Chapter 32
MILA
Watching the sunlight fall across the studio tables in angled stripes, I felt alive in a way that made my hands shake.
Tomorrow night.
élodie had said it like it was nothing. Like a show appearing out of nowhere on a deadline that ridiculous was an ordinary inconvenience. Like the word opening didn’t rearrange a person’s entire internal architecture.
I laid my contact sheets on the table and tried to make myself breathe like a normal human being.
Tried to slow down the part of my mind that kept sprinting ahead—frames, pacing, cohesion, how the images would land on a wall under gallery lights, how strangers would look at them and decide what kind of woman I was.
And underneath all of it—like a heartbeat under everything else—Connor.
His voice still lived in my body. His hands, the way they had held me with that quiet insistence, like he was making an agreement with my nervous system. The steadiness of him. The presence. The sentence he’d said with no flourish at all—When you’re ready.
Not if.
When.
I could still feel how that word had warmed me from the inside out.
I hadn’t heard from him since I’d left.
Which was fine. He wasn’t a man who filled space just because silence existed. He didn’t text to narrate his day. He didn’t send emojis or little proof-of-life messages to soothe someone else’s anxiety. He moved like a man trained to conserve energy and attention for when it mattered.
And I told myself I understood that.
But still—sometimes my gaze flicked to my phone as if my body expected him to appear there the way he appeared in rooms. Like gravity. Like consequence.
I chose photographs with more instinct than logic.
Some were obvious—the ones that felt like Paris itself had taken my chin between two fingers and forced me to look.
The river in early morning, silver and cold.
A woman laughing too loudly on a bridge, cigarette between her fingers like punctuation.
A man reading a book on the métro with the kind of reverence most people reserved for prayer.
Some were quieter.
Hands. Shoulders. The curve of someone’s back as they leaned into a window, half-lit, half-hidden. The spaces between faces when something was about to be said.
The truth was that my readiness to show my work had changed because I had changed.
Not because Connor had saved me.
Because he had seen me.
Because he had chosen me with no almosts. And the act of being chosen like that had snapped something into place. It had made me braver with my own life. Less apologetic. Less afraid that honesty would cost me love.
Now, honesty felt like the only thing worth offering.
Amaya drifted in and out of the shared workspace, earbuds in, her head tilted the way it always was when she was listening to something no one else could hear.
She set a small recorder on the table near her laptop, tapped a few keys, then paused and watched me spread my prints like I was laying out tarot cards.
“You look like you’re about to jump off a cliff,” she said.
I let out a short laugh that wasn’t entirely stable. “I feel like I already did.”
She came closer, gaze skimming the images without touching them, respectful in that way artists could be when they knew better than to disrupt someone else’s process.
Amaya’s mouth curved. “élodie will pretend she’s not proud, but she is.”
“Is she?” I asked, unable to keep the disbelief out of my voice.
Amaya shrugged. “élodie’s pride looks like deadlines and pressure. It’s her love language.”
That made me smile for real.
Across the room, the printer whirred. Someone cursed softly in French. I caught only the tone, not the words, which was still the story of my life here—always a half-beat behind, always translating in my head, always slightly off-balance.
But it didn’t make me feel small today.
Today it felt … temporary. Like a bridge I was already halfway across.
I leaned over my laptop again, building a sequence. Not just a collection of images—an arc. Something that would pull a stranger in and carry them through a feeling.
I was so focused that I didn’t hear footsteps in the hall at first.
Not until they stopped outside the workspace.
Not until the air itself seemed to tighten, the way it did when someone entered with purpose.
I looked up.
Ellsworth stood in the doorway.
He wasn’t carrying a tray or a neatly folded garment. There was no faint smile at the corner of his mouth. No amused British dryness.
He looked … stripped down.
Like whatever mask he wore had been removed and set aside.
His posture was still immaculate, of course. But the energy around him was different—compressed, urgent, dangerous in its restraint.
And every instinct in me went cold.
Ellsworth’s gaze found mine.
And held.
“Mila,” he said.
Not Miss Zee. Not polite distancing. My first name.
I stood so fast my chair legs scraped the floor.
“Is Connor—?” The question came out in a rush, rawer than I meant it to.
Ellsworth stepped fully inside. The room behind me continued as if nothing had happened—printers, murmured French, Amaya’s quiet tapping—yet I felt like I’d been pulled into a different dimension where the only thing that existed was whatever Ellsworth was about to say.
“He needs you,” Ellsworth said.
Relief hit first—quick, irrational, almost dizzying. Needs me could mean a hundred things. It could mean he was rattled. Tired. On edge. That he wanted my presence, my steadiness, my body.
My mind tried to soften it. To make it something manageable.
“I can come later,” I said quickly, already bargaining with time. “I have—Ellsworth, I have a show tomorrow night. élodie gave me the slot, and I’m on a very short timeline. I just need today to—”
Ellsworth’s jaw tightened.
The movement was small. Controlled.
But it snapped my words right in half.
“Mila,” he said again, and there was no softness in it now. Only command. “You need to come now.”
I stared at him, not understanding.
He took one step closer. His voice dropped lower, the tone shifting into something that felt like a man speaking from the field, not a hallway.
“Connor isn’t doing well,” Ellsworth said. “He’s … compromised.”
The word landed like a door slamming.
Compromised.
Not upset. Not rattled. Not tired.
Compromised.
My skin went cold. My throat tightened so fast it made breathing feel like something I had to choose on purpose.
“What happened?” I whispered.
Ellsworth didn’t answer directly, which told me enough.
If he couldn’t say it here—if he wouldn’t—then it was bad.
I looked down at my table. At the images I’d been arranging like my whole life depended on them. At the neat stacks of paper and the fragile, beautiful proof that I was finally stepping forward.
Tomorrow night.
A dream.
A door.
And suddenly it didn’t feel like a door at all.
It felt like a room full of strangers watching while the person I loved was bleeding somewhere out of sight.
“I can’t—” My voice cracked on the words because I didn’t know what I meant. I can’t leave? I can’t lose him? I can’t do both?
Ellsworth’s gaze didn’t flicker. “You can,” he said simply. “And you will.”
My pulse hammered.
I thought of Connor’s face. The way he watched me move through his room like it mattered. The way he had looked at my hands like he trusted them to hold his truth.
I thought of him in some cold, lonely place. Suffering.
I didn’t know details. But I knew Connor.
Men like him didn’t collapse loudly.
They collapsed inward.
And if Ellsworth—Ellsworth, who I’d bet treated emergencies like mild inconveniences—was standing here looking like this, then it was bad.
I swallowed hard.
“I’m coming,” I said.
Amaya looked up from her laptop, expression shifting. “Mila?”
I turned to her, heart racing. “Can you—” My brain scrambled for something practical. Something that would keep the dream alive without me. “Can you tell élodie I’m stepping out? That—just that I’m stepping out. I’ll explain when I can.”
Amaya’s gaze flicked to Ellsworth, then back to me. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t demand justification.
She just nodded once. “Go.”
I grabbed my bag and my camera on instinct—then hesitated, fingers tightening on the strap.
Did I bring it? Did it matter?
Ellsworth’s eyes moved to the camera, then back to me. “Leave it,” he said gently, as if he knew I’d use it like armor if I carried it right now. “You won’t need it.”
The simple certainty in his voice made my eyes sting.
I set it down carefully, like I was placing a part of myself somewhere safe.
Then I followed Ellsworth out.
The hallway felt too bright, too ordinary. The residency’s quiet elegance suddenly obscene against whatever waited.
Outside, Paris continued moving as if nothing had changed.
Scooters. Footsteps. A woman pushing a stroller while talking into her phone. A man carrying baguettes like he was transporting sacred objects.
Life.
Uninterrupted.
Ellsworth led me toward a dark car tucked along the curb. The men he’d assigned—so discreet I’d barely noticed them earlier—shifted subtly, creating a corridor of space without ever drawing attention.
I slid into the back seat, hands clenched in my lap.
Ellsworth got in beside the driver, and the car pulled away with a smoothness that felt practiced.
“What happened?” I asked again, softer now. “Please.”
Ellsworth’s shoulders stayed squared, but his voice went quieter. “Connor learned something,” he said. “Something … personal.”
My lungs tightened.
“Merrick,” I whispered.
Ellsworth didn’t confirm. Didn’t deny.
Which was confirmation enough.
I pressed my forehead briefly to the cool window, watching Paris blur past, my thoughts trying to sprint ahead and failing.
My mind kept snagging on images—Connor’s hands.
Connor’s eyes. Connor’s voice when he’d told me about the fire that killed his parents, the way he’d said it flat like he’d packed it into a box years ago and taped it shut.
If that box had just been ripped open—
My stomach turned.
“I should’ve been with him,” I said, the words bitter and useless.
Ellsworth’s voice came back, measured. “He didn’t want you near it. He wanted you safe.”
“I don’t care,” I snapped, then immediately regretted it. “I mean—I care. But I don’t want him alone.”
“He’s not alone,” Ellsworth said. A pause. “Not anymore. Not now that you’re coming.”
The car turned down the same quiet street I’d walked earlier that morning—the one that looked forgettable on purpose. Tall, dignified buildings pressed close together, their facades understated, almost anonymous. No signs. No spectacle. Just the kind of elegance that had learned how to disappear.
My pulse slammed harder when I recognized it.
Ellsworth opened my door, and I stepped out into air that felt cooler here, shaded by familiar stone. The Sanctuary again. Too soon. As if the building itself had barely finished exhaling after I left.
We moved quickly through the entryway I now knew by feel rather than sight, past walls that held more history than they ever revealed.
Up the same stairs, my footsteps echoing sharper than before, my body already braced for something it hadn’t known how to name that morning.
The corridor smelled faintly of clean linens and something darker beneath it—metal, maybe.
Or adrenaline. Or the lingering residue of lives that were rarely allowed to be soft for long.
My breath was coming too fast.
Ellsworth reached Connor’s door and stopped, turning to me.
His eyes held mine—steady, serious.
“When you go in,” he said quietly, “don’t ask him for details. Don’t demand anything. He needs … anchoring.”
My throat tightened so hard it hurt.
“I can do that,” I whispered.
Ellsworth nodded once.
Then he knocked.
A single knock. Measured.
Not a polite social knock.
A signal.
The door opened.
And the moment it did, I felt it—like stepping into a room where the temperature had dropped ten degrees.
Connor stood inside.
His hair was slightly damp, like he’d washed his hands or his face and still hadn’t decided whether cleanliness mattered. His eyes were bloodshot. His jaw was tight in a way that wasn’t anger anymore—it was containment. Pure, brutal restraint holding something back.
He looked at me.
And something in his face broke.
Not dramatically.
But enough.
Enough that my chest cracked open with it.
“Mila,” he said, like my name was the only solid object left in his world.
I crossed the distance and went straight into him, arms wrapping around his torso, my face pressing into his chest. His body jerked like the impact startled him, like he hadn’t expected contact to feel this real.
Then his arms crushed around me.
Not careful. Not gentle.
Desperate.
Like he was holding onto the only thing keeping him from falling apart completely.
I felt his breath shudder against my hair.
I felt his hands grip my back like he needed proof that I was here. That I was solid. That he hadn’t lost everything.
“I’m here,” I whispered, the words breaking through my throat like prayer. “I’m here. I’m here.”
His mouth pressed to the side of my head—no kiss, not exactly. More like a touch of teeth and breath and grief.
For a long moment, neither of us moved.
We just held.
And in that hold, I felt it—the quake under his skin, the tremor he was trying to hide, the violence of whatever was inside him pressing against the walls of his body.
I pulled back just enough to see his face.
His eyes were glassy, furious, devastated.
“I—” He tried to speak, and whatever he meant to say collapsed.
So, I didn’t make him.
I reached up and cupped his jaw with both hands, forcing him to look at me, forcing his focus into the present.
“You don’t have to tell me yet,” I said softly. “You just have to let me be here.”
His throat worked.
A sound—raw and broken—escaped him.
Then he leaned forward and pressed his forehead to mine.
His hands slid down my arms, gripping my wrists like he needed to feel my pulse. My skin. My warmth.
And I let him.
Because this was what love looked like in his world.
Not flowers.
Not speeches.
This.
A man in ruins, choosing to reach for someone, anyway.