The café in Brooklyn had exactly six tables and a chalkboard menu that misspelled "cappuccino" in a different way every week. I liked that about it. I liked that nothing here had anything to do with Carson, or Kyra, or the version of me that used to check her phone under the table like it was a leash.

Enzo was already there when I walked in, folded into a chair too small for him, a mug in front of him he hadn't touched. He stood up when he saw me. Didn't rush around the table. Just stood, and waited, and let me come to him.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

I sat down across from him and wrapped both bandaged hands around the mug the waitress brought before I'd even ordered. The heat pressed through the gauze, dull and far away, the way most of my pain had started to feel lately — present, but no longer the loudest thing in the room.

He looked at my hands. He didn't ask.

So I told him.

"It's over," I said. No warm-up. No easing in. Three years didn't deserve a gentle sentence. "Carson and I are done. Actually done. I moved out. I have a studio with bad carpet and a radiator that sounds like it's dying. I burned my hands pulling my grandmother's locket out of a fire he started, and I don't feel anything when I think about him anymore except tired." I took a breath. "I wanted you to hear it from me. Not from anywhere else."

Enzo didn't say anything right away. He just listened, the way he always did, like my words were something worth the full weight of his attention and not just a pause before his turn to talk. The espresso machine hissed behind the counter. Somewhere a spoon clinked against a cup. I watched his face for the thing I'd been braced for without realizing it — pity, or worse, triumph — and found neither.

When I finished, he reached across the table. Slowly. Like he was approaching something wild that might startle.

He turned my bandaged hand over, palm up, resting it in his.

"You know what happens to meteorites when they re-enter the atmosphere?" he said.

I blinked at him. "Is this a science lecture? Right now?"

"Just answer the question."

"...They burn."

"They burn," he agreed, tracing one finger, feather-light, along the edge of the gauze. "Thousands of degrees. Most of them don't survive it. But some do. They burn, and they land, and they're still here." He looked up at me. "Still here, Avery."

I stared at him. The steam from my coffee curled up between us, and for a second I couldn't find a single word in my entire vocabulary, three years of writing taglines for a living and I had nothing.

"That," I finally said, "is the nerdiest thing anyone has ever said to me."

He grinned, that easy, unbothered grin that never once made me feel like I owed him anything for it. "Did it work?"

It had. God help me, it had.

I told myself the apartment visit would take four minutes. In and out. Passport from the drawer in the study, nothing else, no goodbyes, no closure I didn't already have.

I used my old key one last time. The door swung open onto a scene so carefully arranged it took me a full second to understand I was looking at a set, not a memory.

Kyra was on the couch in one of my old robes — I recognized the stitching on the cuff — her hair artfully mussed, her legs tucked under her exactly the way she'd sat the night she dropped my grandmother's locket on the floor. Carson stood over her, shirt half-buttoned, and when I stepped inside neither of them scrambled. Neither of them looked surprised. They looked like they'd been waiting for their cue.

Carson's mouth curved. "Couldn't stay away."

"I need my passport," I said.

Something in his expression shifted, the smirk sliding into something colder, more practiced. He stood, straightened his shirt like he was about to walk into a boardroom instead of his own living room.

"You walk out that door with that passport," he said, voice flat, "and I will personally make sure every agency, every studio, every firm in this city knows your name. You will never work in advertising in New York again."

Behind him, Kyra's mouth twitched — not quite a smile, but close enough that I saw it.

I walked past both of them into the study. The drawer stuck a little, the way it always had, and I had to jiggle it before it gave. My passport was right where I'd left it, tucked under a folder of old contracts I no longer needed. I picked it up, closed the drawer, and turned around.

Carson was watching from the doorway, arms crossed, certain — still, after everything — that he held some kind of leverage over me.

"Good," I said. "I won't need this city anymore."

I walked past him, down the hall, out the front door. I didn't close it behind me. Let them sit in whatever draft came through. I was already thinking about gate numbers, about a jar of stones on a desk that wasn't in this apartment anymore, about a man who thought burning meant surviving too.

The first email came at 7:14 a.m., before I'd even opened my eyes.

*We regret to inform you that Hensley Group will not be moving forward with your contract at this time.* Polite. Bloodless. No reason given.

I sat up in the ugly little studio, radiator clanking its good morning, and thought: fine. One client. Clients drop people.

By 8:40 there were three more.

By 9:15, my phone buzzed with a text from Priya, who I'd worked beside for two years at my old agency, who I hadn't heard from in months. *Hey. Heard some stuff. You okay? Ben said Carson's people called our creative director yesterday. Just — be careful, okay?*

I read that one twice. Then a third time, like the words might rearrange themselves into something less true.

At 10:02, the agency that had all but promised me the Sutton Media account called to say the position had been "filled internally." I'd interviewed for that job eleven days ago. They'd shaken my hand. They'd said *we'll be in touch this week* like it meant something.

I sat on the edge of the hotel bed — no, not yet, still the studio, still the bad carpet — and watched the rejections stack up on my screen like a wall going up brick by brick, and for one long, terrible moment, I felt exactly the way I used to feel standing outside a hotel room with a stranger in my bed. Small. Cornered. Like the walls of my own life were being built by someone else's hands while I stood inside them, helpless.

My thumb found my palm. Pressed in, hard, past the point of comfort, the old habit rising up out of muscle memory before I even decided to let it. I looked down and there was a faint white crescent already forming.

*No.*

Not this time. I wasn't going to disappear into my own hand in some rented room while Carson Matthews rearranged my career from a boardroom he'd never once had to fight for.

I opened my laptop.

The email to my current agency took three sentences. *Effective immediately, I'm resigning my freelance position. Thank you for the work these past months. I wish you the best.* No explanation. No warmth I didn't mean. I hit send before I could talk myself into softening it.

Then I packed the two bags I'd unpacked four days ago, and I checked into a hotel in Midtown under a card that had never once touched Carson's name — one I'd opened myself, quietly, months ago, back when some instinct in me had already started preparing for a life he wasn't in.

I called Enzo from the elevator.

He picked up on the second ring. "Hey."

"He's blacklisting me," I said. No preamble. "Contracts are getting pulled. An interview I basically had locked down just evaporated. It's not one call, Enzo, it's — it's a campaign. He's making calls across the whole industry."

I heard him exhale, slow, on the other end. Not panic. Just a breath, like he was making room for what I'd said before he answered it.

"Okay," he said. "Do you have what you need? Food, sleep, your chargers?"

The question caught me off guard, how plain it was, how little it asked of me. "...Yeah. I'm at a hotel."

"Okay. What do you want to do?"

Not *what should we do.* Not *I'll come over right now.* Just — what did I want.

"I need one night alone first," I said. "I need to think. I need to — I have a lot of files, Enzo. Three years of them. I think I know what I want to do with them, but I need tonight to do it right."

A pause. I could hear, faintly, wind on his end, like he was standing outside somewhere.

"Okay," he said again, and there was nothing behind it but exactly what it sounded like. "I'll be here when you're ready."

That was all. No questions about what the files were. No *are you sure* dressed up like concern but really meaning *are you sure this is smart.* Just a door left open, unlocked, no one standing in the frame waiting to be thanked for it.

I hung up and sat on the hotel bed in the dark for exactly three minutes. I counted them on the nightstand clock, red numbers ticking over, because counting was easier than feeling, and because I needed the stillness before I did what came next.

Then I opened my laptop.

The folder was still there, right where I'd left it — *hotel_incident_1* through *hotel_incident_7*, *kyra_voicemail_march*, *locket_burned.mov*, three years sorted by date like invoices nobody had ever paid. I clicked the first file open.

My own face looked back at me from eighteen months ago, younger, smaller, apologizing to a man for something that had never been her fault.

I started building the deck.

Slide one. A date. A time stamp. A single line of text, clean and clinical, the way I used to write headlines for other people's products.

*This is what three years actually looked like.*

Outside, Midtown hummed on, indifferent, twelve stories down. I didn't look up again for a long time.