All Chapters of The Day I Stopped Loving Him: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Maya's POV The rain started while I was still hunched over the cutting table, a soft tap against the high windows that I ignored right up until it wasn't ignorable anymore, building steadily through the afternoon until, by evening, the whole loft had gone soft and blurred at the edges, streetlights smeared into long yellow streaks against the glass. I set my shears down, flexed my hand where it had cramped around them, and looked up to find Chloe already narrating the weather to Barnaby like he'd asked for a report. "It's mad," she informed him, very seriously. "Rain gets mad sometimes. That's why it's loud." Barnaby thumped his tail against the sofa cushion, unbothered by her diagnosis, and she took that as agreement and went back to negotiating possession of the cushion with him, a long and increasingly physical treaty that ended with both of them sprawled across it in a stalemate. Léo showed up a little after that, banging the door with his elbow because both hands were full, a

Léo's POV She fell asleep sitting up, which shouldn't have been possible but somehow was, her head tipping slowly toward my shoulder over the better part of twenty minutes until it finally just stayed there, her breathing gone slow and even against my collar. I sat still and let her stay that way longer than was probably comfortable for either of us, not willing to be the one who moved first. Down the hall, Barnaby's tags jingled once, a shift of weight against Chloe's door, then quiet again. He'd taken his post seriously since I put him there, apparently unwilling to abandon it even for the sound of the kettle I'd been meaning to put on and never got around to. Maya stirred slightly, murmured something I didn't catch, and burrowed deeper into my shoulder instead of waking. I looked down at her hand where it had come to rest against my chest, the ring catching the last of the lamplight, not doing the shifting trick it did in better light, just sitting there quiet and grey, already

Elena's POV My phone buzzed against the workbench while I had a pin between my teeth, and I almost ignored it. It buzzed again, insistent, and I spat the pin into my palm and checked it. A photo. Just a hand, resting on what I recognized as the loft's cutting table, morning light coming from the left the way it always did there early. A ring on the fourth finger. No caption. No message above or below it. I set the phone down flat on the workbench and stared at it a second longer than I needed to, my own pulse doing something complicated in my throat. I'd seen it coming, honestly. Years of needing to read small signals instead of large ones had left me with a particular sensitivity to the gap between what people said and what they actually meant, and Léo Marchand had never once said something he didn't mean. That was rare enough to notice on its own. The way he moved around Maya, never hovering, never possessive, just consistently exactly where he needed to be without requiring cre

Maya's POV I picked a weekday for the launch on purpose, no weekend performance energy hanging over it, no charged anticipation before anyone even walked through the door. The people who showed up on an ordinary evening came because they wanted to be there. I nearly didn't make it to the entrance on time. My heel caught in a gap between the museum's floor tiles two steps from the doors, and I went down hard on one knee before Léo's hand closed around my elbow and hauled me upright, both of us laughing under our breath before either of us could stop it. "Auspicious start," he said. "Don't." "I'm just saying, if the floor's already trying to take you out......" "Léo." I brushed off my knee, checked the fabric for a tear, found none, and straightened my spine before the doors opened properly. "Not one word about this to anyone tonight." "Not one word," he agreed, entirely unconvincing. The venue was the museum's ground floor, which he'd offered and I'd spent days deciding whether

Leo's POV I watched the room the way I watched buildings, not hunting for flaws, just taking in the whole of it, how the space worked, how people moved through it, what happened when someone stopped in front of a piece and let the stillness say something they weren't saying out loud. The collection was good. Better than good. The most honest work she'd ever made, which was saying something, because even the armor pieces, the sharp early VOSS years, had been honest in their own way too, honest about what she'd needed to feel safe back then. These were honest about something harder to name, what comes after the need for armor, the particular quality of someone who'd been through the fire and come out clarified instead of hardened by it. I'd watched her make it. Sat on the stool by the loft window for hours over these past months, watched the moment each piece stopped being a problem to solve and became the thing it had always been trying to become. One of the more interesting things I