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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The key still fit the lock. I had not expected that small mercy. Nolan used to change the locks whenever suspicion convinced him someone had touched what belonged to him, but death had finally ended his need to decide who could enter. The brass turned beneath my hand, and the front door opened without resistance.

The brownstone was empty, but not with the quiet of a sleeping house—breathing bodies upstairs, tomorrow’s chores waiting in corners. This emptiness had been made. The entry table was gone, the mirror above it removed, and pale rectangles marked the places where family photographs had once tried to prove we belonged to one another. Nail holes remained like tiny puncture wounds in the walls.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. My footsteps traveled through the rooms and came back altered, as if the house had learned to echo after the people inside it stopped listening.

Someone had taken the rugs, lamps, curtains, and furniture. Scratches scarred the hardwood where heavy pieces had been dragged toward the door, cutting crooked lines through dust no one had bothered to sweep. Nothing remained of the life my mother built here except the damage left by its removal.

I wondered whether she had watched the movers carry everything away. Maybe she had stood on the same stairs and decided which objects deserved another home. The thought of her choosing what to save tightened my chest, so I stopped before imagination could put grief on her face.

I couldn’t think about Mom yet. Dad waited behind the same forbidden door, and Rurik stood beside him with Henry in Illyria’s arms. If I allowed one of them into my thoughts, the others would follow, and love would become a crowd large enough to block what had to be done.

The front parlor had always belonged to appearances. Nolan entertained men there whose laughter never reached their eyes. Mom served drinks while reading each shift in his mood, and I learned to descend the stairs without sound whenever voices sharpened. Even after I was grown, my body remembered where to stand so I remained outside the path of his anger.

Without the furniture, the room looked larger than it ever had. Morning light poured through uncovered windows and spread across the bare floor, revealing dust, chipped molding, and the darker outline where Nolan’s chair had sat like a throne.

I looked at that empty space and, for once, let myself replace him. No man would enter this room and make the air dangerous. No child would learn to stop laughing when footsteps crossed the hall. The house might have become proof that a place was not permanently owned by the worst thing done inside it. We could have taught every room a different memory and called it home again.

In that imagined life, Salvatore stretched across the couch beneath the windows, his jacket abandoned over one arm and his shoes left exactly where I would complain about tripping over them. Henry built something elaborate from wooden blocks on the rug and insisted his father was not allowed to help. Salvatore ignored the rule, of course, slipping pieces into the structure whenever our son looked away and acting wounded when Henry caught him.

I sat in the chair opposite them with a book open across my lap, reading the same sentence again and again because watching my husband and son mattered more than reaching the next page. Henry’s laughter filled the room without fear of who might hear it. Salvatore looked at me over our child’s head, and the private warmth in his eyes said this was the life we had fought to keep.

The vision vanished when I moved. There had never been blocks on the floor or Salvatore’s shoes beside the couch. Henry had never run through this house calling for his father. I had come back here alone after giving my son away and let everyone believe Salvatore was a man I once knew—not the husband whose absence made every room unbearable.

I walked into the dining room before the truth could bend my knees. The long table was gone, but shallow dents remained where its legs had pressed into the floor. I remembered meals eaten beneath Nolan’s scrutiny, silverware striking china too loudly, and Mom carefully steering conversation away from anything that might expose his temper.

The life I should have had entered anyway. Salvatore sat at one end of a smaller table because he would have rejected Nolan’s oversized monument to authority. I sat beside him instead of opposite him, close enough for his knee to touch mine beneath the wood. Henry argued that vegetables violated his rights while Salvatore solemnly offered to represent him in court.

There would have been birthdays in that room: cakes leaning slightly because I could never decorate them as neatly as I imagined, doorway marks rising from my waist to my shoulder as Henry grew taller, and Salvatore pretending not to grow emotional each year while taking too many photographs and insisting every blurry one was perfect.

I pressed my palm against the bare wall until the plaster cooled my skin. I couldn’t imagine Henry older. That future belonged to Illyria now, and letting myself enter it would turn resolve into pleading.

He was safe. That was the only future I needed. Henry was with Salvatore’s sister, behind Maxim’s guards and Illyria’s promise to live for him. Reagan had protected his identity from the public release. Whatever happened inside the brownstone couldn’t change the mother who would wake tomorrow, check his breakfast, remind him about school, and listen when he claimed ownership of the moon.

I repeated those truths until my hand stopped shaking. The kitchen smelled faintly of old wood and the cleaning solution the movers had used. The refrigerator, table, and copper pans were gone. Cabinet doors stood open, exposing shelves Mom had emptied with the same thoroughness she applied to survival.

I imagined Salvatore there on a winter morning, flour streaked across the front of his black shirt because Henry had decided pancakes required force. Music played from a radio near the sink. I entered wearing one of Salvatore’s shirts, and both of them looked at me with matching guilt while batter dripped from the ceiling.

In the life we should have had, I was allowed to be irritated by ordinary disasters. I could complain about sticky floors without measuring danger in a man’s response. Salvatore would have laughed, caught me around the waist, and kissed the anger from my mouth while Henry made theatrical noises of disgust.

We would have cleaned the kitchen together. That was the part grief made most precious—not the kiss, not the laughter, but the three of us remaining afterward to repair the mess.

I climbed the stairs slowly, carrying Salvatore’s files against my chest. Each step held a different memory of Nolan: his hand closing around my arm, his voice following me toward my bedroom, the knowledge that no locked door in his house could protect me from the man who owned the keys.

The second floor had been emptied as completely as the first. My mother’s room held only faded wallpaper and a line of dust where her dresser had stood. I didn’t cross the threshold. If I imagined her sleeping beside Nolan while loving Cian somewhere beyond these walls, I might begin forgiving choices I had no time left to understand.

My old bedroom waited at the end of the hall. Sunlight lay across the floor where my bed had been, and the closet door opened onto emptiness. This was where I had learned to hide bruises, swallow questions, and dream of leaving without understanding that freedom could become another exile.

I set the files inside the closet and removed the loose baseboard Nolan had never discovered. As a child, I had hidden letters, cash, and one photograph of Cian there because proof that someone gentle existed made the house survivable. The narrow space still opened behind the wood.

I wrapped the files inside my coat and pushed them deep into the hollow. Mom would remember the hiding place. If she didn’t, Dad would search until he found what his daughter had summoned him to retrieve. Together, they would give Uncle Sal everything Reagan’s release couldn’t safely make public.

The task steadied me. My parents would arrive this afternoon, after Sylvia had already come for me. They would not be beside me when the violence began, and no bullet meant for my body would have to pass through theirs first.

I replaced the baseboard and sat on the floor. Exhaustion loosened reality, and the room shifted around me. A larger bed appeared against the wall with Salvatore asleep on his stomach, one arm reaching across the space where I should have been. A crib stood near the window, though Henry had outgrown it years ago. Grief had no respect for time. It placed every age of the people we loved inside the same impossible room and asked us to choose which loss hurt most.

I saw Henry as a baby, warm and heavy against Salvatore’s bare chest. Then he became the little boy sleeping beneath the stars at Illyria’s house. In another blink, he was older, standing as tall as his father while I searched his face for years I had not witnessed.