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“I know that I still love my husband. I always will.”

“I have known that from the beginning.”

“Salvatore isn’t a memory I will eventually put away. He isn’t a grief that becomes smaller because another man waits long enough.”

Rurik finally looked at me. “I don’t want you to put him away.”

“Then what do you want?”

“The right to decide for myself whether what remains of you is enough.”

My throat closed. “There’s nothing left.”

“Stop deciding what I am allowed to love.”

The rebuke exposed the arrogance inside my grief. I had measured what remained and declared it worthless without asking whether anyone agreed. I had done it to my mother and Henry. Now I was doing it to Rurik because dismissing his love seemed kinder than allowing it to become another loss.

Perhaps Salvatore had told himself the same thing. Perhaps every secret he’d carried home had been another part of himself he decided I was better without.

I turned away because the tenderness in his anger was more than I could survive while looking at him. The window reflected a woman who seemed older than she had hours before, emptied by one goodbye and broken open by a love she had not asked to receive.

“It isn’t fair to you,” I said.

“Love is not a business arrangement. Fairness has nothing to do with it.”

“You fell in love with a widow who sleeps beside another man’s ghost.”

“I fell in love with a woman who still wakes up.” His gaze didn’t leave mine. “A woman who watched her son from a park bench for years and called the pain mercy because he was safe. A woman who looked at files filled with criminals and saw the children trapped between their names. Don’t reduce her to the man she buried. Salvatore would hate you for that more than I do.”

The mention of my husband should have felt like trespass. From Rurik, it felt like recognition. Loving me meant sharing every room with Salvatore’s absence, yet he hadn’t demanded I clear a space.

“You’ll spend every day competing with a dead man.”

“I don’t compete with Salvatore.” The answer was immediate. “He gave you a life I wish you still had. He gave you Henry. He died trusting me with truths he couldn’t carry home to you. I owe him loyalty, but I am allowed to hate that he left you behind.”

Tears burned my eyes. “He didn’t choose to leave.”

“Neither will you.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“No.” His honesty hurt more than reassurance would have. “I cannot promise you will live. I can promise you will not walk toward death alone because you think solitude makes the sacrifice cleaner.”

“And if staying beside me gets you killed?”

“That is my risk to choose.”

“You say that as if your life belongs only to you.”

The bitter irony silenced us both. Rurik’s mouth shifted without humor, and I understood he had led me into the argument deliberately.

“It does not,” he said. “That is why I will not throw it away. But belonging to others does not mean surrendering every choice to their fear. It means allowing them to stand beside you when the choice becomes dangerous.”

I pressed my hand against my mouth. Rurik watched without reaching for me. Even after telling me he loved me, he waited for permission to cross the narrow space between us.

That restraint undid the last of mine.

I lowered my hand and extended it toward him.