I take my coffee to the library and I’m going to have a normal, peaceful Sunday and I’m not going to spiral about forehead kisses and missing hums and one-degree temperature changes that probably only exist inside my own anxious, overthinking, still-healing head.
Because that’s what this is. This is Billy’s legacy, the part of me that was trained to look for signs of leaving, to measure affection in millimeters, to interpret every small silence as a prelude to abandonment. Billy taught me that love could vanish overnight, and now my stupid, scarred brain is applying that lesson to a man who knelt on my bedroom floor and told meI love youlike the words had never existed before he spoke them.
Alexei is not Billy.
Nothing is wrong.
I take my coffee to the library. I curl up in the leather chair that has become mine, the one by the tall window, where the morning light falls in long golden strips and the silence has a quality I’ve come to love, deep and old and full of peace.
I read. I drink my coffee. I text Trish about Saturday’s dinner plans. I call Joni, who has opinions about tablecloths and is not afraid to share them. I talk to Gerald, the fern in the conservatory, the one I named on our third day because he looked like a Gerald, and ask him if I’m overthinking things, and Gerald, as always, offers no comment.
It’s a normal Sunday.
Alexei has been gone for maybe twenty minutes when a staff member appears in the library doorway. I don’t know her name. The fortress has a small team that maintains the grounds and the interior, all preters, all so discreet they’re practically invisible.
“Mrs. Lykaios?”
I’m still not used to that. Mrs. Lykaios. Every time I hear it, my brain does a small, bewildered reset, like a GPS that keeps recalculating a route it didn’t expect to be on.
“Yes?”
“You have a visitor.”
A visitor. On a Sunday. At a fortress in the Rocky Mountains that exists in a pocket dimension and doesn’t appear on any map.
“Who?”
The staff member’s expression gives nothing away, but something in how she holds herself, a slight stiffness, a careful blankness, tells me she knows this name carries weight.
“A Mr. Stein, ma’am. Billy Stein.”
The coffee mug in my hands goes very still.
The library goes very still.
Everything goes very still, and the world narrows to the two words in the staff member’s mouth and the blood leaving my face and the particular, sickening lurch of my stomach that accompanies two realities crashing together that were never, ever supposed to touch.
Billy is here.
Billy is here, at the fortress, at my husband’s home, on a Sunday morning when my husband just left for the first time since we were married, and the coincidence of that timing is a thought I can’t complete because completing it would mean acknowledging something I’m not ready to acknowledge.
How did he even get here? The fortress exists in a pocket dimension. The roads only appear when they’re supposed to. You can’t just Google Maps your way to the Prince of Atlantis’s front door.
Unless you’ve been watching long enough to learn the way.
I shut that thought down. Hard.
“Ma’am?” the staff member says. “Shall I...”
“Yes.” My voice sounds far away. “Yes, let him in.”
I don’t know why I say it. I should say no. I should tell the staff member to send him away, to close the gate, to inform Mr. Stein that Mrs. Lykaios is not receiving visitors. That would be the smart thing. The safe thing. The thing that a woman who has spent two weeks building a new life would do to protect it.
But I’m not a woman who leaves things unfinished.
He’s standing in the living room when I walk in.
And the first thing I think, the very first thing, before the shock settles, before the anger arrives, before any of the complicated emotions that come with seeing someone who broke your heart, is: he’s smaller than I remember.
