The Bushwick sublet has one window and a radiator that clanks like it's angry at me personally. I sit on the floor because there's no table yet, and I write the letter on the back of a takeout menu because it's the only paper I can find.

One line. That's all it needs.

*You can have it back. I never wanted to be a place someone kept her.*

I don't cry writing it. I thought I would. I fold the menu into an envelope instead, seal it, and write his name on the front in the same handwriting I used to sign five years of birthday cards.

Averie comes at seven, still in scrubs, hair falling out of its clip. She looks at the envelope like it might bite her.

"You don't have to do it this way," she says.

"I know."

"Then why—"

"Because if I tell him first, he'll talk me out of it. He's good at that." I press the envelope into her hand. "Only after he's seen. Not before. You understand me? Not one minute before."

She holds it like it's already heavier than paper. "And the box?"

"White. Ribbon, not bow. Packed on ice, the way you'd ship anything that has to stay alive a little longer than it should." I say it steady, the way I'd describe binding a spine, gluing a torn page. Technical. Clean. "Courier to The Plaza. Timed for the ceremony. Not before, not after. During."

Averie's jaw works. "Brynn, that is — that's a message. You understand that's a message, not a medical instruction."

"Good," I say. "I want it read."

She doesn't argue anymore. She just nods, once, like something in her has finally stopped fighting the current, and slides the envelope into her bag next to a folder of consent forms I already signed in a hand that didn't shake nearly as much as I expected.

---

The flowers show up two days later — at my father's address, not mine, because Callen doesn't actually know where I live now, and he didn't ask. White peonies, the kind I used to love before I knew loving them was scripted. No card. Just an assumption, wrapped in cellophane, dying slowly on my father's doorstep.

Yosef calls that night. His voice is the same flat, careful thing it's always been, like he's reading off a teleprompter even when there isn't one.

"He thinks you're cooling off," he says. "His words. 'She always comes back.'"

I laugh, and it comes out wrong, more air than sound. "Does he."

"He's not calling you. He's not looking for you. I wanted you to hear that from me before you heard it from somewhere worse."

"Thank you, Yosef." I mean it. It's the closest thing to kindness anyone in that building has offered me in a week.

There's a pause, longer than his pauses usually run. "For what it's worth," he says, "the table he drove to a landfill for — that wasn't about the table."

I don't answer that. I don't know what to do with it yet. I hang up before he can say anything else that might have mattered a year ago.

---

Skye's Instagram post goes up that same night. My silk robe, the pale gray one I bought at a shop in the Village because the woman behind the counter said it looked like moonlight on water. Skye's wearing it open at the collar, the Romero diamond turned just so toward the camera, my ring catching light that used to catch on my hand.

*Home again* ❤️, the caption says. Forty thousand likes by morning.

I stare at it longer than I should, waiting to feel something specific — rage, grief, anything with a name. What I feel instead is smaller and colder than that. Recognition. Like watching someone finally take off a mask I already knew was there.

A cousin of mine who still follows the family accounts sends me a screenshot from the Romero dinner two nights later — Diane at the head of the table, champagne flute raised, Skye seated exactly where I used to sit, laughing at something Callen said. The caption under the photo, posted by one of Diane's society friends, reads: *So good to have her back where she belongs.*

Where she belongs. Not where I belonged. There's a difference, and everyone at that table has always known it.

I hear, secondhand, that Skye's already talking florists. A different palette. A different menu. A different bride wearing my dress on my wedding day, three days from now, in a room full of people who will clap for her like they never clapped for me.

I set my phone face-down on the floor of the sublet and look at the one window, the radiator ticking its slow, ugly rhythm, and I think about the box Averie is packing ice into somewhere across the river.

Let her have the seat. Let her have the ring, the robe, the florist.

She can't have what's already scheduled to arrive at nine sharp on Saturday morning, in a white box, tied with ribbon, cold enough to keep.

The photo loads slow on my phone, like even the internet is embarrassed for me. Callen in a charcoal suit, Skye's hand curled into his elbow, both of them lit gold under the Romero Global step-and-repeat. Her head tilted just so. His face doing that practiced calm he wears for cameras, the one I used to think was shyness.

The caption reads: *Romero heir reunited with cherished companion at charity preview.* Cherished companion. Not fiancée. Not almost-wife. I search the whole article for my name and find nothing, not even a ghost of it, which is funny, because a ghost of me is exactly what's reading this.

I picture the room before the shutter clicked. Diane at his shoulder, murmuring numbers — stock price, sentiment, the optics of grief versus the optics of a fairy tale resurrected. The publicist saying something soft and practical like *let them write the story, it's a good story.* And Callen, saying nothing, which is its own kind of yes. He didn't correct a single word. He just stood there and let the caption become true by not making it false.

I put the phone down on the floor of the sublet and don't pick it up again for a long time.

—

I go back to the penthouse on a Thursday, when I know his calendar has him in a boardroom on the forty-first floor and hers has her wrapped in seaweed somewhere on the Upper East Side. I still have the key. Nobody's changed the code on the elevator, which tells me something about how little I've been thought about since I left.

The apartment smells like her perfume now, something sharp and citrus laid over the ghost of my candles. The reclaimed table's absence is a clean rectangle of unfaded floor, a scar shaped like a year of my life. I don't look at the mantel where the photo used to hang. I don't look at much of anything.

Biscuit finds me before I find her, streaking out from behind the curtain with her ears — ear — flat, and then she stops, sniffs, and climbs me like I never left. I sit on the floor with her in the empty rectangle where the table used to be and let her push her face into my collarbone.

"Hey, baby," I whisper. "Hey."

She purrs so hard her whole body shakes with it, and I hold her until my knees ache from the hardwood, until the light through the window goes the color of a bruise. I don't take my restoration tools, even though I know they're probably in a box in some closet, spared from the landfill by the same man who threw a fit over a picture frame and let a woman erase everything else. I don't take the jewelry. I don't take a single thing that has his fingerprints on it.

"Someone's going to take care of you," I tell her, and I don't know yet who that will be, but I know it won't be Skye — Skye who flinches when the cat looks at her too long, who's already muttering about shelters. I set Biscuit down gently by her food bowl, and she watches me go with her one good ear swiveled toward the door like she already knows.

I don't cry until I'm three blocks away.

—

I walk the whole way back to Brooklyn instead of taking the train. Past the West Village bookshop, closed for renovation now, brown paper taped over the windows like a bandage over a wound that healed wrong. I stand there a minute, remembering rain that wasn't an accident, an umbrella that was a location pin, a smile that was a payment. I don't feel angry anymore. I feel like I'm reading an old book I already know the ending to.

I go past Green-Wood without meaning to, feet just carrying me there, and I stand at the gates and don't go in. Somewhere past those gates is a headstone with a dead woman's name on it, and somewhere past that is the spot where I said yes to a ring held out over her grave, believing it was ours. I don't say goodbye to her either. I don't owe her that.

I don't say goodbye to anyone. That's the thing nobody tells you about leaving — you think there'll be a scene, a door slamming, someone's face when they realize. There isn't. There's just a woman walking through a city that doesn't know it's about to lose her, holding nothing, owed nothing, owing nothing back.

—

The surgical suite is colder than I remember, all white tile and low hum. Averie's hands are steady when she lays the forms in front of me, less steady when she starts talking numbers again — re-transplant lists, survival curves, *there's still time, Brynn, there's still—*

"More time to be what?" I ask her.

She doesn't answer that. Nobody ever does.

I sign my name without the painkillers, feeling every letter, every second of it real. I hand her the envelope one more time, say the instructions one more time — white box, ribbon, nine sharp, during, not before — and then I lie back on the table and let the lights swallow the ceiling whole.