Chapter 93

Alex’s POV

When Ezra left the penthouse, the stair still held the ghost of his footsteps.

It was a hollow, decisive cadence that sounded too much like escape.

I watched the door close from and for a second I felt the whole room tilt, as if gravity had remembered the shape of something I hadn’t noticed before and pulled it out into plain sight.

Emily sat at the table with both hands wrapped around her mug.

Her fingers were white-knuckled from the heat, and the steam clouded against her glasses.

She hadn’t touched the tea. She hadn’t let anything go back to normal since she’d bolted from the office.

That was the thing about guilt, it gave people new, exhausting rhythms, and she had learned them all in an hour.

“I should go,” she kept saying, like a mantra. Like if she said it enough it would be true.

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” I said. I hadn’t meant to be soft, but the words came out that way, honest and low. “Not toni