Chapter 1

Amelia's POV

"Marcus. Not now."

Nathan flipped his phone face-down on the tablecloth before Amelia could read more than one line on the screen.

She didn't ask what it said. She picked up her wine glass instead.

Four years of marriage teaches you which questions are safe to ask out loud. This wasn't one of them.

The restaurant was Grace's pick, the way it always was for their anniversary. Candles on every table. String lights along the ceiling beams. A pianist near the back playing something slow, the kind of song nobody actually listens to. It was a pretty room. It was supposed to feel like something.

Amelia had worn the blue dress. It was Nathan's favorite, and the only new thing she'd bought for herself all year. She'd spent twenty minutes on her hair before they left, the way you do when you want the night to prove something to you.

"Four years," Grace said, smiling at both of them, her pearls catching the candlelight. "Can you believe it, Amelia? Four years already."

"It doesn't feel that long," Amelia said.

It was a lie. It felt like every single day of it.

Marcus laughed into his glass. Nathan's younger brother had a way of showing up to every family dinner and being useless at all of them.

"Four years and still no babies for the old girl," he said. "Good thing you've got Zane, or people would start asking which one of you is the problem."

Nobody said anything for a second. Grace's fork stopped halfway to her mouth. Nathan picked up the wine list and stared at it like it needed his full attention.

"Marcus," Grace said. There wasn't much bite in it. There never was, when it came to her grandsons.

Amelia smiled — the smile she'd gotten good at over the years. "We're happy with Zane."

He was five. He was home with the sitter, probably coloring, the kind of kid who stayed inside the lines like it mattered to him. He was her son, and loving him was the one easy thing in four years that hadn't asked anything hard of her.

Grace's eyes went soft and wet, the way they did every time his name came up. "You've been such a wonderful mother to that boy. Wonderful."

The waiter came and cleared their plates. Grace ordered a second bottle of wine and started telling a story about Nathan as a kid — one Amelia had already heard three times — and Amelia let it wash over her, because it made Grace happy, and Grace's happiness had been the one thing Amelia always tried hardest to earn.

She hadn't always been the woman sitting at this table. Nine years ago she was fourteen years old, standing in a hospital hallway while a stranger in scrubs told her, as gently as anyone can tell you a thing like that, that her parents were gone. That her life had just been split into two pieces, and there was no way to sew them back together.

She had no aunts. No uncles. No grandparents to call.

Grace came to the hospital on the third day. Amelia didn't really know her yet — just the elegant woman from the community center who always remembered her name and asked about her grades like she meant it. Grace sat down next to the bed, took Amelia's hand in both of hers, and told her she would not be going into foster care.

She said it like a fact, not a kindness. She paid for the funeral. She found a new school. She gave Amelia a room with a window that looked out over the garden, and never once, in nine years, made her feel like she owed anything for it.

Which is why, four years ago, when Grace knelt down in front of her — an elegant woman in her sixties, on her knees in her own living room, holding Amelia's hands so tight her rings left little marks — Amelia said yes before she'd even finished asking.

"He needs someone who won't leave him because of this," Grace had said. "Please. For me."

Amelia broke off her engagement to Lucas Stone three days later. He didn't yell. He just went quiet and still, and asked her once — only once — if she was sure.

She told him yes. She had never been less sure of anything in her whole life.

"You've been so good to him," Grace said now, patting Amelia's hand, her eyes shining the way they always did at this exact point in this exact story. "So good to all of us. I don't know what we would have done, especially with—" she glanced at Nathan, "—everything."

Nathan still hadn't looked up from the wine list.

Eighteen months into their marriage, he'd sat across from her at their kitchen table and told her, in a voice so quiet and ashamed it made her want to hold him, that the accident he'd survived years before had broken more than just his legs. That there would be no kids. That she was free to leave if she wanted to.

She hadn't left. She'd held his hand across that table and told him it didn't matter.

His phone buzzed again against the tablecloth.

This time he didn't flip it over. He just glanced down at it, quick, the way your eyes jump toward a sound before your brain decides if it's worth worrying about. Something crossed his face for half a second and then it was gone, like a light switched on in another room and off again before she could see what was in there.

"Everything alright?" Grace asked, not really listening, already waving the waiter over for more wine.

"Work," Nathan said.

His voice was calm. Too calm. The kind of calm he used when he needed a sentence believed instead of questioned.

Amelia looked down at her plate and didn't say anything. But something in her chest — something she'd been holding very still for a very long time, out of habit, out of gratitude, out of being flat-out tired — moved. Just a little. Like a stone finally sinking into wet ground after years of being told to stay put.

She hadn't seen a name on the screen. Just one lowercase letter, saved like a contact.

Nathan kept everyone else in his phone with full names. His suppliers. His dentist. Even the man who mowed their lawn was saved as Roger — lawn. She knew this because she'd set up that phone herself, two years back, holding the charger while he read out every name from memory. In case you ever need to call someone for me, Amelia. I don't want you guessing.

One letter. Nothing else.

She told herself it was nothing. An old joke between old friends. Some leftover shorthand from college that had stopped meaning anything except habit.

She almost believed it.

On the drive home, the window cracked, cold air on her face, Nathan's hand resting on her knee the way it always did — some old reflex from a marriage neither of them had ever really looked at too closely — Amelia watched the streetlights go by and thought about a man who saved his lawn guy's name in full, and a stranger under one single letter.

She didn't ask the question sitting in her mouth.

Not yet.

She had no idea how short "not yet" was about to be.