LOGINEliora's POV The visiting room smelled like industrial cleaner and something underneath it that no amount of cleaning could fully reach.I did not know what to expect. I sat down and waited.The woman across the room was not Margaret.Then the door on the other side opened and she came through it and she was Margaret, smaller than I remembered, which I had not thought was possible.She saw me.She stopped walking for just a moment, one step, a half pause, and something moved through her face that was complicated and immediate and gone before she had fully crossed the room.She sat down across from me.We looked at each other through the partition."You came," she said. Her voice was careful. The voice of someone who had not been sure this was going to happen and was still processing that it had."I didn't think I would," I sighed. "But here I am."She nodded. Her hands were in her lap and she was holding them still with visible effort."How is he?" she asked. The first thing. Not ho
Eliora's POV "Drew cried for twelve minutes," Zoey said, wrapping both hands around her mug. "I timed it." I stared at her across the kitchen table."Twelve minutes," I repeated."Twelve minutes and forty three seconds if we are being precise." She took a sip of her tea with the serene expression of someone who had witnessed something extraordinary and had been waiting to tell someone about it. "I would have stopped timing but I was too fascinated.""Zoey." I put my mug down. "You are telling me that Drew proposed and your first instinct was to time how long he cried?""My first instinct was to say yes," she said. "The timing was a close second." She smiled widely. "I said yes before he finished asking. He said I didn't let him get to the good part of the speech.""There was a speech?""Apparently." She waved her hand. "I didn't hear most of it. I was already crying."I looked at her across the table, at my best friend. Sitting in her kitchen in the middle of a Wednesday morning w
Eliora's POV I was making coffee.Ezra's spoon tapping the side of his bowl, the coffee machine working through its process, the particular light that came through the window at this hour and fell across the counter in a long warm rectangle.I sighed, tapping my hand on the table waiting for the coffee and listening to Ezra narrate something to himself at the table behind me and feeling…. content. That was the word. The specific quiet contentment of a Tuesday morning that was just a Tuesday morning and not anything more complicated than that.Then Kian said my name."Eliora."Something in the way he said it made me turn around.He was on one knee in the middle of my kitchen.My hand went to my mouth before my brain had finished processing what my eyes were showing it. The coffee machine finished behind me with a ping sound but I paid no attention to it. Ezra said something at the table and I didn't hear that either. There was just Kian on one knee on my kitchen floor with a ring
Kian's POV The boardroom looked exactly the same.That was the first thing I noticed when I walked in, that six months had passed, that everything had happened, and the room had simply waited. Same table, same chairs, same view of the city through the floor to ceiling glass on the east side. The same faint smell of coffee and of recycled air that every boardroom in every building like this one had. It had not changed at all.I had.I stood at the head of the table and looked at the faces arranged around it, twelve people, some of whom I had known for years, all of whom were doing the careful recalibration of people who thought they knew someone and were now deciding what they knew. I could see it moving through the room. Not hostility. Not warmth exactly. Something in between, the measured assessment of people who had watched the last three months from a distance and were now in the same room as me and forming their conclusions.I had prepared for this.I sat down."Let's begin,"
Eliora's POV It had not been planned.Ezra had woken up from his nap on Sunday afternoon with his mind already made up, he wanted to see his superhero, he wanted to see him now, and he communicated this with the focused persistence of a small person who understood that repetition was a legitimate negotiating strategy. I had called Kian. Kian had said come over. And that had been three hours ago and somewhere between Ezra's elaborate tour of the garden and Mrs Halloway's food appearing on the counter in covered dishes and Ezra crashing spectacularly on the sofa mid-sentence, it had become seven in the evening and neither of us had moved toward the door.Which was how I ended up in Kian's kitchen washing dishes while he stood beside me drying them with a dish towel over his shoulder like this was something we had always done.It felt like something we had always done.That was the part I was trying not to think about too directly.The kitchen was quiet in the specific way of kitchens
Kian's POV She was already there.I had been prepared for that, Eliora had never been late to anything in her life, it was one of the things about her that had always quietly impressed me, this woman who managed her time like it was a resource she respected, but seeing her actually sitting there at the corner table still caught me somewhere in the chest.She had her coat on still. Menu in her hands, studying it with the focused attention of someone doing due diligence, even though I was fairly certain she had already decided. She hadn't seen me yet and I stood in the doorway for a moment and let myself look at her the way I had not let myself look at her for three months, properly, without managing what it meant.Then she looked up.Something moved through her face, quick, unguarded, warm, the expression she had when she was feeling something she hadn't prepared a response for. Then she pulled it back into something more composed and set the menu down and straightened slightly in h
Eliora’s POVThe silence that followed Elijah’s exit was thick, but for the first time since the crash, it wasn't heavy. It was just Zoey and me. The two of us had survived more than just corporate scandals and car wrecks; we had survived a silence that had lasted years.I watched her for a moment,
Kian’s POVThe fluorescent lights of the hospital hallway felt like they were vibrating, humming with a high-pitched frequency that set my teeth on edge. My heart was still hammering against my ribs, a frantic, uneven rhythm that I couldn't throttle into submission. I could still see her. Even when
Eliora’s POVI shifted in the bed, the movement sending a dull, throbbing ache through my chest. The machines hummed a steady, rhythmic reassurance that I was still alive, but I didn't feel alive. I felt like a ghost haunting my own broken body."Easy, Eli. Don't try to move too fast."Elijah was t
Eliora’s POVThe world wasn't a place; it was a weight. It was the crushing sensation of being buried alive under layers of cold, wet earth, with a high-pitched ringing in my ears that sounded like a tea kettle screaming in a distant room. There were flashes of the nightmare, jagged, strobe-light m







