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“I know.”

“She should have told you.”

“I know.”

“Someone should have told me.”

“I know, Maddie.”

The quiet certainty of his answer took the fight out of me. He was not defending Mom. He was not defending himself. He was letting me name what had been taken without demanding that I also excuse the frightened people who had taken it.

Cian pulled up outside Colleen’s building and shifted the car into park. Light spilled from the entrance across the sidewalk, but the apartment windows above stayed dark. Upstairs, borrowed furniture and empty rooms waited for me—none of them belonging to anyone who had ever made a place feel like home.

“Thank you for driving me.” I reached for the door handle.

“I’ll walk you up.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

I looked at him. The same answer lived in his expression: he would not force me to accept him, but he would not leave simply because absence would be easier.

I nodded.

He followed me inside and up the stairs. At the apartment door, I fumbled with the key before the lock finally gave. I stepped in first and reached for the light switch. The lamp beside the couch threw a weak circle of gold across the living room, leaving the kitchen and narrow hallway in shadow.

Cian stopped at the threshold. “Do you want me to come in?”

The question undid me more completely than any demand could have.

Everyone had always told me what I needed. Nolan decided I needed discipline. Uncle Sal decided I needed protection. Mom decided I needed ignorance. Salvatore and I had decided Henry needed another mother, and Illyria had decided my absence was the price of keeping him safe. Even the people who loved me had shaped my life with choices made on my behalf.

Cian asked.

I stepped aside and let him in.

He closed the door behind him but left it unlocked. While he shrugged out of his coat, I set my bag on the small table beside the couch. My fingers snagged on the chain beneath my sweater, pulling Salvatore’s ring into the open. The gold band fell against my chest, still warm from my skin.

Cian noticed.

His gaze lingered on the ring for only a heartbeat before he looked away, granting my marriage the privacy it had been denied in life. That small mercy broke through the last fragile thing holding me upright.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

The words came out quietly, but my body remembered where I had spoken them before—in an apartment crowded with Salvatore’s belongings, ten steps from a bathroom and an ending. Cian couldn’t know that, but the memory did. The room tilted. I grabbed the back of the couch as my knees weakened beneath me.

Cian moved at once, but he didn’t catch me before I sank to the floor. Instead, he lowered himself beside me, one knee on the rug, his hands hovering near my shoulders without touching.

“Maddie, look at me.”

I shook my head. “I can’t.”

“Look at me, baby.”

The endearment carried every year he had loved me without knowing why. I lifted my face, and the fear in his expression told me what my words had made him imagine.

“I’m not going to hurt myself,” I whispered. “I just don’t know how to keep living inside a life everyone else has already chosen for me.”