“Do you miss home?” I asked.
A pause.
Then, carefully: “Sometimes. It’s not a longing so much as … muscle memory. The way you expect certain things to be simple.”
I exhaled. “Yes.”
She glanced at me. “You sound like you’ve already learned Paris won’t meet you halfway.”
I huffed a quiet laugh. “Paris doesn’t even acknowledge I’m walking.”
That earned a small smile.
We reached the end of the corridor. Mila leaned against the stone wall, arms folded loosely, and she looked less like someone showing me her work and more like someone making space for me to exist.
My eyes drifted back to the photographs—proof that this place didn’t only hold men who were dangerous. It held the people who loved them, too. The ones who learned how to live beside the shadows without letting the shadows swallow them whole.
And somehow, standing in front of Mila’s work, I felt the same thing I’d felt in Rose’s sweater.
Not peace. Not yet.
But steadiness.
A pause.
A place to breathe.
Before I could say anything else, my phone rang.
The sound snapped through the space—too loud, too sharp, too normal.
Mila’s head turned immediately.
I glanced down.
Étienne.
Everything inside me went cold.
I answered too fast.
I was supposed to call him.
We were supposed to get together for dinner tonight—awkward and new and fragile, but real. I’d promised I would come back. Promised I wanted to sit at their table. To see Sabine again.
I had even planned what I’d say—how I’d explain that something had come up, that I needed to delay, that I wasn’t disappearing. That I wasn’t abandoning them.
I’d been rehearsing the conversation in my head.
Now, none of that mattered.
Now, his name on my screen felt like a warning siren.
“Étienne?”
His voice was panicked.
“Ella,” he said, and my name came out like it hurt. “I went to pick up Sabine.”
