The unspoken this is your fault hung in the air, thick and sour.
Isla stared at him. The room felt smaller than it had a moment ago, the lamplight dimmer, the steady hum of the old refrigerator suddenly too loud. She tried to keep her voice even, to keep the tremor out of it—not fear, not exactly, just the strain of holding back. "You can't put that on me."
Tyler didn't answer right away. He leaned forward again, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped like he'd been dropped into this pose and could not think of another. His eyes cut to the box and back. "I'm not putting anything on you," he said finally. "I'm telling you how it feels."
"Feels and facts aren't the same thing."
"Maybe not. But feelings don't wait for facts."
Her jaw tensed. She looked down at the ribbon she'd so carefully set straight when she put the box on the table, then forced herself to look back at him. "Ask me, then," she said quietly. "If you want facts—ask."
There was a beat, like he was surprised she'd offered. Then his mouth flattened. "Fine. How long has this—" he gestured again, vaguely, as if the word dress offended him— "been going on?"
"What, exactly? People assuming things about me? Or you deciding they're right?"
He huffed, not quite a laugh. "The invitations. The rides. The... packages."
"Two invitations," she said. "Both delivered to the bakery because apparently that's where I exist now. One ride, because someone insisted. And the package—this—" she nodded toward the box "—which I didn't ask for and don't even know if I'm keeping."
He stared at her like he was trying to find the trick. "You walked in with it."
"It was handed to me on the sidewalk," she said. "He didn't give me room to argue. You saw how that went downstairs."
"Right. The part where you smiled at him."
Her eyebrows lifted. "I smiled because people were watching and I wasn't going to create a scene in front of my building."
"People are always watching now," he said, not quite under his breath. "That's sort of the point."
"No," she said, and there it was—the flicker under the words, the frustration that had nowhere to go. "That's the problem. I didn't choose that. I don't know how to make it stop. Half the time I can't even walk to the trash without someone taking a picture of it and captioning it 'scandal girl discards evidence.'"
He looked away, exhaling through his nose. "You say you hate it," he said, soft enough it almost sounded like concession. Then, sharper: "But you're living in it."
"I'm living around it," she corrected. "Because it showed up whether I wanted it or not. I'm trying to keep my head above water."
"And what am I supposed to do?" He sat back, spreading his hands a little, palms up. "Watch you... float off?"
"I'm not floating anywhere." She heard how it sounded—defensive, thin. She swallowed. "I'm making bread at five in the morning and answering the door and telling people we're out of almond croissants by ten. I'm still me."
"Are you?" His eyes met hers and didn't move. "Because ever since all this started, we haven't been the same. You haven't been the same."
She stood straighter without meaning to. "I'm tired," she said. "I'm stretched thin. I'm learning how to say no to people I'm not supposed to say no to. If that reads as 'different' to you, then maybe you haven't been paying attention to how much I'm trying."
He absorbed that, expression unreadable. When he spoke, the edge was dulled but it was still there. "It's not about holding you back, Isla. It's about not watching you turn into someone I don't even recognize."
The words landed in a neat line across her chest. She felt each one as a mark. "Someone who what?" she asked, careful. "Accepts help? Goes to events she didn't ask to be invited to? Tries not to embarrass herself on the way out of a room?"
"Someone who says she hates the attention but keeps stepping into more of it," he said. "Someone who used to call me to come fix her espresso grinder, and now I find out what you did yesterday from a video with ten thousand comments."
"Because there were cameras in the bakery," she said. "Because I can't stop people posting. Because the minute I opened my mouth wrong, it turned into... all of this." Her voice thinned, and she pulled it back. "If you think I like it, you haven't been listening."
"I'm listening," he said. "I'm not sure you are."
"To what?"
"To me telling you that it feels like you've got your own little world now." His voice didn't rise, but it tightened. "And I'm just the guy who gets whatever scraps are left over after everyone else has had a piece."
A small, startled sound left her—almost a laugh, but not. It was the kind of sound that happens when anger and hurt bump into each other at a doorway.
"Scraps," she repeated, very quietly.
He held her gaze, stubborn. "That's how it feels."
She turned her face away for a second, blinking hard, and pressed the heel of her hand against one eye. It didn't help. The tears gathered anyway, hot and humiliating. She hated that he could still do this to her—open up a seam with a few words and leave everything raw.
"Do you hear yourself?" Her voice didn't shake, but it took effort. "We had problems before any of this. You were already halfway out the door before the prince set foot in my bakery. We were tired. We stopped trying. Both of us."
He stiffened. "I didn't stop—"
"Yes, you did." She forced herself to look back at him. "When was the last time you stayed for dinner without checking your phone between every bite? When was the last time you asked how my day was and listened past the first sentence? When was the last time you looked at me and didn't see a to-do list you were failing or a person you were losing?"
He didn't answer. The refrigerator clicked off, and the sudden quiet thudded into place.
Her throat burned. She swallowed again. "You want to talk about scraps?" she asked, softer now. "I've been living off them for months. I gave you all the benefit of the doubt I had. I kept smoothing the edges. I kept telling myself we were just in a weird season, that it would lift. And now there's attention I never asked for and people making assumptions I never invited, and somehow that's the thing that broke us?"
He rubbed a hand over his jaw, the motion stalled halfway like he'd lost the thread of what to do with himself. "It didn't help," he said.
"No," she said. "But neither did you."
He flinched, and for a second she could see the other thing in him—the thing that wasn't anger, the thing that looked like shame. If it was there, it vanished quickly. He shook his head. "You can't blame me for not wanting to watch you drift."
"Drift where?" she demanded. "You keep saying that, like I bought a yacht and sailed away from you on purpose. I am literally standing in the same apartment, making the same coffee, buying the same brand of dish soap—"
"With a ball gown on your table." He pushed himself up from the couch.
She glanced at the box, then back to him, exasperation flaring. "It's a box," she said. "You're treating it like a verdict."
"It represents something."
"It represents a dress," she shot back. "One I didn't ask for and don't need."
"Then why keep it?"
"Because you came at me before I could decide what to do with it!" The words burst out of her, too loud for the room. She caught herself, brought the volume down. "Because I walked in the door and you met me with an interrogation and a conclusion already written."
His jaw worked. "Maybe because the conclusions keep writing themselves."
"No," she said. "You're writing them. You. Not me, not the internet, not the prince. You."
He stared at her like he wanted to argue with every syllable. His chest rose and fell. "I'm trying to get you back," he said, and it came out too raw, too exposed. "And I don't even know where you went."
She blinked. For a heartbeat there was just the truth of it, sitting between them, breathing. "I didn't go anywhere," she said, and her voice finally broke. "I've been right here. Waiting for you to show up."
He made a small sound in his throat, stepped forwards a pace, stopped. "I'm here."
"Not like that," she said, wiping fast at her cheeks with the side of her hand, annoyed at herself for crying when she'd sworn she wouldn't. "Not as a referee for my public image. Not as a critic counting how many minutes I've spent with other people. Not as a man who thinks I'm—" she faltered, swallowed the word greedy "—different because someone else noticed me."
The last word landed between them like it hated itself for existing. He dropped his gaze, and she saw, for a sliver of a second, the pettiness he didn't want to admit to and couldn't quite hide.
He recovered fast. "It's not about someone noticing you."
"Then what is it about?"
He searched for an answer and came up with the oldest one in him. "Us."
"Us," she echoed. "Right." She pressed her fingertips against the edge of the table until they hurt. "Then stop acting like my entire life is a threat to it. Stop measuring what I do against what you wish I wasn't doing."
He shook his head and laughed without humor. "You make it sound like I want you small."
"Do you?"
"No," he said, too fast. Then, slower, as if the truth had to squeeze through something tight: "I want you... back."
She let out a breath that tasted like exhaustion. "Back where?"
He didn't answer. The silence crowded in again, carrying the hallway sounds—the muted thud of someone's door down the hall, a burst of distant laughter that didn't belong to them, the soft tick of the cooling oven. The room smelled like flour and detergent and a faint curl of lavender from the soap she kept at the sink. It was all the same, and somehow none of it was.
"You think everything new is what broke us," she said, not a question.
"It didn't fix us," he said.
"Nothing fixes something you won't admit is broken."
His mouth opened, closed. The fight in him seemed to lurch, then redirect. "I didn't lie to you," he said, and the defensive note came back like muscle memory.
"I didn't ask you to say that," she said. "I asked you to trust me."
"You lied yesterday," he said, quieter now, as if they were both running out of volume. "In the bakery. About him."
"I didn't know how to explain any of it," she said. "To you, to myself. I was just trying to get through a morning without burning the scones."
He nodded once, twice, like that answered something but not the thing he wanted answered. His gaze drifted back to the box again, and there was the tell—his fixation, his fulcrum. "You kept the dress."
"For an hour," she said. "In my apartment. That's not keeping; that's a pause."
"And the invitation?"
"Is a piece of paper."
"To a world that isn't ours."
"Then say that," she said, the frustration finally cracking clean. "Say you're scared I'll walk into something shiny and decide you don't fit. Say you're worried you'll lose me because you didn't hold me close when it was still quiet, and now it's loud and you don't know how. Don't say I wanted this. Don't say it made me different. Don't make me the reason you're afraid."
For a moment, his mouth opened like he might argue — then closed again, the words swallowed before they could come out. He shifted his weight, gaze cutting away, as if looking at her too long would make something crack in him.
"You make it sound so simple," he said finally, voice low. "Like it's just fear. But maybe I'm not afraid of losing you... maybe I'm afraid you've already gone."
He stepped back, reaching for his jacket without looking at her. "I should go."
The zipper teeth clinked softly as he slung it over his arm. The door didn't slam shut, but the quiet click it made was somehow worse. She stood there a long time after he was gone, the room still holding the sharp edges of the fight. All that remained between them now felt like scraps—too small to gather, too jagged to hold.