I hope you find peace. Both of you.
I read it again. And again. My mother watched my face, her expression careful.
“What does it say?” she asked.
I handed her the letter without speaking. Watched her read it and her eyes filled with tears.
“He rebuilt it,” she said quietly. “Not the same building, but close enough. He gave it back.
This is significant, mija.”
“It doesn’t change what he did.”
“No.” She folded the letter carefully. “But it changes what happens next. Those families can go home. We can go home if we want to. The building is protected forever.”
I took the deed and studied it. Legal language, but the meaning was clear. Archer had given up everything—his company, his reputation, probably his entire fortune—to fix this one thing he’d broken.
“Gianna,” my mother said quietly. “What are you going to do?”
I looked at the deed, at the letter, at the proof that the man who’d destroyed us had spent the last six months trying to rebuild what he’d taken.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Do you want to see him?”
Did I? The question had a thousand answers and none of them felt complete. I wanted to scream at him for making me care about him again. Wanted to thank him for doing something that actually mattered. Wanted to know if he’d really changed or if this was just another way of trying to ease his guilt.
Wanted to see if looking at him would still hurt, or if enough time had passed that I could breathe around the ache in my chest.
“I don’t know,” I said again. “Mom, I don’t know what to do.”
She pulled me into a hug, and I let myself lean into her like I was ten years old again instead of a lawyer who was supposed to have answers.
“You don’t have to know right now,” she murmured. “You can sit with it for a while. Figure out what feels right.”
That night I lay in bed and stared at my ceiling, the deed and letter on my nightstand. Outside my window, the city moved through its usual rhythms, indifferent to my crisis.
Archer had given up everything—his company, his reputation, his entire life as he’d known it. Had spent months commissioning a new building, rebuilding what he’d destroyed, creating something that honored the past while protecting the future.
And he hadn’t asked for anything in return. Hadn’t demanded I forgive him or even acknowledge what he’d done. Just wanted me to know that something had been rebuilt.
I picked up my phone and stared at the screen for a long time, my thumb hovering over his name. I’d unblocked himweeks ago, in a moment of weakness I immediately regretted. Now his contact information stared back at me, waiting.
I could text him. Ask to talk. See if the man who’d destroyed me had actually become someone different.
Or I could delete the deed and letter, forget he’d ever done this, and keep moving forward without looking back.
Both options felt impossible.
I set my phone down without deciding and closed my eyes, trying to sleep. But my mind kept circling back to the same question my mother had asked.
What was I going to do?
And underneath that question, the one I was afraid to answer: Did Archer Devlin deserve a second chance?
The building said yes. My anger said no. My heart, still healing from the way he’d broken it, didn’t know which answer to believe.
So I lay in the dark and thought about superhero capes and rebuilt buildings and whether redemption was something you earned or something you were given.
