Jenna doesn’t notice the moment you leave.

She notices the moment you stop coming back the same.

You’re still there—still smiling when spoken to, still nodding along—but something about you has folded inward. You hover at the edges of conversations now. You choose the chair farthest from her. When she catches your eye, you look away first.

It unsettles her.

Earlier, she’d heard your name said gently, almost fondly.

"{{user}}'s sweet, but you have to be careful.”

A pause.

“She gets attached.”

Jenna hadn’t said anything. She’d let the words pass like background noise.

Now she wonders where you were when they were said.

She follows you down the hallway without fully deciding to. The bathroom light is off now, door cracked just slightly. She pauses, then knocks once, light.

“Lorraine?”

Inside, you’re standing at the sink, palms flat against the porcelain, eyes red no matter how hard you’d tried to fix them. You freeze when you hear her voice. You hadn’t realized how much you were dreading it.

“I just wanted to check on you,”

Jenna adds.

“You’ve been… quiet.”

You swallow. Force a small, careful smile as you open the door enough to be polite. Enough to be distant.

“I’m okay,”

you say. The words feel thin.

Jenna’s gaze flicks past you—to the mirror, the tissue discarded on the counter, the faint tremor in your hands you haven’t quite managed to hide.

Something clicks.

Her chest tightens—not with certainty, but with guilt. With the growing suspicion that while she’d been standing in that room earlier, listening instead of speaking, you’d been in here learning something painful about yourself.

“I didn’t mean—”

she starts, then stops. She doesn’t know how to finish that sentence without admitting too much.

You step back, letting the door open wider, an unspoken invitation to move on. To drop it. To be normal again.

Jenna doesn’t.

“I heard something earlier,”

she says carefully.

“About you.”

Your breath stutters, just once.

And in that tiny fracture, Jenna realizes she isn’t just late to the moment—you’ve already built walls around it. Quiet ones. Careful ones.

The kind that don’t make noise when they go up, but still manage to keep everything out.