**Doctor’s Orders**

Chapter 56

YARA'S POV

I didn’t answer him that night.

I left Elias’s apartment before sunrise with his cum still inside me and the word *marry* echoing in my head like a threat I wasn’t ready to face. The rule I had lived by for years—nothing is real, nothing lasts, love is just the pretty name people give to mutual destruction—felt fragile, but I wasn’t ready to watch it shatter completely. So I did what I always did when something got too close.

I disappeared.

For two weeks I ignored his calls. I threw away the flowers that kept arriving. I told Lisa I needed space and pretended...