Chapter 24
Anna
The story broke on a Tuesday.
Not as a Hunter Interactive press release.
An exclusive with a journalist who'd been covering industry misconduct for years, the kind of reporter who didn't take anonymous tips lightly and didn't publish without documentation.
Diane spoke publicly for the first time.
Her face. Her name. Her voice. The accident, the surgeries, the NDA, the settlement, the man who drove the car and never looked back.
I watched it on my phone in Miley's living room, where she sits beside me. Neither of us spoke for the full fourteen-minute segment. When it ended, Miley set her phone down and said "perfect" and that was enough.
Tobias Hart's career detonated. The fuse had been burning for years, and someone had finally let the room hear the explosion.
The hit-and-run charges were reopened. The NDA was challenged by Diane's new legal team, funded by a trust that didn't have a public name attached to it, but I knew whose name was behind the money.
He was arrested on a Wednesday. Perp-walked in front of cameras. The same face that smiled from magazine covers and movie posters staring straight ahead while officers guided him into a car.
The world watched. I sat on Miley's couch and let myself watch with it. The man who'd destroyed my life walked in handcuffs, and I waited for the joy to come, or the revenge. Neither did. Just relief. Quiet, bone-deep, settling into places I'd been holding tight for years.
My phone rang. Jace.
I answered on the first ring.
"It's over," he said. His voice was steady, sure. "He can't touch you anymore. You're safe."
I didn't say anything for a long time. The word safe sat in my chest and I let it stay there because I'd been afraid to trust it and now it was real and I needed a minute to believe it.
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me. I should have done it sooner."
"You didn't even know."
"I know now."
The aftermath settled the way storms do. Slowly, and then all at once.
My days took on a shape I didn't recognize at first. I went to work. I came home. I didn't scan every room for exits. The absence of fear was disorienting, like stepping off a treadmill and not knowing what to do with legs that weren't running anymore.
Jace asked me to move in. He delivered the question with formal awkwardness and a sentence structure that belonged in a legal filing: "I would like to propose, not in the matrimonial sense, but in the cohabitative sense, that you consider relocating your belongings to my residence."
I said yes. Miley cried. Then she helped me pack. Then she cried again.
The penthouse was nothing like the cabin.
No cocoon, no sealed-off quiet. This was real life.
Morning routines that overlapped and collided.
His alarm at five thirty, mine at seven.
By the time I stumbled out of the bedroom looking like something recently excavated, he was showered, dressed, and making breakfast at the kitchen counter.
"Good morning," he'd say.
I'd grunt.
"You're beautiful."
"You need your glasses checked."
"My prescription is perfect. I confirmed it last month."
The domesticity opened him up in ways the cabin only started.
I saw him before the armor went on. Hair damp from the shower, glasses fogged, barefoot on the kitchen tiles with a coffee cup in his hand and the raw, unfinished version of himself that the world never got to see.
That version was softer. He'd lean against the counter and watch me pour cereal and the look on his face was so unguarded that I'd catch my breath and pretend I was yawning.
I woke up one night to find his side of the bed cold. I padded down the hallway in bare feet and found him at the piano, playing in the dark. The melody was low and aching, his mother's piece, the one from the cabin.
I didn't say anything. I sat on the bench beside him.
He didn't flinch. He shifted to make room without stopping the piece and I rested my head on his shoulder and listened.
The music filled the dark penthouse, his body was warm against mine, and I thought: this is what safe sounds like.
A man playing piano in the dark and making room for me without being asked.
He still saw Dr. Adler. Twice a week. He told me about the sessions sometimes, not details, just outlines.
Adler was helping him untangle love from control.
Wanting someone close from needing to dictate where they stood.
Helping him understand that a man who spent his childhood unable to control anything didn't have to spend his adulthood controlling everything.
"It's a process," he explained.
"I know about processes," I said. "I'm in one too."
His public interactions were getting longer. I took him shopping again, not to a cleared fashion house this time but to an actual store with actual people and actual noise. He lasted forty minutes before his hand went to the sanitizer. I counted it as a victory. He counted it as torture.
"Forty minutes is remarkable," I said.
"Remarkable is a word people use when they mean barely adequate."
"You're learning my language."
His mouth twitched. I kissed it.
The weekends were ours. He read on the couch with my feet in his lap, his free hand tracing lazy patterns on my ankle while the other held a book, and the image of him, glasses on, hair falling across his forehead, fingers absently on my skin while he read, was so quietly devastating that I grabbed my camera and photographed him before he noticed.
He looked up at the sound of the shutter. "What are you doing?"
"Documenting."
"Documenting what?"
"You." I took three more shots while his ears turned pink. "Hold that. The blush is perfect."
"I'm not blushing."
"You're the color of a sunset and I have photographic evidence."
I met his family properly. Sunday dinner at Coral Gables.
Catherine held my hands at the front door, her eyes filling, and said "thank you.
" I didn't understand at first. Then I did.
She meant her son. The version of him that came home from Cedar Key with sand in his shoes, peace on his face, and the ability to hold someone's hand without gloves.
Richard studied me across the dinner table with a thoroughness I recognized immediately. After a long moment, he nodded once and returned to his steak. Apparently I'd passed.
Mona tackled me in the hallway. Full-body hug, no warning. "You're the sister I've been requesting from the universe," she said into my shoulder. "I've put in formal applications. Manifestation boards. Candles. The whole thing. And here you are."
Priya was there too. Standing by the kitchen door with a glass of wine, watching the scene with a quiet smile, as though she knew a secret that was slowly becoming less of one.
Mona reached for her hand as she passed and Priya took it.
Catherine, from across the room, smiled at them both like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Miles sat beside me at dinner and launched into a college story about my first week—the professor who made me cry over a composition assignment, and how I went back the next day with a photograph so good he put it on his office wall. I laughed, and Jace went rigid across the table.
"Move," Jace said.
Miles looked at him. "I'm at a normal distance."
"The normal distance is larger."
"This is a dining table, Jace. There's a fixed amount of space."
"Find more."
Mona leaned toward me and whispered, "This is the greatest show on earth." Priya, beside her, was biting her lip to keep from laughing.
Catherine told her children to behave. Nobody behaved. Richard ate his roast in silence and looked like a man who'd survived decades of this and had made peace with it long ago.
My brother flew in from North Carolina for the weekend. Caleb, gangly, too smart for his own good, and completely incapable of acting normal around attractive women.
We gathered at Miley's place.
I watched from the couch as my brother, who'd been rehearsing a casual greeting the entire flight based on the fourteen texts he'd sent me about what to say when he saw her, opened his mouth and produced: "Hey. Miley. Hi. You look. Hi."
Miley raised an eyebrow. "You said hi twice."
"Did I? I don't think I did. Did I?" He looked at me. I nodded. He went red from his collar to his hairline. "Cool. Great. I'm going to put my bag somewhere. Anywhere. A room. Where's the room?"
Miley pointed down the hall. Caleb walked into the coat closet, walked back out without acknowledging it, found the correct room, and closed the door behind him. I heard the groan through the wood.
Miley looked at me. "Your brother is adorable."
"My brother is going to need therapy if you keep looking at him like that."
She raised a brow. "Like what?"
"Like you think he's adorable."
"He walked into a closet, Anna. That's peak adorable."
Caleb spent the rest of the weekend trying to recover. He brought Miley coffee every morning and got her order wrong every time and she drank it anyway without telling him.
We had dinner together, including Jace, and Caleb tried to explain his engineering coursework and got so flustered by Miley's eye contact that he knocked over his water glass.
Twice. At the same meal. Jace watched this as though he was observing a species he'd only read about.
At one point he leaned over to me and whispered, "Is your brother malfunctioning? "
"He has a crush," I whispered to him.
"On Miley?"
"Since he was eighteen. Miley visited me in Charlotte once. He hasn't recovered."
Jace watched Caleb accidentally compliment Miley's elbows and then try to recover by saying elbows were underrated as a body part and then stop talking entirely.
"I feel seen," Jace said. "And vaguely nostalgic."
"For what?"
"The fitting room. The parking garage. Every interaction I had with you before the cabin where my brain stopped working and my mouth said things my dignity hadn't approved."
I kissed his cheek. "Your dignity survived."
"Barely," he said, smiling.
Jace
The Wynwood farmers market on a Saturday morning.
The same market. The same stalls. The honey vendor was still there, sealed jars lined up in rows—the same setup I’d stared at nineteen minutes into my exposure therapy assignment—before a woman hit me from behind, poured coffee down my shirt, crashed her face into mine, called me a pervert, and changed the molecular structure of my entire existence.
"Why are we here?" Anna asked. She was holding a cup of coffee from the stall on the corner.
"This is where Adler sent me for exposure therapy," I said. "Thirty minutes in a crowded, uncontrolled environment. I was nineteen minutes in when you collided with me."
She smiled, the one that reached her eyes and stayed. "I remember."
"I remember too." I stopped walking. She stopped beside me. The market moved around us, vendors calling out prices, people laughing, a musician somewhere playing guitar. The Miami sun pouring down hot, the kind of heat that clung to everything.
"Dr. Adler told me to face crowded spaces," I said. "Instead I found you. And you became the thing that made every space manageable."
I took a breath.
"You counted to four in a dark elevator and I could breathe. You held my face when my nose bled and I didn't flinch. You sanitized your desk with my brand, wore indoor shoes, and none of it came from pity. It came from you. From who you are, without even trying."
She was looking at me with those brown eyes, morning light catching the gold in them. Vanilla and coffee in the air between us. I wanted to kiss her more than I wanted to keep talking.
I reached into my pocket.
"I'm not good at this," I said. "I've never been good at the people part. My hands are better with cubes and pianos and charcoal. But my hands found you in the dark and you counted to four and I could breathe again."
I opened the box.
The ring was simple. A single stone, set low so it wouldn't catch on things, because Anna was a photographer and she used her hands and I'd spent three weeks designing it with a jeweler in Brickell who understood that the woman wearing this ring would value function as much as beauty.
"I want to spend the rest of my life breathing next to you," I said. "If you'll let me."
She laughed. And cried. At the same time. Her hand was over her mouth and her eyes were streaming and she was laughing. And the sound of it was the best thing I'd ever heard, better than music, better than the ocean, better than silence.
"Yes," she smiled. "Yes. Absolutely yes."
I slid the ring onto her finger. My hands were steady. No gloves. No tremor. My bare fingers touching hers in the middle of a crowded market where I couldn't stand for nineteen minutes a few months ago without my pulse trying to exit my body.
She kissed me. I kissed her back. The honey vendor watched and clapped. A woman at a candle stall cheered. A man with a dog whistled. The musician changed his song to something that sounded like a celebration.
I held her face in my hands, bare, and looked at her. Her cheeks were wet, her smile wide. She was wearing a ring I'd designed for her. The market was loud, crowded, chaotic. Nobody was sanitizing anything.
I was fine. Better than fine.
I was home.