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Now, the exact same hollow drop from fifteen years ago hollowed out Emma's stomach. Another car waiting outside. Another person she loved walking away down the corridor, choosing a different life over everything they had built together. The only difference was that this time, Emma had locked the door herself.

She slid down the wood until she hit the floorboards, pulling her knees tight against her chest. She listened to the muffled sounds of the house below—the heavy front door opening and closing, followed by the crunch of tires over the gravel driveway as the town car pulled away, taking Harrison and Victoria with it, leaving the valley completely empty.

The house plunged into a suffocating silence.

Hours later, when the afternoon light had bled into long evening shadows across the rug, Emma finally pushed herself up from the floor. Her limbs felt like lead. She unlocked the door and pulled it open to go downstairs.

Her knees locked.

Hanging from the outside brass handle was a scrap of black lace—her own bra, the souvenir left behind in an Oakbridge hotel room a lifetime ago. And resting on the floorboards right at her feet was a folded piece of thick stationery.

Emma knelt down, picking up the paper with trembling fingers. Victoria’s handwriting was rushed, stripped of all its usual control.

I am going to fix this. Just give me time. — V

Emma stared at the ink until it blurred. It felt like just another empty promise meant to keep her quiet. She sank back to her knees in the empty doorway, clutching the note and the scrap of lace against her ribs, and surrendered to the silence of the house.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Emma

At five in the morning on the first of August, the kitchen of The Amber House was dead silent.

Emma hauled the last sheet of cinnamon rolls from the oven, the metal clattering against the cooling rack. The air hung thick with the scent of browned butter, cardamom, and the oppressive humidity of a late summer dawn. Nobody was going to eat them. The guest rooms upstairs were stripped bare, and her single canvas duffel bag was already sitting in the passenger seat of Nate’s idling car outside. She had baked them simply because her hands didn't know how else to survive the dark. Pastry was a simple, honest contract. Pastry never lied.

She untied her worn apron, folded it into a neat square, and laid it flat in the center of the oak butcher block.

She didn't look at the pantry. She didn't look toward the sitting room, where Joe's wingback chair sat empty beside a cold hearth, the floorboards still holding the ghost of linden wood shavings. If she looked at that chair, her knees would lock, and she would never make it out the door.

Emma turned her back on the ovens and walked down the front hallway. As she passed the base of the staircase, she didn't step around the warped pine plank she had spent fifteen years carefully dodging. She planted the heel of her work boot squarely in the center of the wood.

The board let out a sharp, hollow groan that echoed all the way up the empty stairwell. Nobody called down from Room Three. Nobody complained about the vibrations throwing off his chisel.

At the front door, she stopped beside the row of wooden pegs. Hanging at the very end was Joe’s weathered tweed flat cap, the wool still holding the faint, stubborn trace of pipe tobacco and English rain. Emma reached up, lifted the cap from the hook, and tucked it inside her denim jacket, pressing it flat against her ribs.

She pulled the brass master key from her pocket and set it down on the hallway console table—right over the faint water ring left behind by a sweating glass of ice.

Emma opened the heavy oak door, stepped out into the grey morning mist, and pulled the wood shut behind her. She listened to the latch click home, and she did not look back.

✽✽✽

Four weeks later, the rolling pin felt heavy against her palms.

Emma pressed her weight forward, flattening the chilled dough across the stainless steel prep table. The Parisian kitchen hummed with the industrial roar of stand mixers and the sharp clatter of aluminum trays.

She kept her eyes fixed on the butter block encased within the layers of dough. It had to remain cold. If the butter softened into the flour, the croissants would turn into dense bread. She rotated the sheet ninety degrees, executing the final fold with a swift, practiced motion.

Four weeks into the pastry program, Emma’s body ached in ways Rosebrook had never demanded. She had a fresh burn mark across her right forearm, aching arches, and a permanent dusting of flour on her clogs.

Chef Laurent stood at the front of the room, observing the class with arms crossed behind his back. He did not care about home cooking. He cared about precision.

Pâtisserie is chemistry, he had told her on her very first morning, dumping a tray of her unevenly proofed dough straight into the bin while eighteen other students watched in silence. You respect the math, or you pack your things.

The memory of that first week still tasted like bitter caramel. Emma had shown up at the academy in her worn apron from Rosebrook, carrying the muscle memory of fifteen years in a stone kitchen. At The Amber House, she was exacting with her measurements—she knew the exact ratios for a perfect scone or a stable sponge without thinking. But knowing the precise weight of flour and sugar was entirely different from mastering the volatile chemistry of French pastry. She had never needed to monitor the exact temperature of a chocolate temper to the decimal, or calculate the resting humidity of a laminated dough.

Here, the room was a sterile grid of brushed steel. Her classmates were twenty-year-olds from Milan, Paris, one from Tokyo and the rest from various cities of France, equipped with monogrammed knife rolls, infrared thermometers, and pristine white jackets. When Laurent had asked for a classic pâte à choux on day three, Emma had measured her ingredients flawlessly, but she had reached for a wooden spoon and an earthenware bowl to mix the choux out of habit, completely failing to account for how the ceramic retained heat differently than stainless steel.

Laurent had stopped behind her station, his shadow falling across her bench like a guillotine.