Raul had known he wouldn't be walking into a warm welcome.
He had prepared for cold looks, for clipped words, for the kind of polite hostility people wore when they wanted you to know you were tolerated and nothing more. He had braced for that on the drive over, talked himself through it, told himself it was fine, it was deserved, he could take it.
He had not prepared for Olivia.
The girl moved like a storm that had been waiting for something to hit, and the moment she saw him in that doorway, she had found her target. Three months of fear and helplessness and rage, all of it aimed directly at him, and the worst part was that he understood it. He did. He had no ground to stand on and nowhere to redirect it, so he had just stood there and absorbed it like he was supposed to.
