Oh.
Right.
They were here.
Here, as in where her parents were.
Her heart did something complicated, and she was quiet for a moment, and Olivio didn't fill the silence. He simply waited, his thumb tracing a slow circle against her hip, giving her whatever she needed without being asked. He'd gotten good at that. Or maybe he'd always been good at it and had just stopped pretending he wasn't.
He helped her out of the backseat, his hand never letting hers go, and they walked in silence.
Chelsea's thoughts drifted, the way they did on quiet walks, to the month that had passed. Rhea had quit before HR could finish the investigation, which was probably for the best, because Chelsea had been dreading the possibility of having to see her every morning and pretend the awkwardness wasn't there, and pretending was the one thing Chelsea had never been able to do. Francine had been served a restraining order, drafted by Adriano personally and delivered with the kind of legal force that made Chelsea briefly, guiltily grateful to be on the side of people who could afford lawyers like Adriano Kontides. Amanda had been promoted to co-manage the front desk, and the quiet pride on her face the first morning she'd worn the new badge had made Chelsea's eyes sting, because Amanda had risked something real to do the right thing, and it mattered that the right thing had cost her nothing in the end except the courage to do it.
Johnny had been promoted too, which had coincided, in a timing that Chelsea was sure was purely coincidental, with him getting himself a girlfriend. She wasn't entirely sure what one had to do with the other, but she was so thrilled for him on both counts that she hadn't thought to question it. He deserved good things. He'd been the first person in the building to be kind to her, and Chelsea never forgot that sort of thing.
The Marquez deal hadn't been canceled in the end. Chelsea had insisted on that, because the deal itself wasn't the problem, the problem was that it had been the reason Olivio kept her, and once the reason changed, the deal was just a deal again. Adriano had drafted a new contract, not for the Vancouver property but for a donation, a significant one, to the hospital where Chelsea had spent three years asleep and eight months learning to walk again. Edgar had accepted a post there as investment consultant, which meant the man who'd called her every week for three years when she couldn't hear him would now be helping to make sure the place that had kept her alive could keep doing it for other people. Chelsea still cried every time she thought about it, which was often, and which she had stopped apologizing for.
But the best thing, the thing that made all the other things feel like footnotes—-
It was Olivio.
It was Olivio, and the way he'd changed, and the way the change had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the God she'd been praying he would find. Because this time, when they'd been sitting on the balcony last week with their mismatched mugs and the blue ceramic plate and the morning doing what Toronto mornings did when they decided to cooperate, it had been Olivio, not Chelsea, who'd spoken first.
Her parents were with Him now, in Paradise, he'd told her quietly. And one day, she and Olivio, they would join them, too.
He'd said it the way he said everything that mattered, without fanfare, without performance, just the voice of a man who'd followed the evidence to its conclusion the way the book had described, and had arrived somewhere he hadn't planned to go and had no intention of leaving.
Chelsea hadn't been able to speak for a full minute after that.
Because it meant he believed now. Truly believed. And because it also meant that the man she loved had just promised her the one thing no amount of money or power or Cannizzaro influence could buy: that this wasn't the end. That they had forever. And that her parents, who she'd been missing every single day since she woke up, were somewhere she would see them again.
And next month, they'd be in Boston. A charity golf tournament, Olivio had told her, the kind of event where families like the Cannizzaros and the Marchettis gathered to do what powerful families did, which was play golf badly and make deals on the back nine. Chelsea had never met the Marchettis, but she'd heard enough from Sienah and Shayla to know they were the real deal, the kind of family whose name carried weight in rooms that most people didn't know existed.
She'd been thinking about this when she turned to her husband and asked, "Are there any dos and don'ts I should know about? For the Marchettis?"
Olivio was quiet for a moment. Then: "Two rules."
"Okay."
"Don't look at any of them for more than five seconds."
Chelsea started to laugh.
Then stopped.
Because Olivio wasn't laughing.
"Seriously?" She searched his face, and the look she found there was one she'd never quite seen before, total sincerity layered with something that looked remarkably like irritation. "Why? Are they...are they dangerous? Are they violent? Should I be—-"
"Because," Olivio said, in an unusually irritated voice, "all of them are ridiculously good-looking, and I happen to be an extremely jealous husband."
Oh, Olivio.
She would've teased him some more, would've leaned into him and called him ridiculous and watched the irritation flicker into something warmer the way it always did when she refused to take his possessiveness seriously, but there wasn't any time. They'd made it to the end of the path, and the grass was soft under her feet, and she slowly knelt.
Two headstones. Side by side. Her father's name and her mother's, and the dates that marked the boundaries of lives that had been too short and too full and too important to ever be contained by stone.
She placed the flowers between them. White lilies, because her father had always brought her mother white lilies, and the memory of that, him coming through the door on Friday evenings with the stems wrapped in newspaper and her mother pretending to be surprised even though it happened every week, had lived in Chelsea through three years of silence and eight months of rebuilding and nine days of falling in love and one afternoon of having her heart broken and the month after that, the slow and grace-filled month of being put back together.
