Maya blinked. “You cleared a month.”
“I own the company.”
“That’s not how that works.”
“It is when people are afraid of disappointing me.”
She shook her head. “This is temporary. You’re reacting.”
“Probably.” He held her gaze. “I’m still doing it.”
The first week home was humiliating.
Not because Taylor was cruel. He wasn’t. That would have been easier to resist. The humiliation came from slowness. From needing help in ways she hated. From walking ten minutes and feeling winded. From sitting at the kitchen island while a nutritionist named Elena, warm-eyed and unsentimental, asked careful questions about food, routine, fatigue, emotional triggers, sleep. From seeing her own habits mapped without judgment and therefore without an easy enemy.
