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I look at the final entry.

Nora finally safe.

Emma has taken a memory I’ve been using against myself and returned it to Celeste’s character, where it belongs.

“My mother was right about you,” I say.

Concern crosses Emma’s face. “That sentence rarely ends well.”

“She said you look at people while I look at evidence.”

“Mara is an excellent judge of character.”

“She’ll become unbearable when I repeat that.”

Emma smiles as her phone vibrates against the table. She checks the time and stands. “I need to go, but I’ll come back at lunch.”

“You have work.”

“So do you, and we both know you’ll keep going through this alone unless I return.”

She gathers her folders and reaches for her coffee.

“Emma.” She turns near the door. “Thank you.”

Her expression softens. “You don’t have to thank me for staying.”

After she leaves, I look at the chair beside mine, the coffee ring near the notebook, and the photographs she studied because they mattered to me.

I want Emma beside me when problems refuse to make sense, and I want her asleep on my couch with my daughters competing for the space nearest her.

I want Mom saving her a seat at dinner and Sprout losing every trace of discipline the second Emma enters the penthouse.

I want her laughter in my home and her coffee beside mine each morning. I want the difficult conversations she never avoids and the ordinary days I stopped imagining after Celeste died.

What I feel extends beyond desire, and distance has done nothing except make that truth harder to deny.

Emma hasn’t replaced the life I shared with Celeste, because love doesn’t require one memory to disappear before another can begin. She has shown me that losing my wife didn’t destroy every part of me capable of building a future.

I love Emma.

The realization brings no guilt or sense of betrayal. It gives shape to everything I’ve refused to name, and once I understand it, fighting becomes another form of dishonesty.

For months, I’ve treated loving her as a danger I could contain.

I’m finished pretending I can.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Emma

JUNE 20TH

My name echoes across the plaza before I clear the front doors of Wolf Shield. “Emma!”

Camera flashes fire from every direction, and I stop instinctively. Security closes ranks at the entrance.

Photographers crowd the sidewalk beside television crews and people filming on their phones, all of them facing the same man standing beside the fountain with a bouquet large enough to hide behind.