Chapter 75

Chapter 75


Mira’s POV

“She remembered the song.”

Zara stopped mid-sip, one eye still half closed from sleep, hair doing something architectural that defied explanation.

“What song,” she asked carefully.

“The Sunday one. The humming one.” I was still holding my phone, still standing in the kitchen doorway. “She called this morning and I hummed it and she just—” My voice caught slightly. “She remembered.”

Zara put her mug down.

That alone told me everything. Zara didn’t voluntarily put food or drink down for anything less than a genuine emergency or a genuine miracle.

“She called you,” she said slowly. “And remembered a song you haven’t hummed to anyone in years.”

“Yes.”

She stared at me for a long moment with the specific expression she wore when something had genuinely moved her but she was deciding how much of that to show.

“Well,” she said finally, picking her mug back up and taking a very long sip, “I’m not crying.”

“You’re literally tearing up right now.”

“Allergies.”

“Zara—”

“Brand new, Mira. Developed overnight. Very aggressive strain.” She waved her hand dismissively. 

“When are you going back?”

“This weekend,” I said. “Alone. She asked for just me.”

Zara nodded, already deciding about something. “Bold of you to think I’m not following in a separate car.”

“I figured,” I replied.

She looked at me properly then, stripped of the performance, just her face in the morning light.

“You look different,” she said quietly.

“Same face.”

“Different eyes.” She tilted her head. “Less like someone carrying the world in their back pocket.” She paused. “Suits you. Put it down more often.”

I looked at her standing there in her chaotic dressing gown with her disaster hair and her allergies that weren’t allergies, and felt something so full in my chest it almost hurt.

“Thank you,” I said. “For yesterday. All of it.”

She crossed the kitchen and hugged me quickly, fiercely, the way she did when words weren’t going to cover it.

“She’s back,” she murmured into my shoulder. “Your mum is actually back.”

“Yeah,” I said roughly. “She is.”



Marlo had been coming over recently and it felt awkward.

He always turns up in the evenings with beer he’d brought himself because he knew Zara’s fridge situation, slotting into her space with an ease that told me this had quietly become a habit while I wasn’t paying attention. Zara pretended it was casual. Marlo pretended it was casual. I watched them pretend together and said absolutely nothing because it was the most entertaining thing available to me and I wasn’t surrendering it.

“You look better,” Marlo told me, settling into the chair across from me.

“People keep saying that.”

“People keep meaning it.” He glanced briefly at Zara beside him, then back at me. “How’s everything actually going?”

“Complicated,” I said honestly. “But less so than last week.”

He nodded, turning his bottle in his hands with the energy of someone sitting on something they were deciding whether to say.

I watched him.

“How is he?” I muttered, because apparently I still needed to know even when I told myself I didn’t.

Marlo looked up. “Not great. Goes through all the motions, the meetings, the public stuff his dad needs, but he’s—” He paused, choosing his words. “Somewhere else. All the time.”

“Candy?” I kept my voice flat.

“She actually came to him last week and asked out of the arrangement.” He picked at his bottle label. “Said she wasn’t interested in being furniture in someone else’s love story.”

Zara made a sound of approval. “Smart woman.”

“Very,” Marlo agreed, and the look he gave her when he said it had absolutely nothing to do with Candy.

I stood up. “I need water.”

“You have water,” Zara said.

“Different water.” I took myself to the kitchen before either of them could argue.

I stood at the counter and let their voices drop behind me into something low and easy, the specific register of two people who thought they were alone, and I looked at my phone.

Ace texted. 

Ace: Sorted the transfer. Harrington’s office confirms the first installment has been received. You have your slot.

I read it twice.

He’d done it quietly and completely, no fanfare, no moment made of it, just handled it and told me after and that specific restraint hit harder than any grand gesture could have.

I don’t know how to thank you, I typed.

Ace: Then don’t. Just show up to Switzerland.

I paused, then he typed again.

Ace: Come over tomorrow. I’ll cook.

I thought about his hands in this same kitchen weeks ago, sleeves rolled, glasses steamed, the smell of something real filling the air.

Me: Okay.

Through the wall Zara laughed at something Marlo said—the real laugh, the one she couldn’t manufacture —and I stood in the kitchen, holding my phone and letting myself feel the strange specific relief of a life that was still broken in several places but had somehow, quietly, started gathering people in the cracks.

I went back to the living room.

Marlo was sitting considerably closer to Zara than when I’d left.

Neither of them mentioned it.

I caught Zara’s eye.

He’s good, hers said.

I know, mine replied.

“What just happened?” Marlo demanded, looking between us.

“Nothing,” we said together.

He looked deeply unconvinced.

And for the first time in longer than I could remember, the evening felt easy.

I didn’t fully trust it.

But I took it anyway.



That night I lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling and thought about my mother’s voice at 7am, Ace’s message and Marlo’s expression when he looked at Zara and somewhere underneath all of it, quiet and persistent, Alejandro still lingered in my mind. 

I pressed my hand flat against my chest. The heart wants what it wants, mine just had considerably less time than most to figure out what that was.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​