Outside, the air felt colder than it should have for an early evening in Providence. The officers guided Hannah away first, asking gentle questions she answered in fragments between breaths. I stayed close enough that she could feel I wasn’t disappearing from her side.
Kyle and Sharon were still inside, speaking too fast to be convincing, their voices rising and falling as if volume could replace truth. But no one was listening to performance anymore—not the staff, not the diners, not the officers writing everything down.
Hannah finally looked at me, her eyes red but clearer than they had been all night. “I didn’t know how to make it stop,” she whispered.
I squeezed her hand once. “It stops now,” I said. And for the first time, she seemed to believe it might actually be true
