“I just resigned from my job,” I said, like I was announcing I’d ordered waffles.
Sasha’s eyes widened—just a fraction. Then she laughed, delighted. “Okay, damn.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I surprised myself by laughing, too. “Yeah.”
Sasha leaned on the counter. “So, you’re serious-serious.”
“I’m serious,” I said. And then, because it mattered, I added, “But I’m not reckless. I’m intentional.”
Sasha nodded slowly, approving. “Good. Intentional gets you far.”
I hesitated, then asked, “Can you remind me what you said about the extended-stay suites?”
She tapped her keyboard. “I already sent the request to Isabel. You should get an email by lunch.”
“Thank you,” I said again, and it felt like more than politeness. It felt like gratitude for being witnessed in a moment when I was choosing myself.
Sasha’s smile softened. “Go handle your morning, Sophie.”
I blinked. “How do you know my name?”
She lifted her chin toward the room key card in my hand.
“Oh,” I said, laughing quietly at myself.
Sasha’s eyes gleamed. “Also … you look like a woman who just made a decision.”
I swallowed once, feeling heat rise behind my eyes—not tears, exactly. Something fiercer.
“I did,” I said.
“Good,” Sasha replied. “Now, go live with it.”
I turned away from the desk and headed back to the elevator, my stomach buzzing with nerves and excitement and that deep,strange certainty that I was doing the right thing—even if it scared me.
27
WYATT
Icouldn't move.
Couldn't speak. Couldn't breathe properly, like my lungs had forgotten their basic function, like my body had shut down everything non-essential to process what my eyes were seeing.
Just stood there staring at a ghost made flesh, at the impossible made real, at the man who'd disappeared when I was a teenager and left a crater in his wake.
My father.
Byron Dane.
Alive.
The word felt inadequate. Insufficient. Like calling a hurricane "windy" or a gunshot "loud."
I studied every detail like I was cataloging evidence for a trial I'd never get to prosecute—the new lines around his eyes that hadn't been there, deeper grooves bracketing his mouth like parentheses around all the words he'd never said, all the explanations he'd never given. Gray threading through hair that had been solid dark brown in my memories, in the mentalphotographs I'd replayed so many times they'd worn smooth at the edges, faded like old film.
The same broad shoulders, though. The same way of holding himself—straight-backed, alert even at rest, like a soldier who'd never fully stood down, never fully believed the war was over.
The memories I'd stored, the ones I replayed daily like worn film stuck in a broken projector—they didn't match this. This version was older, weathered by time and choices I knew nothing about, marked by years I hadn't been part of. Real in a way that made everything I'd believed feel like fiction I'd told myself to make sense of abandonment, to make peace with being left.
