Mateo did not mention the message.
Not that night. Not the next morning. Not even when Bambi woke with the taste of panic still on her tongue and checked her phone again to make sure it had been real.
It was still there.
She watched him instead.
The way he hovered without touching. The way his questions came dressed as concern. Did you sleep? Does your head still hurt? Do you want tea or coffee? He spoke like someone who had nothing to hide, and it was that ease that unsettled her most.
"You've been distant," he said gently on the third day after the hospital. "I'm worried about you."
Bambi stared at the window. Outside, life continued without her. Cars passed. People laughed. Somewhere, someone was living a life that did not feel like a locked room.
"I almost died," she said.
Mateo smiled sadly. "And I was the one who stayed."
The words landed carefully, like bricks laid one at a time.
After that, things shifted.
Not suddenly. Mateo was too smart for that. He learned to apply pressure the way you learn to boil water slowly, so the scream comes too late.
He began rearranging her days.
"You don't need to go out," he said when she mentioned seeing an old friend. "You're still recovering."
When she insisted, he sighed. "If they cared so much, where were they when Janice needed help?"
That name—Janice—was still sharp enough to cut her open. Mateo used it sparingly. Precisely.
He reminded her of the club, too. How they'd failed her. How they'd failed Janice. How no one showed up until it was too late.
"What good is a family that only mourns you once you're already gone?" he asked one night, voice low, sincere. "I was there. I stayed."
Bambi didn't argue. She didn't trust her voice when he said things like that.
Money became a conversation again.
"Things are tight," Mateo said, though she was the one still working. Still going out late. Still coming back smelling of cheap alcohol and sweat and shame. "We have to be careful."
So she worked more.
She stopped talking about leaving.
Her nightmares worsened that year. Every anniversary of Janice's death came like a storm she could feel weeks in advance. She drank herself into numbness the night before, cheap liquor burning all the way down, then cried until sleep dragged her under.
The dreams were always the same: Janice calling her name from somewhere dark, asking why she hadn't come sooner.
Mateo never came to the memorials anymore.
"Work," he said every time. "You know how it is."
Bambi went alone. She lit candles alone. She spoke to the dead like someone who still expected an answer.
When she came home after, hollow-eyed and shaking, Mateo would hold her and tell her she was strong. That she survived because she was meant to.
"Not everyone can handle life the way you do," he'd say. "You're built different."
She didn't realize then that he was shrinking the world around her while praising her for surviving inside it.
The message from the unknown number returned to her thoughts late at night. Mateo's other phone. The way he sometimes smelled unfamiliar. The nights he didn't come home at all.
Once, she asked, carefully, "Where do you go when you work late?"
He looked at her for a long moment. Hurt flickered across his face so convincingly she felt cruel for asking.
"So now you don't trust me?" he said quietly. "After everything?"
"I didn't mean—"
"I saved you," Mateo said. "I've carried us. And now you're questioning me?"
She apologized.
Again.
By the end of the sixth year, Bambi noticed she no longer imagined a future without him. The thought didn't scare her—it felt impossible, like trying to picture a color she'd never seen.
"You wouldn't make it alone," Mateo told her one evening after an argument she could no longer remember starting. "I don't say that to hurt you. I say it because I know you."
She stared at the wall while he spoke.
"You don't have family," he continued. "Your friends disappeared. The club failed you. What would you even do?"
The question lingered.
What would she do?
She thought of the nights she still worked. The men who touched her without seeing her. The way Mateo managed the money afterward, told her what they could afford, what they couldn't.
"You need me," he said softly. "And I need you. That's love."
Something inside her twisted.
That night, when Mateo fell asleep, Bambi lay awake staring at the ceiling, counting breaths that didn't feel like her own. She reached for her phone without thinking.
Another message waited.
He's been lying longer than you think.
Her heart began to race.
Mateo shifted beside her, murmured her name in his sleep, his arm heavy across her waist like an anchor.
Bambi stared at the screen, the words glowing in the dark.
For the first time in six years, she didn't delete the message.
She locked her phone instead.
And listened to the sound of Mateo breathing, wondering how long someone could sleep next to the person who was slowly killing them—and still call it love.