
He'd told himself it was kindness, not wanting to embarrass her. He wondered now, sitting alone in the growing dark, whether it had actually been something closer to cowardice — an old, familiar unwillingness to disrupt something good by introducing an uncomfortable truth, the same instinct that had kept him locking a door full of his own vulnerable work away from anyone who might judge it too harshly.
Maybe I really am like that. Maybe I really do just let people believe whatever's convenient, because the truth is too much work.
He moved through the apartment slowly, mechanically, not entirely aware of where his feet were carrying him until he found himself standing in front of the workshop door — the same door he'd opened, weeks ago, with such careful, hopeful vulnerability, the same room where Zoey had once sat beside him on the floor and made him a small, lumpy clay creature to prove that his work, his heart, mattered to someone.
He looked at the shelves through the doorway — the fox, the rabbit with the cracked magnifying glass, the hedgehog holding its strawberry, and there, beside them, still sitting exactly where she'd left it, her own clumsy, misshapen little figure.
He remembered, with a fresh, sharp ache, the exact words she'd said that night: if anyone can't see the value in something this careful and this alive, then their eyes are the problem, not your hands.
He wondered, standing there now, whether she still believed that. Whether anything she'd said that night had been real, or whether it had simply been easier, at the time, to be kind, the same way he'd found it easier to stay silent about her fear rather than address it directly.
He reached out and closed the door.
He didn't slam it. He simply pushed it shut, quiet and final, and turned the small brass lock with a soft, definitive click that felt, in the moment, like sealing something away far more significant than a room full of clay.
He sat down on his couch afterward, in the gathering dark, making no move to turn on any lights, Mochi eventually padding over to curl against his side with a soft, questioning meow that Leo didn't have the energy to answer.
"I know, buddy," he murmured, voice rough, scratching absently behind the cat's ears. "I don't really have an explanation for you either."
He didn't cry. He'd expected, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he might, but instead he simply felt hollow — a vast, echoing emptiness where the past two months of hope and warmth had briefly, foolishly convinced him he might actually be worth staying for.
Of course it fell apart eventually, some old, tired voice in his head informed him, quiet and almost gentle in its cruelty. Things like this always do, once people actually understand you well enough.
He thought about calling someone — his brother, maybe, though they'd never been close enough for this kind of conversation; a friend from the studio, though the specific shape of this particular grief felt too private, too tangled up in old family wounds, to explain to anyone who hadn't already seen the locked room and understood what it meant.
He thought, briefly, about Nancy — about the eerie, unwelcome parallel between this moment and the one years ago when he'd come home to find her apartment half-empty, her verdict on him already delivered and immovable. He wondered if this was simply his pattern now, the shape every relationship in his life was destined to take: an opening, a hope, a slow accumulation of trust, and then, inevitably, a moment where the other person looked closely enough to find him wanting.
His phone buzzed on the coffee table, screen lighting up in the darkness. He glanced at it without much interest — a message from Marcus, something about the final funding decision arriving within the week, a piece of news that would have, a month ago, consumed his entire attention with anxiety and hope.
He looked at it for a long moment, and found, to his own distant surprise, that he simply didn't have the capacity to care. The show, the deadline, the entire professional crisis that had dominated his thoughts for weeks — all of it had shrunk, suddenly, to something almost irrelevant beside the much larger, much more personal collapse currently unfolding in his chest.
He turned the screen face-down on the table and sat in the dark a while longer, Mochi a warm, silent weight against his side, the workshop door locked once more behind him, sealing away, for now, the fragile, hopeful thing he'd let himself believe in for a few short, precious months.
Somewhere outside, faintly, he could hear the ordinary sounds of the evening continuing on without him — traffic, distant voices, someone's music drifting up from an open window — and he found himself wondering, distantly, whether Zoey was sitting in her own apartment right now, just across the narrow street, feeling anything close to the same hollow, grieving stillness currently settled so heavily into his own chest.
He didn't reach for his phone to find out. He simply sat there, in the dark, letting the silence hold him, uncertain, for the first time in months, whether there would be any way back from here at all.
You've reached the end of this chapter