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He pulls me back against him before I can continue arguing. I should object. Instead, I settle against his chest and listen to his heartbeat.

For most of my life, numbers have been easier than people because numbers eventually balance. Every debit has a credit. Every discrepancy has an explanation. Given enough information, every equation should resolve.

Adrianos doesn't. Neither do I. Together, we might be the most unbalanced account I've ever seen. For once, I don't need to fix it.

Epilogue

Adrianos

Two Weeks Later

There are three coffee cups in my study. None of them belong to me.

I stand in the doorway and stare at the nearest one, abandoned beside a stack of financial reports that also do not belong there. A second cup sits dangerously close to a side table that cost more than Elena's first apartment, while the third appears to have been forgotten beside one of the three monitors now occupying the desk where there used to be one.

Two weeks ago, this room was orderly. Two weeks ago, my entire penthouse was orderly.

Now there are files on a chair because Elena apparently believes chairs are horizontal filing cabinets. Her shoes are beneath the console table despite my repeatedly pointing out that we have closets. A charger stretches across the kitchen counter like a trip wire, and someone has placed sticky notes on the edge of a seventeenth-century cabinet.

I remove one.

CALL LORENZO'S ACCOUNTANT.

I stare at it. Then put it back.

"Absolutely not."

Elena's voice carries from the room across the hall. I walk toward it.

"I don't care if you've been processing the accounts that way for fifteen years. You've been doing it incorrectly for fifteen years."

I stop outside the door.

She's sitting at a desk with a headset on, glaring at two monitors filled with financial data. Her hair is twisted into something that probably started the morning as a bun but has surrendered several strands around her face.

She doesn't notice me.

"No, that wasn't a compliment." A pause. "Because six separate companies should not be paying the same consulting fee to an entity without employees. Yes, I'm aware of who owns it. That's why I'm asking."

I lean against the doorframe. For years, I paid an obscene amount of money for silence.

After Nikos died, noise became unbearable. After my parents, it became worse. Silence asked nothing of me. It didn't remind me that people had once laughed in rooms that were now empty. It didn't leave belongings behind or create routines that could disappear without warning.

So I bought enough space that silence became unavoidable. Then Elena moved in.

She hasn't been here fourteen days, and somehow my penthouse sounds alive. I didn't know how much I'd missed that.

"Fine," she says into the headset. "Send me the original statements, not the summaries somebody prepared because they apparently believe I'm easily distracted by attractive formatting."

She ends the call and finally notices me.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough to feel sympathy for Lorenzo's accountant."

"He'll survive."

"Will he?"