Three years.

I don't know what I lost. I only know what I have.

Every morning I wake up before Koen. I pull on a sweater and make coffee and stand at the kitchen window while the Seattle mist lifts off the water. The light comes in slow here — gray first, then gold, then something warmer than gold that doesn't have a name. I watch it happen every day and it never gets boring.

I have a sketchbook on the counter. I don't remember starting it. But every few days my hand picks up a pen and starts moving — looping patterns, layered geometries, something that looks almost like fabric, almost like something I once knew. I never plan it. It just comes out. Koen says I do it when I'm happy. I believe him.

Tuesdays and Thursdays I go to yoga. The studio is six blocks away and I walk, coffee in hand, watching the city wake up around me. I know the woman at the front desk by name. I know which mat to take. I know that afterward I'll stop at Pike Place and buy peonies because there's something about peonies — the weight of them, the way they smell like rain and sweetness at the same time — that makes the whole day feel right.

I always pick them by scent first. Then color.

I don't know where that habit came from. I don't ask.

There are a lot of things I don't ask about.

My head hurts sometimes. A deep, pressing ache behind my eyes that comes without warning and stays until Koen sits me down on the couch and puts his hands on my temples and works slow circles until it eases. We do this every evening. It has become the rhythm of our nights — dinner, dishes, the couch, his hands.

"Why can't I remember things?" I asked him once. Early on. The headache had been bad that night and I was tired and the question just slipped out.

He didn't hesitate.

"Your brain decided to only keep the good stuff," he said. "That's how smart you are."

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

I've asked him the same question maybe a dozen times since then, in different moods, on different nights. He always says the same thing. And I always laugh. I don't know if that's strange. It doesn't feel strange. It feels like something solid I can put my weight on.

I am happy. Not the kind of happy where you're trying to convince yourself. The real kind. The kind that lives in small things — the mist, the peonies, the sketchbook, his hands.

I don't know what came before this. But I know it doesn't matter.

---

In a penthouse apartment in New York, the curtains are always drawn.

Julien Carter is awake at 3 AM. He is always awake at 3 AM. The insomnia found him three years ago and never left — no medication touches it, no amount of whiskey fully closes the gap. He sits in a leather chair by the window with a glass in his hand and the city glittering thirty floors below him like something beautiful and completely irrelevant.

He is thinner than he should be. His coat hangs wrong on his shoulders. His face has the particular hollowness of a man who has been eating just enough to stay alive and not a bite more.

Against his chest, on a chain beneath his shirt, is a locket. Inside the locket is a ring. White gold. Single inlaid diamond.

He touches it sometimes without thinking. Like a bruise he can't stop pressing.

Every Sunday he goes to the cemetery. He stands at the grave for a long time. He doesn't bring flowers anymore — he did, for the first year, and then one Sunday he arrived and couldn't make himself do it and he hasn't since. He just stands there. In the cold, or the heat, or the rain. He stands there and he looks at the name carved in the stone and he does not speak because there is nothing left to say that he hasn't already said to the dark at 3 AM a thousand times.

Melina is in the house. She is always in the house. She moves through the rooms and manages the child and speaks to him sometimes and he hears the sounds she makes but they don't reach him. She could be furniture. She could be weather. He looks through her the way you look through glass — aware of the surface, seeing only what's beyond.

He hasn't touched her since the night Yara died.

He doesn't think about why. He doesn't think about much.

The Carter family's business is bleeding. His mother calls. His lawyers call. Numbers move in directions they shouldn't. He signs what's put in front of him and goes back to the chair by the window and pours another two fingers and watches the city that keeps moving without him.

He deserves this. He knows that.

It doesn't help.

In Seattle, three thousand miles away, a woman laughs at something her husband said, and tucks a peony stem into a glass vase on the kitchen counter, and does not dream of anything at all.

The rain started just as I reached Pike Place Market.

I didn't mind. Seattle rain wasn't like rain anywhere else — it was softer, quieter, the kind that settled into your hair and your coat without making you feel drenched. I pulled my sweater tighter and ducked under the flower stall awning, shaking droplets from my sleeves.

Tuesdays were for peonies. I don't know when that became a rule, but it was one now, solid as the coffee I drank every morning or the way Koen's hands felt on my temples every night. Tuesdays meant peonies.

The vendor knew me by now. She smiled and gestured toward the back corner where the good ones were — the ones that hadn't been picked over yet, still tight-budded and heavy with scent.

I lifted a stem to my nose. Closed my eyes. Breathed in.

Rain and sweetness. Something else underneath I could never name. It made my chest feel warm.

Someone grabbed my arm.

Hard.

I jerked back, eyes snapping open. A man stood there — tall, gaunt, wearing a coat that looked expensive but hung all wrong on his frame, like he'd borrowed it from someone bigger. His face was unshaven. His eyes were red-rimmed and wild.

"It's you," he said. His voice cracked. "It's really you. You're alive."

I stared at him.

He was crying.

"I thought—" He grabbed my other arm, pulling me closer. "I thought you were dead. I thought I lost you. Oh god, Yara, you're alive—"

I didn't think. My hand came up fast and cracked across his face.

The sound was sharp. Clean. His head snapped to the side.

"Get your hands off me, you creep," I said.

I yanked my arms free. Stepped back. My heart was pounding but my voice came out steady. Clear.

He stood there, one hand pressed to his cheek, staring at me like I'd just shot him.

"Yara—"

"I don't know you," I said. "Don't touch me again."

I turned and walked away. Left the peonies on the counter. Didn't look back.

Behind me, I heard nothing. No footsteps. No voice calling after me. Just the rain and the market noise and my own pulse in my ears.

I kept walking until I hit the street. Then I stopped, pressed my back against a brick wall, and took three long breaths.

My hands were shaking.

I looked down at them. Watched them tremble. Didn't understand why.

He was just some guy. Some creep who grabbed me. It happened sometimes. Cities were full of people who didn't understand boundaries.

But something about his face—

I shook my head. Pushed off the wall. Walked home.

---

In the flower stall, Julien Carter stood frozen.

Rain dripped from the awning onto his shoulders. His cheek stung where she'd hit him. He didn't move to touch it again. He just stood there, staring at the space where she'd been, at the peony stem she'd left on the counter.

She didn't know him.

She looked at him like he was a stranger.

She slapped him and walked away and she didn't know him.

The vendor was saying something. Asking if he was okay. He didn't answer. He picked up the peony stem Yara had dropped. Held it carefully, like it might break.

She was alive.

She was alive and she was here and she was real.

For three years he had carried her death like a stone in his chest. For three years he had stood at a grave and touched a ring and drowned in the specific, endless horror of having destroyed the only thing that mattered and having no way to undo it.

And she was alive.

He walked out of the market into the rain. Stood on the sidewalk. Looked down the street where she'd gone.

He wasn't leaving Seattle.

---

I told Koen about it over dinner.

"Some guy grabbed me at the market today," I said, twirling pasta on my fork. "Total weirdo. Called me by name and started crying."

Koen's hand stopped halfway to his glass.

"He grabbed you?" His voice was very calm.

"Yeah. I slapped him." I grinned. "Pretty sure I left a mark."

"Did he follow you?"

"No. I just walked away. He didn't come after me." I took a bite. "Probably just some guy having a breakdown. You know how it is."

Koen set his glass down without drinking.

"What did he look like?"

I shrugged. "Tall. Thin. Expensive coat. Kind of… hollow, I guess. Like he hadn't been sleeping." I paused. "Why?"

"Just want to know," Koen said. "In case I see him."

He smiled. It didn't reach his eyes.

Under the table, his hand was a fist.

"I'm fine," I said. "Really. It was just weird, not scary."

"Good." He reached across the table and took my hand. His grip was warm. Steady. "If you see him again, call me right away. Okay?"

"Okay."

We finished dinner. He did the dishes while I sketched at the counter — loops and layers, something almost like fabric. When my head started hurting, he sat me on the couch and worked slow circles at my temples until the ache faded.

"Better?" he asked.

"Better," I said.

I leaned against his shoulder. Outside, the rain kept falling. Inside, everything was warm and safe and mine.

I didn't think about the man in the market again.

But that night, Koen stayed awake long after I fell asleep. He sat in the dark living room with his phone in his hand, staring at nothing, running through scenarios and contingencies and the specific, cold calculations of a man who had already lost her once and would burn the world down before it happened again.