She nodded slowly, her fingers still tracing those absent patterns on the chair.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” I said, my words coming out more vulnerable than I had intended. “I’m not asking you to forget the six months or pretend they didn’t happen. I’m just... I’m trying to help you understand that when I walked away, it wasn’t because I didn’t love you, Melissa. It was because I did. Because keeping you safe meant more than keeping myself whole.”
“And now?” she asked, her voice barely audible. “Now that you’re back? What happens now?”
“Now,” I said quietly, “I wait. I give you the time you need. I don’t push, don’t demand, don’t try to force something that might be broken beyond repair. I just... wait. And hope that maybe, eventually, you’ll decide I’m worth the risk.”
The silence that followed felt different, not hostile or tense, but contemplative. Like we were both sitting with the weight of what had been said, trying to figure out what it meant for our future.
She stood slowly, her pregnant body moving with careful deliberation. For a moment, I thought she was leaving, walkingaway again, and my heart clenched with the fear of losing her before I even had a chance to try.
But she didn’t leave.
She just stood there, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read, something between exhaustion and understanding, between anger and acceptance.
“I’m tired,” she said finally, her voice soft. “I’m so tired, Rowen. Of fighting, of hurting, of trying to make sense of a world that refuses to make sense.”
“I know,” I said, standing as well, keeping the distance between us. “I know you are.”
She nodded, her hand moving to her belly again. “I’m going to bed. I need... I need to sleep. To think. To figure out what I want.”
“Take all the time you need,” I said, echoing Sinclair’s words from earlier, when I remembered something. Reaching inside my coat, I pulled out a worn envelope that had been given to me many months ago. A promise I hadn’t yet fulfilled. Holding it in my hands, I added, “Before Ghost returned to the Silver Shadows, he gave me this to give to you when the time was right. I honestly forgot about it with everything going on. I’m not sure the time is right, but you should have it.”
Holding it out to her, I watched as her hand trembled, her fingers closing around the worn envelope. She looked at it for a long moment, then at me as something shifted in her expression—not forgiveness, not yet, but maybe the beginning of understanding. The first crack in the wall she’d built to protect herself.
“Goodnight, Rowen,” she whispered.
“Goodnight, Melissa.”
She turned and walked toward the stairs, her footsteps soft on the hardwood floor. I watched her go, my heart heavy with everything unsaid, everything still unresolved. But as shereached the bottom of the stairs, she paused, her hand on the banister. She didn’t turn around, didn’t look back at me, but her voice carried through the quiet house.
“Edward VIII,” she breathed. “He lived in exile. But he wasn’t alone.” And then she was gone, climbing the stairs to her bedroom, leaving me standing in the living room with those words echoing in my mind.
He wasn’t alone.
I sank back into the chair, my body heavy with exhaustion and something that might have been hope. The story of Edward VIII hung in the air between us, a parallel, a metaphor, a way of understanding sacrifice and choice, and love. He’d given up the throne. Walked away from power. Lived the rest of his life in exile.
But he hadn’t been alone.
And maybe, just maybe, that was the point.
I sat there in the dim light, listening to the sounds of Melissa moving around upstairs, and for the first time in six months, I allowed myself to believe that exile might not be the worst fate. That walking away from power might not mean walking away from everything.
That love, in the end, might be worth more than any crown.
The house settled around me, quiet and still, and I closed my eyes, letting the exhaustion finally take hold. Knowing tomorrow would bring new challenges, new conversations, new moments of reckoning.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Melissa
I sat on the edge of the bed, my pregnant belly making the simple act of sitting feel like a negotiation with gravity. The lamp cast a warm light across the cream-colored envelope, illuminating my name written in Travis’ distinctive handwriting, bold strokes, slightly slanted to the right, the kind of penmanship that belonged to a man who learned to write with purpose rather than elegance.
Melissa.
Just my name. Nothing else. No “My Love” or any of the endearments he used when he was alive. Just my name, stark and final, like he knew that by the time I read this, all the other titles would have fallen away.
The envelope was heavier than it should have been, not physically, but in the way that objects become weighted with meaning, with the knowledge of what they contain. The paper felt fragile beneath my fingertips, not old, but delicate in the way that important things often are. I traced the letters of my name, following the path Travis’ pen had taken, trying to imagine him sitting somewhere quiet, knowing these would be his last words to me, trying to distill everything he felt into sentences that would have to carry the weight of forever.
