Nadiyah gestures with the gun, directing me toward the center of the roof. Not the edge, but the most exposed position. The place where every low wall is visible, where running in any direction ends at a ledge too short to protect me.
I stop where she indicates. Wind pushes at my back.
Then Nadiyah circles around to face me, and for the first time since she pulled that gun in her apartment, we're looking at each other directly. Her eyes meet mine, and I make myself hold that resigned gaze. Desperately, I search it for something I can hold on to, or something I can use.
In the flat outdoor light, her face looks different than it did in the apartment. Stripped down. The grief is still present, but it's gone rigid beneath something harder. Resolution. A terrible stillness, like water that's stopped moving because it's frozen solid. The face of a woman who has already made her choice and is simply waiting for the world to catch up.
The wind gusts, pushing my hair across my face. I don't brush it away.
"I knew something was wrong, Nadiyah." The words come before I've consciously chosen them, rising from some instinct that urges me to find connection with her. Find the thread that I can gently pull and hopefully make her see me as a person, notan object of her hatred. "At the fittings. The way you looked at me. The distance you kept."
I shake my head slightly, remembering those moments. Her gaze sliding away from mine so frequently, her smile that never quite warmed, the careful reserve I'd attributed to professionalism or cultural difference or simple introversion. "I thought I'd done something to offend you. Said something wrong, or... I couldn't figure out what it was. What I'd done to make you pull away."
Nadiyah's expression doesn't change. But something in her stillness shifts, moving toward an attention that wasn't there before. She's listening. Registering that I saw her, even when I didn't understand what I was seeing.
But she says nothing.
The silence stretches between us, and I wait for it to break, for her to offer something I can work with. But the seconds pass and her face remains that mask of terrible calm, and the small flame of hope that flickered when I saw her attention sharpen begins to gutter.
She heard me. But hearing isn't the same as being reached.
Her fine, dark brows furrow slightly. "I don't hate you, Avery." She sighs, resigned. "This was never about you."
Good. I tell myself this is something, a small start. If she doesn't hate me, maybe there's room for something other than violence, space for words to matter, a crack in the wall where reason might slip through.
But even as the relief rises inside me, dread follows right behind it. If this isn't personal, bringing me up here like this, then it's purposeful. Nadiyah isn't acting from fury or impulse—not the kind of white-hot fury that burns itself out, that might crack under the right pressure or crumble when faced with consequence. She has a plan. And I'm not the target of her hatred.
I'm the instrument of something else entirely.
"Dominic Baine took something from me." Nadiyah's gaze holds mine, steady and unblinking. "Something that can never be replaced."
She says his name with precision, not spitting it, not raging. Just stating it. A fact entered into evidence. A name on a ledger she's been keeping in her heart for eighteen months.
"He destroyed the only man I ever loved. Then he went on with his life as if nothing had happened." The muscles in her jaw tighten almost imperceptibly. "As if Omar meant nothing. As if what he did to him—ruining a good man for his own gain—carried no weight at all."
The words settle into me, and I have to fight the urge to defend Nick. To explain that he carries that awful day with him too—the horror of watching a ruined man step off a roof, the weight of being present for something he couldn't predict or prevent. But that's not what this moment needs. That's not what Nadiyah wants to hear.
"Dominic Baine wronged my Omar." Her voice carries the weight of something long-held. Long-rehearsed in the dark hours when sleep wouldn't come and grief was the only company she had. "And wrongs demand an answer."
I swallow hard, understanding this isn't simply grief anymore. It's mourning that has hardened into something else. Something that has come untethered from reality, with edges sharp enough to draw blood. Nadiyah isn't spiraling into the kind of emotional collapse that might create an opening for connection or reason. She's calm because she decided long ago how this would end. She's been living with that decision for months. Working beside me at House of Delaire, stitching pearls into my wedding veil with those steady, careful hands. All while carrying this certainty inside her like a stone.
She doesn't want comfort. Doesn't want to be understood. She doesn't want catharsis or closure or any of the things that might make her grief bearable.
She wants balance.
And somehow I ache for her, as much as I fear her right now. Empathy rises in me before I can stop it. Before I can calculate whether it's wise, whether it will help or hurt, or whether offering genuine feeling to this woman will create an opening or close one. It's simply who I am, how I'm built. The part of me that looked at Nick Baine and saw past his armor to the wounded boy underneath. The part of me that still believes connection is possible even in the darkest places.
"I'm sorry, Nadiyah. I can't imagine what that was like for you." Emotion clogs my throat, not for myself in this moment but for the broken woman in front of me. Whatever else is happening here, her pain is real. I hold her steady gaze. "Losing someone you loved that way. Losing the father of your child. The life you'd built together."
She doesn't blink, doesn't give me any indication that anything I'm saying matters. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it can't. But I have to try to reach her somehow. It may be my only hope.
"I've lost people too. Not the same way, but I know what it feels like when grief takes over everything. When it becomes the lens you see the whole world through, and nothing else seems right, or real, anymore."
She takes a slow breath. The rigid set of her jaw eases by a fraction. Something moves within her hollow gaze.
I see it happen—a flicker, barely there, like light catching water beneath ice. Recognition. The acknowledgment that I'm not dismissing her, not treating her pain as madness or manipulation. For one suspended moment, something in her expression shifts toward something almost human. Almost reachable.
My heart lifts. There. That's the crack. That's where the wall isn't solid.
