Part 2 She had learned to live smaller.

“When?”

“After we broke up.”

Sabine folded her arms protectively across her body. “She wanted to leave because she was embarrassed.”

Nora looked down at the floor.

There were faint marks in the dark wood where the sunlight changed direction, small scratches from years of furniture shifting and shoes crossing the room. She remembered being here before, in a different version of her life. Adrian’s mother had been alive then. The room had smelled like lemon polish and lilies. Nora had stood by the windows while Adrian argued with a caterer about whether the flowers were too formal.

She had loved him then.

That was the unbearable part.

Not that he had believed the worst of her.

That she had loved him enough to believe he never would.

“I was offered the job because I needed one,” Nora said.

Adrian’s face went still.

Sabine looked away first.

Celia took one step into the room.

Her shoes made a soft sound against the dark wood.

She still did not speak.

Adrian looked at his aunt, then back at Nora.

“You never told me about Lisbon.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Nora laughed again, quieter this time.

“Because you weren’t taking my calls.”

The words landed harder than she intended.

Adrian’s eyes lowered.

Sabine stepped forward. “That’s unfair.”

Nora looked at her.

“Is it?”

“You disappeared. You stopped answering people. You left the city.”

“I left because everyone treated me like I had done something unforgivable.”

“You had.”

Adrian’s head lifted sharply.

Sabine seemed to realize too late what she had said.

Nora felt the old bruise of it open inside her.

Three years ago, a private message from Adrian had been leaked to a columnist. It had not been a scandal by anyone else’s standards. It was not a crime. It was not even particularly cruel. It was a vulnerable message, written after a fight with his father, about feeling trapped in the family name and afraid of becoming the kind of man who let money make decisions for him.

Nora had been the only person he showed it to.

Then the message appeared online, stripped of context, paired with a photograph of Adrian leaving a hospital with his mother.

The internet had called him spoiled. The board had called him reckless. His father had called Nora a parasite.

Nora never knew who leaked it.

But everyone knew who had access.

Adrian never said the words aloud. He did not have to. His silence did the work.

Nora had moved out of their apartment two days later.

Sabine had appeared in Adrian’s life six months after that.

Or at least that was when Nora learned about her.

“You still think I did it,” Nora said.

Adrian did not answer.

Sabine turned toward him. “You see? This is what she does. She drags us backward every time we see her.”

“No,” Nora said. “You drag us backward because you never stop lying.”

Sabine’s tears disappeared.

For one second, the woman standing there was the same woman who had shoved Nora to the floor.

Adrian saw it too.

Nora knew because his eyes changed.

Sabine looked at him and seemed to understand she had gone too far.

Her face crumpled again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just overwhelmed.”

“By what?” Adrian asked.

The question was quiet.

Sabine stared at him.

“By her being here,” she said at last.

Nora could not help it. She looked at Adrian.

He had always hated conflict. Not in the ordinary way. He did not avoid hard conversations because they frightened him. He avoided them because he believed he could control them by delaying them. He could make problems manageable by keeping his voice level, by arranging people in rooms, by offering solutions before anyone had asked for them.

It was one of the things Nora once admired about him.

It was also how he had lost her.

Now he stood between the woman he was planning to marry and the woman he had once abandoned, wearing a tuxedo in the middle of a bright penthouse, with his aunt watching from the doorway.

He looked less like a man in control than a man who had discovered control was an illusion and did not know what to do without it.

“Why did you come upstairs?” he asked Nora.

She looked at Sabine.

Sabine looked back.

“Answer him,” Sabine said softly.

Nora drew in a slow breath.

“Celia asked me to come to the luncheon.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“She also said you wanted to speak to me.”

Adrian frowned. “I didn’t.”

Nora’s gaze moved to Sabine.

There it was.