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No version of those years included me.

We reached Maxim’s estate just before midnight. Armed men opened the iron gates before the car stopped, and the house appeared beyond the trees with only a few windows illuminated. It was large without being showy, built of stone meant to endure weather and enemies. Security cameras followed us along the drive.

Maxim waited beneath the light beside the front door. Illyria stood slightly behind him in a long cardigan pulled over her nightclothes, her blond hair loose around a face pale with worry.

Rurik stepped from the car first, but I was already opening my door before he could reach it. Maxim’s gaze moved over me, taking in the hour, the rain on my coat, and whatever the last few months had left visible in my face.

“He’s asleep,” Maxim said.

“I won’t wake him.”

Illyria’s expression crumpled for less than a second before she mastered it. Maxim put one hand against her back. The gesture was small and instinctive, the kind of touch built through years of knowing when the person beside you needed strength without wanting to be held upright.

Salvatore had touched me that way.

The memory entered cleanly and cut as it passed.

Maxim looked at Rurik. Something silent moved between the two men, a question asked and answered without me. Then Maxim stepped aside.

“Illyria will take you.”

The house was warm and almost completely silent. Family photographs covered one wall near the staircase. I saw Henry among them before I forced myself to look away. There would be time to study every captured year after I no longer had the courage to climb the stairs; I couldn’t let photographs take what little strength remained.

Rurik remained downstairs with Maxim. Neither man protested when Illyria led me upward alone.

We passed a bowl filled with children’s forgotten things: a toy car, two stones, a red mitten, and a folded paper airplane. Henry lived in a home where someone collected what he left behind because they knew he would come back for it.

Illyria stopped outside the last room and placed her hand on the knob. “He sleeps deeply, but he talks sometimes.”

“What does he say?”

“Mostly nonsense. Once he argued with Little Max for ten minutes about who owned the moon.”

A laugh caught inside my chest and became something painful. “Who won?”

“Henry. He said Little Max could visit whenever he wanted.”

That generosity belonged to Salvatore. So did the arrogance of claiming the moon before offering visitation rights.

Illyria opened the door.

A night-light cast dim stars across the ceiling. Henry slept in the center of a bed shaped for a child who had recently outgrown little-boy furniture but wasn’t ready for anything adult. One arm rested above his head. The blankets had twisted around his legs, leaving one bare foot exposed, and his dark hair fell across his forehead in the same stubborn curl Salvatore had never managed to tame.

I stopped in the doorway.

Every part of my body recognized him. My arms remembered his infant weight. My breasts remembered feeding him. My hands remembered the fragile curve of his skull. Instinct demanded that I gather him against me and kiss every missed year from his face.

I couldn’t move.

If I woke him, he would see a woman crying beside his bed and wonder why she looked at him as though he were both miracle and wound. I wanted to tell him his father had loved him enough to make enemies of monsters. I wanted one selfish moment when the word mother belonged to me.

Wanting had already cost him enough.

Illyria stood beside me for a long time before she whispered, “I’m sorry.”

I turned toward her. Tears had filled her eyes, and she made no attempt to hide them.

“For what?”