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He could have offered comforting lies or placed himself inside memories that didn’t belong to him. Instead, he gave me only what he knew and protected the boundary around the life that had been ours. Somehow, that honesty made me trust him more.

Rurik started to stand. “I should let you finish your dinner.”

My hand moved before caution could stop it. I reached across the table and wrapped my fingers around his wrist.

Warmth passed between us, quick and startling. Rurik looked down at my hand but didn’t cover it with his. He let the touch be mine—mine to choose—mine to end.

“Thank you,” I whispered. “For telling me about him.”

“I would tell you more if I had more to give.”

My fingers loosened, but I didn’t pull away at once. For one breath, I sat with my hand against the pulse of a living man while loving my dead husband with everything left in me.

Both truths existed. Neither erased the other.

When we left the restaurant, Rurik walked beside me through the warm Boston night. He didn’t ask for my number or tell me when I would see him again. At the corner, he waited until my car arrived, then opened the door without touching me.

“Good night, Maddie.”

“Good night, Rurik.”

The car pulled away, and I watched him through the rear window until the city folded around him. I didn’t know Sinclair had sent him to Boston. I didn’t know his business that night had been me. I didn’t know he had followed me to make sure I returned safely, or that he’d carried the responsibility inside Salvatore’s file for years.

All I knew was that, for the length of one meal, Rurik had not asked me to leave Salvatore behind.

He had given me back pieces of my husband I’d thought were lost forever.

What I didn’t yet understand was what Rurik would do when the danger inside that file finally reached for me.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

One week later, Boston

The text arrived at 7:14 that evening while I stood in Colleen’s kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil.

The number wasn’t one saved in my phone. There was no name, no explanation, and no warning strong enough to prepare me for the three sentences waiting beneath it.

Unknown: Cian’s been hurt. He’s at Massachusetts General. Your mother needs you.

For several seconds, I stared without understanding. The words remained ordinary shapes on the screen while my mind refused to arrange them into meaning. Then the kettle screamed behind me, and my body remembered how to move.

I shut off the burner hard enough to make the metal grate jump, then called Mom. Her phone rang until voicemail picked up. I hung up without leaving a message and called my father. His phone went straight to voicemail. Uncle Sal didn’t answer. Neither did Duncan, or Mac.

Five people who always answered me had gone silent at once. Panic didn’t arrive as fear. It arrived as certainty: Dad was hurt, Mom was alone, and whatever had happened was bad enough that someone else had been forced to tell me.

I grabbed my coat from the back of the chair and shoved my feet into the shoes by the door without fastening them properly. My purse was still on the counter. I went back for it, dropped my phone, cursed when it hit the floor, and nearly fell trying to pick it up. Every second became something I could punish myself for later. Every breath I took in that apartment was one I wasn’t spending beside my father.

Cian was my father. I had loved him most of my life without understanding why his presence felt different from every other man around Uncle Sal. He remembered birthdays Nolan ignored, attended school events Nolan dismissed, and never closed the door when I knocked on it. Cian had been allowed to love me as an uncle while Nolan wore a title blood had never given him.

Knowing the truth hadn’t given us back the years. It had only shown me how many moments we had misunderstood while living them. We’d not had enough time to replace the old name with the right one. I still called him Cian more easily than Dad, still hesitated before touching him, unsure what daughters were allowed to ask from fathers they had only just discovered. The text made every unfinished conversation feel like something death had already begun collecting. I couldn’t lose him before we learned how to become father and daughter.

My ride was still four minutes away when I reached the street. Evening had settled over Boston in bruised blue and gray, and the heat trapped between the buildings pressed damp against my skin. Traffic moved at the end of the block. Somewhere above me, someone laughed through an open window, the ordinary sound so careless it made me hate the world for continuing before I knew whether Cian would.

I stepped toward the curb and opened the rideshare app again, watching the little car crawl toward me on the map.

“Maddie.”

Rurik stepped out from beside a black SUV parked several yards behind me.