Page 68 of His Vow

"You're smiling."

"This is just my face."

"Your face has never done that before and we both know it."

I stepped back. The distance returned — warm now. Chosen. The distance of a woman moving toward something at her own pace.

"Goodnight, Nolan. We're working on things."

I turned. Unlocked the door. Stepped inside.

Leaned against it. Closed my eyes. My lips were buzzing — the same as the first night on this stoop, when I slid down this same door and grinned at the ceiling. I didn't slide down tonight. I stood. Steadier than I was then. Knowing more. Choosing harder things.

Tomorrow would be hard. The gallery, the rebuilding, the long slow work of trust. My father's case moving through systems I couldn't control. Rhys facing Adira someday. Nolan fighting for the Vanguard with partners who didn't fully trust him yet.

But tonight I kissed a man in the same place where he first kissed me, and this time both of us knew exactly who we were. No masks. No plans. No architecture. Just two people on a stoop deciding to try again with their eyes open.

That was enough. For tonight, that was enough.

EPILOGUE

NOLAN

The gallery was smaller now.

Margaux secured a market-rate lease on her own — no hidden subsidies, no patriarch's connections, no shell grants. She renegotiated for less space with clean terms on untainted paper. Rafael helped repaint the walls that weekend. The three of them wore old clothes, rollers, and drop cloths. Soleil controlled the playlist. Rafael protested it. Margaux ignored him entirely.

The collectors who came because of Hugh's network were gone. The ones who remained came for the work.

Soleil's painting was on the wall.

The one she kept turned away. The one she showed me in her apartment the afternoon I stood in her studio and told her the figure was facing the window. It hung beside Rafael's new pieces — a shared show. Her name on the placard beside his. No Lattimore. Just Soleil.

I stood near the back of the room with a glass I hadn't drunk from and watched her move through the space. Barefoot again — the heels abandoned within the hour, kicked under the front desk the same way they'd been kicked off the first night. She was talking to a young couple about Rafael's new series, her hands moving while she spoke, tracing the dimensions of a canvas they couldn't see yet. The couple leaned toward her — pulled by the warmth, the attention, the particular quality of being looked at by Soleil Lattimore and feeling like the only person in the room.

Rafael stood by the streetscape wall, his button-down wrinkled, his hands in his pockets, his eyes scanning the crowd with the expression of a man walking toward a firing squad. Same as the first show. Some things didn't change. Soleil crossed the room to him, straightened his borrowed tie, and said something low that made his shoulders drop two inches. He exhaled. She squeezed his arm and moved on. The room followed her without knowing it.

Thea and Declan were near the wine table. Thea's ring caught the overhead lights every time she reached for her glass. Declan's arm rested along the small of her back, the two of them settled into each other with the ease of a decision that worked — two people who chose and kept choosing.

Declan caught my eye across the room. He held it for a beat.

The trust between us wasn't rebuilt yet. The fracture was still there — visible in the care he took with his words around me now, in the half-second pause before he returned my calls. But he was here. He came to her gallery on a Tuesday night, stood in the room, and drank the wine.

That meant something.

Julian was at the bar. His sleeves were rolled despite the dress code. A champagne flute dangled from his fingers while he talked to someone's date with the crinkled grin and the easy charm that made people forget he was the sharpest person in any room.

He laughed at something she said, and the sound was warm and real and carried across the gallery — filling the space, making it lighter.

Margaux ran the room. She moved between conversations with her phone in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Her dark bob swinging at her jaw, her expression cycling between professional composure and barely contained satisfaction. She passed me on her way to the back room and gave me a look that could strip paint off a wall. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a coffee she set on the table beside me without a word.

I picked it up and took a sip. Terrible. She'd made it with too much water and the grounds floating on the surface. I drank it without expression.

The room filled. Strangers and regulars. The art teacher from Queens who'd cried in front of the grandmother's kitchen at the first show was back, standing in the same spot, her eyes wet again. The young couple from the first night — the ones who'd held hands while they wrote the check — returned, browsing the new work.

Eleanor Voss was not here. She hadn't come on her own.

A woman in a gray blazer stopped beside me. She nodded at Soleil's painting on the far wall. "Is the artist here?"