And when the first gray light crept through the windows, I slipped out of bed. Pulled on my clothes. Leaned down and pressed my mouth to her forehead one last time.
She stirred and reached for me.
"Milo?"
"Go back to sleep, little bird. It's okay."
She murmured something I couldn't catch. Her hand found air where my chest had been. Then she settled back, curling into the warm spot I'd left behind.
I stood in the bedroom doorway and watched her for a very long time.
Then I walked out of the apartment and closed the door and stood in the hallway and listened to the silence on the other side for just a moment longer.
Taking the stairs two at a time, I walked into the cold morning air and got in my car and sat there with my hands on the wheel and my eyes on her window.
I had twenty-four hours.
I thought about the boy who'd stood in his father's van at eight years old and learned that death was just a mess to clean up. I thought about the man who'd spent twenty-two years provingthat lesson right. And I thought about the woman upstairs who'd proven it wrong, who'd reached inside the void where my humanity used to be and found something still breathing.
I started the engine.
Whatever came next, it was going to cost me everything I had left.
CHAPTER 20
RAVEN
Ididn't recognize who he was when he walked into The Silver Table that night, because his footsteps were different.
I was at the piano, mid-set, my fingers moving through Debussy's "Clair de Lune"—the second movement, where the left hand opens into arpeggios that shimmer like my memories of light on water. Memories that fade more every day. The room was half-full. Glasses clinked. A woman laughed near the bar. Geoffrey's loafers squeaked as he crossed the dining room to greet a table.
Normal sounds. Normal night.
Except for Milo's footsteps, which were telling me absolutely nothing, and that alone told me everything.
He stopped at the edge of the platform. Close enough that I could smell him—dark ocean and clean soap, the same scent I'd pressed my face into last night when he held me and whispered things against my throat that I'd been replaying on a loop for the last fourteen hours. But underneath the familiar, something wasmissing. The warmth. That raw, unguarded layer that surfaced when his defenses dropped, when he was close enough for me to taste the truth of him on my tongue.
It was gone. Replaced by something sealed and airless, like a room that had been vacuumed shut.
"Time to go," he said.
The words were flat. Toneless. The verbal equivalent of a blank wall.
My fingers stilled on the keys. Something was wrong.
"My set isn't finished."
"It is now." His hand closed around my upper arm. Not gently. Not the way he usually touched me, letting me know he was there with a sound, a breath, a word. Something to give me time to map him into my space before his hands arrived.
Not tonight.
Tonight he grabbed me like I was a thing to be moved.
"Milo—"
"Don't." The word landed like a door slamming. "Get up. Don't make a scene. Leave the cane," he ordered when I grabbed for it.
"What?" My cane was my eyes. My compass. My independence reduced to a collapsible stick of aluminum and rubber, and he knew that. He knew exactly what asking me to leave it meant.
