Melissa looked back at Roxanne.

"I cannot pretend the things you said did not cut," she said.

"I know."

"I cannot pretend I did not believe you meant them."

"I know."

"And I cannot promise I will become gracious overnight, because I have never enjoyed lying unless professionally required."

Another laugh broke through Roxanne’s tears.

"But I can understand now," Melissa said. "And I can stop aiming at you for wounds someone else arranged."

Roxanne looked at her then; the damp hair gathered neatly at Melissa’s nape. At the dark sweater, the eyes that were no longer cold in the way Roxanne remembered.

Cool, yes. Guarded, certainly. But not closed.

Something inside Roxanne shifted.

Not healed. Healing was not a switch. It was not one conversation, one hand, one moonlit gesture.

People loved to write healing like a door opening all at once, but real healing was closer to unpaid labor:

Slow. Repetitive. Annoying. Full of setbacks. Frequently in need of hydration and better management.

Still, the first stone moved.

That mattered.

"I did mean some of them," Roxanne admitted, voice barely above a whisper.

Melissa stilled.

Roxanne forced herself to continue. "Not at first. Not in the way Jonathan wanted. But after years of performing hatred, some of it became easier than it should have. Sometimes I resented you because you were free to be angry, proud and to be terrifying without going home to pay for it." Her throat worked.

"That does not excuse anything. I know that. But if I am apologizing, I do not want to give you a clean lie."

Melissa watched her for a long moment.

The honesty sat between them, ugly and necessary.

Then Melissa nodded.

"Good," she said.

Roxanne blinked.

"Good?"

"Yes. I prefer the truth when it is unattractive, um, pretty lies are how this city breeds monsters."

Phei’s voice came softly from the window. "Paradise is going to sue you for defamation."

"Paradise can join the queue," Melissa said. "Many people want my attention. Few deserve it."

Roxanne’s lips trembled toward a smile.

Melissa leaned back slightly, though her hand remained around Roxanne’s.

"I still dislike your old taste in insults," she said.

Roxanne gave a small, broken laugh. "Jonathan wrote most of them."

"Obviously. They lacked elegance."

Roxanne stared at her.

Melissa’s face remained perfectly composed.

"Melissa."

"What?"

"You are critiquing my coerced insults?"

"I am critiquing Jonathan’s writing. Do not defend poor craftsmanship." 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

Phei turned his head slightly, amusement warming his face.

Roxanne pressed her fingers to her mouth as laughter shook through her again. It came cracked and uneven, tangled with tears, but it came. Somewhere in Paradise, etiquette probably collapsed face-first into a champagne tower.

’Good. Etiquette has been useless during every important moment of her life.’

Melissa’s gaze softened by one dangerous degree.

"There she is," she said quietly.

Roxanne’s laughter faded into a shaky breath.

"Who?"

"The woman under all that Montgomery ruin."

Roxanne looked down.

The surname sat on her like ash.

Melissa seemed to understand. Her thumb brushed once across Roxanne’s knuckles, almost too small to notice.

"You do not have to introduce yourself with his name forever, even amongst people do know what has happened."

Roxanne’s breath caught and Phei went still by the window.

The words were simple. Too simple, perhaps, for the storm they opened.

Yet they struck Roxanne harder than any grand speech could have. She had been Montgomery for twenty years. In society, on invitations, on charitable boards, in newspapers, in whispered gossip, in every room where Jonathan’s shadow entered before she did.

The name had become a prison so polished no one called it one.

To imagine setting it down while she kept the current secrets going on in that house felt... obscene.

Holy.

Impossible.

"Not too soo," Roxanne whispered.

"No," Melissa said. "Take your sweet time."

Phei turned from the window at last and walked toward them. His steps were quiet over the stone, but both women felt him before he arrived. Warmth came with him. Not heat exactly. Presence; a gravity that gathered the room without crushing it.

He sat on Roxanne’s other side.

For a moment, no one spoke.

Then Roxanne leaned into him.

She did not mean to. Her body just chose before dignity could object, which was becoming an unfortunate theme.

Phei’s arm came around her shoulders, steady and sure, drawing her close without pulling her away from Melissa’s hand.

He became the bridge between them, warm at her side, silent above the fracture he had helped expose.

Melissa watched the movement.

There was no jealousy in her eyes.

Only a complicated tenderness that refused to make itself simple for anyone’s comfort.

Phei lowered his voice. "I thought you both deserved the truth."

Melissa looked at him. "You also enjoy detonating emotional explosives in expensive rooms."

"I contain multitudes."

"You contain poor timing."

Roxanne laughed under her breath.

Phei glanced down at her. "You too?"

"I am sorry," she said, though she did not sound sorry at all. "She has evidence."

"Betrayed," he murmured. "In stereo."

Melissa’s eyes lifted toward the ceiling. "The moon is also judging you."

"The moon follows me because it has taste."

"The moon follows you because it is collecting testimony."

Roxanne laughed again, and this time the sound filled the space more naturally, fragile but warmer.

The penthouse changed around it. The city remained cruel. The past remained ugly.

Jonathan and Harold remained a scar on all their stories that Phei was healing.

But the room was no longer only a chamber of sorrow. Something else had entered with the portal and the moonlight.

It was a new future-promising beginning.

The moon washed the three of them in silver. Downtown Paradise poured gold through the glass. The two lights overlapped on the stone floor, on Roxanne’s tear-wet face, on Melissa’s steady hand, on Phei’s quiet profile.

Gold and silver.

City and sky.

Lie and witness.

Phei had brought Melissa here through a wound in reality, but the real tear had opened elsewhere.

In the old story, the false shape of their hatred and the version of Roxanne that Melissa had believed. In the version of Melissa that Roxanne had feared.

For years, both women had been made into weapons.

Tonight, for the first time, they sat close enough to see the hands that had aimed them.

Roxanne drew a long, unsteady breath.

"I do not know how to fix what I broke," she said.

Melissa did not answer immediately.

That was good. Quick answers would have cheapened it... some questions deserved to remain heavy for a moment, if only to prove they were being held properly.

"At the beginning," Melissa said at last. "You start there."

Roxanne looked at her. "And where is that?"

Melissa’s lips curved faintly.

"Well." Her gaze flicked briefly toward Phei. "Apparently with bitch."

Roxanne stared.

Then she laughed.

She laughed until tears slipped down her cheeks again, but this time they did not feel like defeat. Melissa’s mouth softened into something perilously close to a smile.

Phei leaned back against the couch, one arm around Roxanne, watching them both with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose terrible plan had somehow avoided immediate disaster.

A miracle, truly.

Civilizations had fallen for less.

But above it, the moon remained.

It had followed Phei here, crossed the island in silver, slipped through Roxanne’s windows, and settled over the three of them like a witness who refused to leave before the record corrected itself.

The wingman’s work was done.

And in the hush between two women who had spent years bleeding from wounds arranged by a dead man’s cruelty, something long fractured began, slowly and stubbornly, to heal.

Not beautifully.

Not cleanly.

But honestly.

Which, in Paradise, was practically a divine scandal.