Garrett's arm came around my shoulders. I leaned into him, pressing my face against his chest. Smoke and sweat and him.
He was solid. Warm. Real. Alive.
"She's at peace now," he said. "With Emma."
"I hope so." I closed my eyes. Pictured Rebecca's face in the firelight. That moment of calm when she'd dropped the match.
"I really hope so."
A week later, we stood at Rebecca's grave.
The cemetery was quiet. Early morning, before the city fully woke up.
Mist hung low over the grass, softening the edges of the headstones. Just us and the graves and the soft gray light of a cloudy day.
I'd brought flowers. Yellow roses. I didn't know if Rebecca had liked yellow roses. I didn't know much about what she'd liked at all, beyond the daughter she'd loved and the justice she'd died chasing.
But yellow felt right. Bright against the gray.
Emma's grave was beside her mother's. A small headstone with a carved angel, wings folded gently around a heart.Emma Marsh, beloved daughter. Forever in our hearts.
Eight years old.
Young enough to still believe in Santa Claus. Young enough to sleep with a nightlight. She never got to grow up. Never got to have a first crush or a first heartbreak.
All of that — stolen by a building that should have been condemned and a system that looked the other way.
I set the roses between the two headstones. Stepped back.
Garrett stood beside me. His hand warm in mine.
He'd been quiet on the drive over. I hadn't pushed. Some silences needed to be sat with.
We stood there for a long moment. Watching the mist drift through the grass. Listening to the distant sound of traffic, the city waking up around us. Two people who'd survived a fire, visiting the grave of a woman who hadn't.
"I've been thinking," Garrett said finally. His voice was rough. Careful. Like he was choosing each word deliberately. "About grief. About how we carry it."
I turned to look at him. His jaw was tight. His eyes fixed on Emma's headstone, on the little carved angel with its folded wings.
"Rebecca carried hers alone. For seven years." His jaw tightened. "And it turned into something that consumed her. Something that burned down everything it touched."
"Garrett."
"I carried mine alone too. After Emma." He paused. Swallowed hard. "I thought that's just what you did. You buried the grief somewhere deep and you kept moving and you didn't let anyone see how much it was eating you alive."
I squeezed his hand. Waited for him to find the rest of the words.
“I don't want to do that anymore." He turned to face me. Something fierce in his gray-blue eyes, like he'd made a decision and he wasn't going to back down from it.
"I want to remember them properly. Rebecca. Emma." His voice roughened, cracking on the edges.
"Our baby. The one we never got to meet."
My throat tightened. The grief I'd carried for so long, hidden behind work and ambition and the wall I'd built around my heart, surged up without warning.
In my chest. In my eyes. In the way my breath caught.
"We never mourned her." Garrett's voice was quiet now. Certain. "Never got to grieve together. Never got to say goodbye to the future we'd been planning."
