Trust, once questioned, changes the quality of everything.
Not broken. Smaller than broken. But changed — the way a room changes when you learn someone was in it without telling you. The furniture is the same. The light is the same. But you know something now that you didn't before, and knowing it means you look at things differently.
I was looking at things differently.
Not at him specifically. At us. The specific architecture of what we had built and whether it had hidden floors I hadn't been shown.
He knew I was doing it. The mate bond had no privacy — it carried mood the way a room carried sound. He would feel the slight withdrawal, the extra millimetre of space, and he would know what it meant.
He did not push.
That, paradoxically, made it harder.
He simply showed up. Every day
