Eleven hours left.
I spent the morning pretending the number didn’t exist. I sat through breakfast with my father, answered his questions about classes that didn’t matter, and watched Marcus stand in his usual place near the wall like the night before had never happened. He didn’t look at me once. Not when he poured coffee. Not when he opened the car door. Not when he drove me to the campus library and waited outside in the black SUV like the perfect, untouchable bodyguard he was paid to be.
The distance was deliberate. I felt it like a bruise.
When he finally collected me in the afternoon the partition stayed up. He didn’t speak. He didn’t lock the doors for privacy. He simply drove me home through the same streets where he had bent me over the hood two nights earlier and f****d me unt
