Chapter 73: fire and resolve

The drive home felt like moving through molasses. Streetlights smeared into long, indifferent lines as the city passed by, and I sat rigid in the passenger seat, hands folded so tightly my knuckles ached. Sebastian had left the kids at Peter’s. I’d told myself it was a reasonable compromise — supervised time, a buffer between the past and whatever fragile beginning we were trying to build. Now the distance between me and them felt unbearable.

At the gate I paused, fingers hovering over the buzzer like a guilty thief. For a second I wanted to turn the car around, take them straight back, hoist them into the front seat and never leave their sides again. But that was panic, not strategy. Panic was what had led to the messy mistakes of the past. I had to be smarter. I had to be cruelly practical.

I climbed the short stone steps and stood on the porch, breathing in the sharp autumn air until the fury simmered to a manageable heat. Peter’s house was all dark glass and angles, an intimidatin