Noah kissed me before he left. Brief. Claiming. Then he slipped from the bed, wincing slightly at the movement, and disappeared into the en suite.
I stayed, staring at the ceiling. Adrian remained beside me.
“You good?” he asked after a moment.
“Getting there.”
“Good enough.” He stood, stretched, completely unselfconscious in his nakedness. “Go shower. Then we eat. Then you do whatever you need to do today. Understood?”
“Understood.”
He left, and I forced myself out of bed. My legs felt unsteady, muscles loose and sated. The carpet was soft under my feet as I walked toward the bathroom where I could hear Noah singing off-key.
The shower was already running, steam filling the space. Noah looked up when I entered, smiled, and handed me the soap without a word.
By the timeI dressed and left Ravenswood, I'd put myself back together. Grey trousers, black jumper, boots. I looked in the mirror and saw what everyone else saw: stable, controlled, the man you called when things went wrong.
The florist knew me by sight. Had my order ready before I reached the counter: two dozen white roses, stems cut at precise angles, wrapped in brown paper.
“Same as always, Mr. Rourke,” the florist said, her smile sympathetic. “Will that be all?”
“That's all.”
I paid cash, took the flowers, and drove to the cemetery on the city's edge.
A fine rain had started, cold drops biting through my jumper, the wind carrying the smell of wet earth. Her grave was in the fourth row, beneath an oak tree. The headstone was simple:
Lily Rourke. Beloved Sister. Taken Too Soon.
I'd argued for different words. But by the time I'd had any say, she was already buried and the stone was already carved.
I knelt on the grass, still wet from morning damp, and laid the roses across the base of the headstone. White roses. Her favourite. I brought them every week, replaced the dead ones with fresh.
“Hey, Lil.” My voice came out rougher than I intended.
The wind moved through the oak's branches, making them creak. I touched one of the roses, feeling the soft petals.
She'd loved flowers. Used to keep vases of them everywhere in her flat, said they made the space feel alive even when she was too tired from work to do anything but collapse on the sofa. Used to drag me to garden centres on weekends, making me carry bags of soil and pots while she debated between varieties I couldn't tell apart.
“Sorry it's been a week. Things got complicated.”
Complicated. What a shit word for it.
“Viktor got married,” I said. “Big ceremony. Palace venue. The sort of thing you used to watch on television and make me sit through even though I'd rather have been anywhere else.”
She'd loved those programmes. Royal weddings, celebrity marriages, anything with elaborate dresses and flowers and the promise of forever. I'd complained every time, but I'd sat through them anyway because it made her happy. Because making her happy had been easy back then, before everything went wrong.
“I wore a suit. Didn't even complain. Well, complained a bit. But I showed up.”
Showed up. Like that was enough. Like being present made up for being too late when it mattered.
The drizzle turned colder. I stayed kneeling, not caring about wet grass or the cold seeping through my trousers.
“I'm still looking.” My voice dropped. “Still trying to piece together what actually happened. Because the story they told, the one that put him in prison, didn't fit.”
The timeline was wrong. The evidence was too clean. The whole thing closed too fast, like someone wanted it finished before questions got asked. I'd gone through the files a hundred times, memorised every detail, and none of it made sense.
Her husband had been convicted. Domestic violence turned murder. Open and shut case, they'd said. Except it wasn't. Except Lily had never mentioned violence, never showed up with bruises, never gave any indication she was afraid.
