Viktor found me at the coat check.

I was pulling on my wrap, fingers still a little unsteady, when I heard his footsteps behind me. Unhurried. Deliberate. I turned.

He didn't say anything about Grant. He didn't have to. He just looked at me for a moment with those sharp blue eyes, like he was reading something written in a language most people had forgotten.

Then he reached into his jacket pocket and held out a card. Cream stock. Simple font. Just his name and an email address.

"The work of someone who truly understands mechanisms should never go unnamed," he said quietly. "If you ever wish to correspond."

I took it. Closed my hand around it.

"Thank you," I said. Two words. They weren't enough, but they were all I had that wouldn't crack.

He nodded once, like we'd settled something between us, and walked back into the party. I stood there for another second, the card pressed into my palm, and then I went home.

—

The workshop was dark when I got back. I didn't turn on the overhead light. Just the lamp on the bench, the same yellow circle I'd worked inside for eleven months.

Grant's grandfather's pocket watch sat on the velvet cloth where I'd left it that morning. Case open. Movement exposed. The escapement catching the light in tiny, even flashes.

I sat down, wound the crown slowly, and held it up to my ear.

The sound was perfect.

Not almost perfect. Not good enough. Perfect—a clean, measured tick with no flutter, no drag, no hesitation. The kind of sound a movement makes when every part has found its right relationship to every other part. I'd memorized the frequency weeks ago, the way you memorize a word in another language until it stops sounding foreign. Now it just sounded like the truth.

I set it down and opened my leather notebook to the last section. Forty-seven pages on this one watch. Sketches of the mainspring in cross-section, notes on the jewel replacements, three different attempts at the beat error calculation before I got it right. My handwriting got smaller toward the end, more compressed, like I was trying to fit everything I knew into a space that kept shrinking.

I traced the final diagram with my fingertip. The balance wheel, the pallet fork, the escape wheel. Everything turning, everything dependent, everything in its place.

I closed the notebook.

Then I took the square of leather—the same kind my father used to wrap his most important documents, soft brown, worn at the corners—and I folded it around the watch the way you'd wrap something you intended to keep safe for a long time. I tied it with the cord. Set it in the center of the bench under the lamp.

Two seconds per day. Museum-grade. Done.

I didn't feel triumphant. I felt finished. There's a difference.

—

Reign's office smelled like coffee and paper. He had the legal pad out before I'd even sat down, pen already in hand, like he'd been thinking about this since the last time I left.

I spread the documents across his desk in order. The original licensing agreement—my father's signature at the bottom, slightly cramped, the way he always signed when he was nervous. The termination clause on page seven, the expiration date circled in pencil by an IP attorney I'd seen six months ago. Payne Technologies' current patent filings, pulled from public record. Three years of their annual revenue reports.

Reign didn't touch anything yet. He just read.

Then he picked up his pen and started mapping it on the legal pad. Dates in one column, revenue figures in another. He drew a single horizontal line and wrote two numbers on either side of it: the date the license expired, and the date Payne Technologies filed their most recent dependent patent.

The gap between them was eighteen months.

He tapped the number at the bottom of the revenue column. Then he looked up.

"Three hundred and forty million," he said. Quiet. Flat. Like he was reading a weather report. "That's the unauthorized commercial use exposure under current statute. Before we get to injunctive relief or licensing back-payments."

I held his gaze. My left hand found my right wrist under the table, pressed once, and let go.

"And the core algorithm," I said. "If we pull the license entirely."

He set the pen down. "Then Payne Technologies can't operate. Not legally. Not at scale." He paused. "You understand what you're holding."

"I do."

He was quiet for a moment. Outside, a truck moved past on the street below, the sound rising and fading.

"When you're ready," he said, "I'll take the case."

No conditions. No qualifications. Just yes.

I gathered the documents back into the leather folder, edge by edge, the way my father taught me to handle anything that mattered.

"I'll be ready soon," I said.

Grant's birthday was in three weeks.

Miley let herself in on a Tuesday afternoon, the way she always did now, like the apartment was already half hers. Grant was at the office. I was at the kitchen island with a cup of coffee gone cold, going through catering menus for a party I didn't care about, when I heard her heels on the marble.

She didn't call out a greeting. She just walked in and stood across the island from me, arms crossed, and for once she wasn't smiling.

"Can I get you something?" I asked.

"No." She looked at me the way you'd look at a stain you were deciding whether to bother cleaning. "I actually came to talk to you. Woman to woman."

I set my coffee down. "Okay."

"You've always known what this marriage is, haven't you?" Her voice was quiet, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "A transaction. Grant needed a compliant solution. Your family needed money." She let that sit for a second. "Don't mistake convenience for belonging, Adalyn. You were never going to belong here. Not really."

I didn't blink. I didn't reach for my wrist, either, though I felt the old pull to do it.

I just looked at her.

Something flickered across her face — not quite confusion, more like she'd thrown a punch and hit air. She'd wanted tears. She'd wanted my voice to shake, my eyes to go wet, something she could carry back to Grant later, wrapped in fake concern. *She got so upset, Grant. I felt bad, honestly.*

Instead she got silence. Steady, unbothered silence.

"That's all," she said finally, like she needed to fill the space herself since I wouldn't. She picked up her bag from the counter. "I just thought someone should say it plainly."

"Thank you for your honesty," I said. Two words too calm to be sarcasm, which made it worse than sarcasm.

She left faster than she'd arrived. I heard the door close, then the elevator. I sat there a while longer with my cold coffee and thought, *You have no idea what you just handed me.* Every word she'd said was true. I did know what this marriage was. I'd known for a long time. She thought she was cutting me open with it. She didn't understand that the wound had already closed a long time ago, and what was underneath now wasn't soft anymore.

—

The gala was three days later, at The Plaza, in a ballroom dressed up in gold light and white flowers, two hundred people who all wanted to be seen being there. I dressed alone in our bedroom while Grant took a call in his study, his voice low and important through the wall.

I chose a dark green gown, simple lines, silk that moved like water when I walked. No label anyone would recognize. The kind of fabric that only reveals itself under a certain light, to someone who knows to look. I liked that about it. I liked that most of the room wouldn't understand what they were looking at.

I wrapped the pocket watch myself, one last time, in the same soft leather I'd used in the workshop, tied with the same cord. It sat in a small velvet box after that, unassuming, easy to overlook if you didn't know what was inside.

In the elevator down, I caught my reflection in the brass doors. Green dress, dark hair pinned back, the little box held in both hands like something alive. I touched my left wrist without meaning to — the place where the loupe used to rest, hours and hours of it, night after night — and then let my hand drop.

I wasn't nervous. I noticed that clearly, the way you notice weather. No fluttering, no tight chest. Just a kind of stillness I recognized now, the same stillness that had settled over me at Eleanor's toast, at the auction preview, at Miley's kitchen-island cruelty. I was not afraid of tonight. I was finished with it before it even began.

—

The painting was the first thing anyone saw walking into the ballroom. Miley had arranged it near the entrance, mounted under its own light, a little brass plaque beneath it with the artist's name and the auction house and a price that had been leaked, somehow, to exactly the right people. A cluster of guests stood in front of it, champagne glasses lifted, saying the artist's name like a password. Someone mentioned the auction record. Someone else said *investment piece* like it was a compliment to the canvas itself.

I stood a little apart, holding the velvet box in both hands, and watched the whole performance without expression. It really was a performance — the lighting, the placement, the plaque, timed to catch every guest before they'd even found the bar. Miley stood near it, glowing, accepting compliments like they were meant for her.

I waited. Somewhere in this room, Grant was working the crowd, laughing at something, checking his watch out of habit rather than need. I would find a quiet moment with him. I had waited eleven months for this box to be ready. I could wait a little longer for the right five minutes.

The box felt very light in my hands. I knew exactly what was inside it. I wondered if he ever would.

The receiving line thinned out around nine. Grant stood near the ballroom entrance, shaking hands, laughing at things that weren't funny, and I waited for the gap. I'd learned to read his schedule the way I read a movement—watch for the pause between beats, then move.

The gap came. I stepped up to him with the velvet box in both hands.

"Happy birthday," I said.

He looked at the box like he'd forgotten I might give him something. He took it anyway, because two hundred people were watching, and Grant never dropped a gesture in public. He opened the lid. Lifted the watch out. Turned it over once.

I watched his face instead of the watch. I already knew every millimeter of that movement, every jewel, every polished pivot. I wanted to see him find it.

Four seconds. I counted them without meaning to—the same way I count beats on a balance wheel, out of habit, out of a whole year of listening. His eyes moved over the engraving on the caseback, his grandfather's initials, the ones I'd cleaned by hand with a toothpick and rouge cloth because the acid bath would have eaten the detail. Then over the face, restored bone-white, the numerals repainted from a photograph I'd found in an estate archive in Connecticut. Then, briefly, to the exhibition caseback, where the escapement ticked behind sapphire glass, clean and even and alive.

Four seconds. Then he closed the case.

"Nice," he said, already looking past me. "Thanks."

He slid it into his jacket pocket the way you'd pocket a stick of gum.

I opened my mouth—to say something about the beat rate, the two seconds a day, eleven months, my father's leather, anything—and that's when Miley arrived at his elbow in a cloud of perfume, gesturing at the flower arrangements like they were her own private accomplishment.

"Grant, isn't the lighting divine? I told them exactly how to hang the—" She stopped, noticed the little bulge in his pocket. "What's that?"

He pulled the watch back out without even looking at me first. Didn't ask. Didn't think to.

"Here, you should have this." He held it out to her, easy, generous, a man giving away something that had cost him nothing. "It's some old watch Adalyn fixed up. You like antiques."

The words landed somewhere behind my ribs and just sat there. *Some old watch.* Fixed up. Like I'd glued a chipped teacup back together on a rainy afternoon.

Miley took it. Turned it over with two careless fingers, the same way you'd flip through a stack of coasters looking for one you liked. "Oh, it's charming," she said, in the voice she used for things she had already stopped thinking about. She didn't open the case. She didn't ask what was inside, or who had made it, or why the hands were shaped the way they were. She dropped it into her evening bag between a lipstick and a phone, and the little clasp snapped shut over eleven months of my life like it was nothing at all.

Because to her, it was nothing at all.

Grant put his hand at the small of her back and steered her toward a cluster of guests near the bar, already laughing at something someone said, already gone.

I stood in the middle of the ballroom. The string quartet kept playing. Someone's champagne glass caught the light somewhere to my left. The whole room moved around me the way water moves around a stone, and I understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that nothing I did tonight would ever be enough. It never had been. I had just needed one final, undeniable proof, and he had just handed it to me without even noticing he'd done it.

I set my champagne glass down on the nearest table. My hand didn't shake. I noticed that, the way you notice weather.

I didn't move. I didn't chase after the watch, didn't ask for it back, didn't make a scene. There was nothing left to fight for in that box. The thing I'd actually made—the hours, the calibration, the care—none of that had ever been visible to him in the first place. You can't lose what someone never saw.

I waited. Not long. Grant turned back toward me eventually, out of habit more than interest, the way you glance at a clock you already know the time on.

Our eyes met.

Something in my face made him stop mid-sentence with whoever he'd been talking to. I saw it land—the stillness, the absence of anything he recognized as hurt. He'd expected tears, maybe, or the quiet sulking he was used to. He got neither.

"I want a divorce," I said. Quiet. Even. No wobble in it anywhere.

Grant laughed. A short, surprised bark of a laugh, the kind you give a joke that catches you off guard.

Then he looked at my face again, and the laugh died somewhere in his throat.

He realized, a beat too late, that I wasn't joking at all.