Chapter 69

Chapter 69


Mira’s POV

Ace arrived at ten with coffee and the specific energy of someone who had decided today was going to be productive whether I agreed or not.

“Get dressed,” he said, handing me a cup.

“You literally just got here.”

“And you’re literally still in pajamas.” He looked around Zara’s living room with the calm assessment of someone cataloguing a situation. “Where’s Zara?”

“Work.”

“Good.” He sat down on the arm of the couch, coffee in hand, watching me. “Then there’s nobody here to help you make excuses. Get dressed, Mira.”

“Where are we going?”

“Somewhere that isn’t this flat.” His eyes moved briefly to the blanket on the couch, the cold tea on the table, the phone face down on the cushion, and back to my face. He didn’t comment on any of it. “Ten minutes.”

“You’re very bossy for someone who was invited.”

“You invited me because you needed someone to be bossy,” he replied evenly. “Ten minutes.”

I got dressed in eight, which felt like a personal victory.



He took me to a bookshop.

Not a chain, a real one, the kind that had been in the same building for forty years and smelled like paper and wood and the specific quiet of a place that had absorbed thousands of hours of people standing still inside it. 

Floor to ceiling shelves, narrow aisles, a cat sleeping on the counter beside the register who opened one eye when we entered and immediately closed it again.

“A bookshop,” I said.

“You used to read,” he replied, moving through the first aisle with his hands in his pockets. “You mentioned it once. Said you stopped when things got busy.”

I looked at him sideways.

He remembered that.

One sentence from a conversation I barely remembered having and he’d filed it away and built an entire outing around it, and I didn’t know what to do with that information so I looked at the nearest shelf instead and pretended to read the spines.

“Find something you’d actually want to read,” he said from somewhere behind me. “Not something you think you should read. Something selfish.”

“Selfish,” I repeated.

“You’re allowed,” he said simply.

I moved through the shelves slowly, trailing my fingers along the spines the way I used to as a child in the school library, back when books were the specific kind of escape that didn’t require money or permission, just the ability to disappear between pages and stay gone long enough to remember you existed outside of everything happening to you.

I found one eventually. A thriller with a battered spine and a first page that grabbed me by the throat before I’d finished the second sentence.

I brought it to where Ace was standing in the back corner, leaning against a shelf, already reading something he’d pulled out himself, glasses slightly pushed up his nose, completely absorbed.

I stood there for a second just looking at him.

There was something deeply unhurried about Ace in a way that I was realizing I’d been taking for granted. He didn’t fill spaces with noise. He didn’t perform his presence. He just existed in rooms with a steadiness that pulled at something in me I hadn’t named yet.

“Found one?” he asked without looking up.

“How did you know I was there?”

“You breathe differently when you’re about to say something.” He finally looked up, glancing at my book. A small smile. “Good choice.”

We paid and found a coffee place two doors down and sat at a window table reading in comfortable silence for an hour, and somewhere in the middle of it I looked up from my page and caught him watching me with an expression that he didn’t immediately rearrange when I caught him.

“What?” I raised a brow.

“Nothing.” He looked back at his book.

“Ace.”

He looked up again, patient as always.

“You’re staring.”

“You looked happy,” he said simply. “I was noting it.”

I felt something move through me that I quickly directed back at my book.

“Don’t make it weird,” I muttered.

“I’m not making anything,” he replied pleasantly. “I’m just sitting here.”



We walked back along the long route without discussing it, the afternoon having done that golden thing it did when you weren’t paying attention, and somewhere between the bookshop and Zara’s street the conversation found its way to things we hadn’t said yet.

“Alejandro came yesterday,” I said.

Ace’s stride didn’t break but something in it shifted, barely perceptible.

“I know,” he replied.

I looked at him. “How?”

“He called me.” There was a pause then he continued. “Or I called him. The details aren’t important.”

“They’re a little important.”

He was quiet for a moment. “We’re not in a good place, Mira. Him and I. You probably know some of it.”

“I know enough,” I said carefully.

“Then you know that whatever he told you yesterday came from a place that isn’t entirely—” He stopped. Chose different words. “Just be careful with what he promises you.”

Something in his tone made me look at him properly.

“That’s an interesting thing to say,” I replied slowly.

“It’s an honest thing to say.”

“About your best friend?”

“Former,” he corrected quietly, and something about that single word carried a weight that closed the subject better than anything longer would have.

We walked in silence for a moment.

“He said something about my mother,” I muttered.

Ace glanced at me. “What about her?”

“That she might be alive.”

He stopped walking.

I stopped too, turning to look at him. His expression had done something I couldn’t fully read, moving through several things quickly before settling into careful neutrality.

“Alive,” he repeated.

“That’s what he said.”

“Did he give you anything concrete?”

“He said he’s still looking.”

Ace looked at me for a long moment, something working behind his eyes, and then he nodded slowly in a way that felt more like processing than agreeing.

“How do you feel about that?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I admitted.

He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers grazing my jaw in that way he had, gentle and deliberate, and I stood on the pavement and let him.

“Whatever it turns out to be,” he said quietly, “you don’t have to figure it out alone.”

I looked up at him.

The afternoon light caught the angles of his face and he was looking at me with that steady unguarded expression he only wore when he thought the moment was private enough for it, and something in my chest pulled toward him in a way I was finding increasingly difficult to categorize as just gratitude.

“Ace,” I said softly.

“I know,” he replied, equally soft.

“I’m not—” I stopped. Started again. “I don’t know what this is yet.”

“I know that too.” His thumb traced briefly along my cheekbone. “I’m not asking you to know.”

“Then what are you asking?”

He looked at me for a long quiet second.

“Just don’t disappear on me,” he said. “That’s all.”

I held his gaze.

Something warm and terrifying moved through me.

“I’ll try,” I whispered.

He dropped his hand and we started walking again, close enough that our arms brushed with every other step, and neither of us moved away from it.

I thought about what Zara had said.

Figure out what you actually want before somebody gets hurt.

The problem was becoming increasingly clear.

I was starting to want things I had absolutely no business wanting from two different directions simultaneously  and my heart, the literal one, the one with the six week deadline and the Swiss surgeon and the thirty four percent didn’t have the luxury of waiting for me to figure it out.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I pulled it out.

One message. No name, a number I didn’t recognize.

Miss Martinez. This is Dr. Harrington’s office. We have an update regarding your surgery slot. Please call us at your earliest convenience.

I stopped walking.

“Mira?” Ace turned back. “What’s wrong?”

I stared at the message.

Earliest convenience.

That was either the best or worst four words currently available to me.

“Nothing,” I said, pocketing the phone with hands that weren’t entirely steady. “Everything’s fine.”

But my heart was hammering in a way that had nothing to do with its condition.

Everything was very far from fine.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​