Chapter 6

Another bright afternoon.

I was at the piano running through warm-ups before the evening set when my heart did a small, private leap — the Vienna Konzerthaus had sent an invitation. A full concert slot.

David Forsythe, the restaurant manager, came by to congratulate me, shaking my hand with both of his.

Then the host stepped in from the front.

"Miss Vivian, there's a man outside. He won't leave."

I turned.

Through the glass I could see him.

Ethan Harrington — thinner than I'd ever seen him, shirt rumpled, eyes red, chin rough with dark stubble. He looked like someone who had been sleeping badly for months.

I didn't avoid him.

Some things deserve a proper ending.

I pushed through the door. He came forward immediately, his face rearranging itself into something careful and uncertain.

"Vivian—"

His voice was hoarse.

"Can we talk? Please?"

He reached out as he said it.

I stepped to the side.

"Don't."

His hand froze in the air between us.

After a moment he let it drop. He reached into his coat pocket and held out a watch.

Identical in every detail — same face, same strap, same style.

"I found one just like it," he said. His voice broke slightly. "Please."

"No."

My tone didn't change. There was nothing in it.

He pressed his eyes closed for a moment.

"I'm sorry." The words came out rough. "I found the airport footage. You were alone. You were bleeding. And I just — I let you leave—"

"I looked into it afterward. Serena pushed you deliberately. I saw it."

He bowed his head.

"I was a fool. I let her use me completely." A pause. "I fired her. I brought everything back — the plants, the photos, the ticket stubs. All of it. I even fixed the ones that got cracked."

He pulled out his phone, scrolling through photos and turning the screen toward me: the balcony full of flowers again, a notebook of carefully pressed stubs, the cracked photograph repaired and back on the nightstand.

They were meticulous. They were his.

But they were not the originals.

A small ache moved through me. Not pain. The gentler grief of something that was simply gone.

I looked away, toward the street.

"You don't have to do any of that, Ethan."

He looked up sharply. Eyes wet.

"Vivian, I mean it. The slippers, the bowl, the handprints on the shower wall — I traced all of it. It was her. I didn't know. I swear. We never—"

"Ethan."

He stopped.

"That was never the point."

I watched him wait.

"The moment you handed her a key to our home — that was the moment. Not because of what it meant about the two of you. Because of what it meant about us. That was you taking a knife to seven years and carving them up yourself."

"The soup I spent four hours on — you sent it to her. The bowl I gave you — you threw it away. The scent on your clothes. The planters she left on my balcony. You knew it would hurt me. You let it happen anyway."

His head shook, fast and urgent.

"I was angry. I didn't want to fight. I never meant—"

"Maybe not. But you did it."

I turned to face him fully.

And I held out my hands — all ten fingers spread wide, completely open.

"Seven years ago, you told me you'd given up surgery for me. And I believed I owed you everything for it. So I gave you seven years of my life in return."

"But seven years later, you did everything in your power to make me feel like I was nothing without you."

"You were wrong."

I let my hands fall.

"I'm going to be fine, Ethan. I'm going to be more than fine."

His expression cracked.

He looked at me the way a man looks at something he understands, at last, that he has lost for good.

A car pulled up to the curb.

My mother got out before it had properly stopped.

She took one look at Ethan and her expression closed like a door being shut.

The next moment she was calling over her shoulder, and two men from her security detail were already moving.

"That's the one," she said, with the precision of someone who had been waiting for this. "He's been harassing my daughter. Take him to the police."

Ethan didn't fight them.

As they walked him toward the waiting car, he looked back at me over his shoulder. His eyes were dark, full of something complicated. Regret. And beneath that, the quiet devastation of a man who finally understood what he'd thrown away.

He didn't say a word.

I watched until the car turned the corner.

The following morning, I arranged his release anonymously.

Not out of softness.

I had no interest in being tangled in his consequences anymore. That was all.

In the months that followed, the news filtered through the way these things do.

Ethan had gone back home. The pharmaceutical company he had spent years building — going public had been the greatest moment of his professional life — was gone. When Serena Thorne left Harrington Pharmaceuticals, she took the proprietary research data with her and sold it to a competitor at a significant premium. Then she recruited his entire sales team, systematically took over the client relationships he had spent years cultivating, and used the proceeds to start over with someone else's backing.

Within a year, there was nothing left.

Ethan had found evidence, eventually. Enough to have Serena and her co-conspirators charged. They were in custody now.

But the company was still gone.

When people in the industry mentioned his name, there was no admiration in it anymore. Just a quiet, uncomfortable noise in the back of the throat.

The man who had walked away from a surgical career and built a pharmaceutical company to a successful listing in under three years — that man was finished.

I heard all of this on the last night of my European concert tour.

The final venue was the Vienna Konzerthaus.

The stage lights came up white and full.

I played the last note, stood, walked to center stage.

The curtain came down slowly against a wall of sound — applause that rose and kept rising.

Through the gap at the edge of the red curtain, just before it closed, I caught a glimpse of a familiar silhouette in the front row, far left. Head lowered. Pressing something small and white against his face.

I didn't ask the stage manager who it was.

It didn't matter anymore.

I had found my way back to what I was supposed to be.

He could have whatever seat he liked in whatever audience he chose.

For him, the curtain had already come down.