“I am so sorry,” I whispered.
She stared down at her hands. Her knuckles were raw. When she noticed me looking, she tugged her sleeve lower.
“Please don’t apologize like it’s obvious,” she said. “When you say it gently, it makes me afraid that maybe you knew.”
The words smashed through me.
“No,” I said. “I swear I didn’t know. But I should have.”
That admission changed the room.
Emily’s shoulders loosened slightly. She did not need me to pretend I had been perfect. She needed me to tell the truth.
“I tried to warn you once,” she whispered.
“When?”
“The morning Karen said I wasted groceries because I threw up breakfast. You were on your laptop. I touched your shoulder and said she scared me.” She swallowed. “You didn’t look up. You said she was probably just old-school.”
I remembered.
A merger. Emails. Numbers. I had kissed her temple and treated her fear like background noise.
It was one of the worst failures of my life.
“Karen told me if I kept complaining, you’d think I was unstable,” Emily continued. “Then your mother agreed with her. They told me I was misremembering things. That hormones made me dramatic. That I was a burden.”
Tears slid down her cheeks.