Aria

He asked for the destination after we were in the car and moving. I gave him the address without explaining it. He didn’t ask me to.

He never did.

I watched the city pass outside the window and I sat with the feeling that had been sitting in my chest since I woke up. Not dread, exactly.

More like the feeling of something you have been putting off for long enough that you know you have no more reasons to keep waiting.

We stopped on the way so I could buy flowers. White ones, small, simple.

Then we kept driving.

The cemetery was quiet in the way cemeteries always were, that particular stillness that had nothing to do with the absence of sound and everything to do with the weight of what was there.

I walked through it alone, following the path I had looked up and memorized beforehand because I hadn’t wanted to wander.

I found her.

Sarah Brown.

The dates beneath her name were the ones I already knew, and seeing them carved into stone did something to me that I had understood it would do and still wasn’t fully prepared for. I stood in front of the gravestone for a moment without moving.

Then I crouched down and set the flowers at the base of it.

I took a long breath.

"You would have been a terrible aunt," I said out loud.

My voice came out steadier than I expected.

"Loud. Overbearing. You would have showed up unannounced constantly and bought her things I specifically asked you not to buy, and spoiled her completely rotten, and then handed her back to me and gone home." I paused. My throat was getting tighter. "And I would have complained about it every single time."

The cemetery stayed quiet around me.

"She’s beautiful," I said. "Her name is Lyra. She has his eyes." I stopped. Pressed my lips together for a second. "You would have loved her so much. I know you would have."

The tears came then, quietly, without drama, just spilling over and down my face the way they did sometimes when I wasn’t trying to stop them.

"I can’t forgive you," I said.

"I need you to know that. For what you did to Kael. For all of it. I can’t." My fingers tightened around the flower stems.

"But I can’t pretend I don’t miss you either. The you I thought you were. The you that I grew up next to. Maybe that person wasn’t real. Maybe she was real once and then something happened and she wasn’t anymore."

I shook my head a little. "I don’t know. I’ve stopped trying to figure it out."

I looked at her name on the stone.

"I hope you’re somewhere peaceful," I said. "I really do. Even after everything." I stood up slowly, brushing off my knees. "I really do, Sarah."

I stood there for one more moment.

Then I turned and walked back through the quiet rows of stones toward the gate, the flowers still sitting at the base of her grave, the afternoon sun warm on my face, carrying the grief and the relief and the contradiction of it all together in my chest the way I had learned to carry things that didn’t have clean endings.

My phone rang as I reached the car.

Kael.

"Where are you?" he asked when I picked up.

"At the cemetery," I said. "How’s the meeting?"

"Wrapping up. You can wait I’ll come pick you up."

"You don’t have to."

A small pause.

"Are you alright?" he asked. Not pushing. Just asking.

"Yes," I said. And I meant it the same way I had meant it that first morning in the hospital.

...

XE headquarters was exactly as I remembered it and completely different at the same time.

The lobby had the same marble floors and the same high ceilings and the same artificial light that made everyone look slightly too professional.

What was different was the way people looked at me when I walked through it.

The executives near the far wall turned when I came in. Smiled. Wide and careful and just a fraction too eager.

"Mrs. Roman. "

Someone said my name in the particular tone of a person who had recalculated its importance.

"A moment please-"

I kept walking.

Didn’t slow down. Didn’t reach for the acknowledgment they were offering. I crossed the lobby and pressed the button for the elevator and stepped in and let the doors close.

The floor number I pressed was one I knew well.

The executive floor was quiet, the kind of end-of-day quiet that meant the meetings were finished and most people were either packing up or pretending to.

The elevator opened and I stepped out.

And there he was.

Coming out of his office at almost the same moment, jacket on, phone in hand, and when he looked up and saw me something in his face did the thing it always did.

That small, immediate softening. Like his whole body decided all at once that whatever it had been carrying all day could be set down now.

He was, if anything, more himself than he had been a year ago. Not softer, exactly. He would never be soft. But more settled. More certain in a way that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with having something worth being certain about.

He still carried that weight that men like him always carry, the kind you earn in places most people don’t go. But it sat differently on him now.

He looked at me.

"You didn’t have to come," he said. "I was going to pick you up."

"I know," I said. "I wanted to surprise you."

I walked to him and he met me halfway and I put my arms around him and he held me in that way he had, his chin against my hair, one hand around my waist, steady and warm and entirely sure of itself.

"Have you eaten?" he asked.

"No."

"Where do you want to go?"

I pulled back enough to look up at him.

"Anywhere you want."

He looked at me for a moment. Then his mouth found mine, slow and warm, and his hands moved to lift me without breaking it, and I went up easily, my arms around his neck, the elevator and the marble floors and the executives downstairs and all of it falling completely away.

There was nowhere else.

There was just this.

Fin...