Luna is already up, making breakfast in her tiny kitchen. The smell of coffee and something sweet baking makes my stomach turn, but I force myself to sit at her small table and accept the mug she slides across to me.
"You don't have to talk about it if you're not ready," she says, pulling muffins from the oven. "But I'm here when you are ready. For talking, or for plotting revenge, or for whatever you need."
So I tell her. About the storefront. About finding out Seamus was Shay. About the fight.
"I don't want revenge," I say quietly. "I just want... I don't know what I want. To not hurt like this. To go back to before I knew the truth and could still believe that what we had was real."
"It was real." Luna sits across from me, and her voice is gentle but firm. "Your feelings were real, Rosie."
She holds my gaze.
"But that doesn't mean you handled it perfectly."
I blink.
"Excuse me?"
"You found out something huge. You panicked. He panicked. You both did what scared people do — you protected yourselves."
She shrugs. "That doesn't make you evil. It makes you human."
I nod.
But something in my chest tightens. Because loving him wasn’t the mistake. Leaving might have been.
***
Later that morning, I force myself to check the city planning portal.
The demolition permits are in process. Expedited review. Timeline showing approval in three weeks, maybe less. By the end of the month, the building could be scheduled for demolition. Everything I've been fighting for, reduced to rubble to make way for another gleaming development that will erase the character of the neighborhood in the name of progress.
I should be devastated.
But I can't seem to make myself care the way I did a week ago.
The storefront still matters. It just feels distant compared to the immediate, visceral pain of losing Seamus.
Luna finds me staring at my laptop, and she reads the screen over my shoulder. "Those jerks," she mutters. "That bid is designed to crush any competition. They're not even trying to be subtle about it."
"They don't need to be subtle." I close the laptop because looking at the numbers just makes everything worse. "They have the resources and the timeline and the political connections to make this happen. My little preservation effort was never going to be enough to stop them."
"The permitting is still in limbo," Luna says, and there's a determined edge to her voice that I recognize from her event planning mode—the tone she uses when a vendor cancels last-minute or a venue double-books and she has to fix it through sheer force of will.
"The historical designation application is still pending. The community coalition is still mobilizing support. This isn't over yet, Rosie. Not until the wrecking ball actually hits the building."
I want to believe her.
My laptop sits closed on Luna's coffee table.
When I finally open it again, there are seven new emails from Shay—from Seamus. I can't think of them as the same person yet.
In my head, they're still separate: Shay, my trusted friend who I thought understood me, and Seamus, my husband who I fell in love with and then he betrayed that trust.
I don't open the emails. Just seeing them in my inbox makes my chest tighten with a complicated mix of anger and grief and something that feels dangerously close to longing.
Because despite everything, despite the lies and the manipulation and the systematic deception, part of me still misses him.
Both versions of him.
