Chapter 77

Chapter 77


Mira’s POV

He’d moved the furniture.

Not dramatically, just enough—the small dining table pulled closer to the window, two candles on it that he was going to pretend weren’t deliberate if I mentioned them, soft music coming from somewhere that was low enough to feel like atmosphere rather than effort.

I stood in the doorway of his apartment and took it in.

“Don’t say anything,” Ace said from the kitchen without turning around.

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You were about to say something about the candles.”

“They’re very casual candles,” I replied, dropping my bag on the couch. “Very unbothered. Nobody would ever read into them.”

“Good.” He glanced back briefly. “Sit down, it’s almost ready.”

His apartment was the kind of space that reflected its owner without trying to. Clean without being sterile, books everywhere in the specific disorder of someone who actually read them rather than arranged them, a laptop open on the coffee table beside a notebook covered in handwriting I couldn’t read from here. No performance to it. Just a place where a person actually lived.

I liked it more than I wanted to admit.

I sat at the table by the window and watched the city below doing its evening thing while something from the kitchen produced a smell that reminded me I hadn’t eaten properly since breakfast.

“What are you making?” I called out.

“Something your body will thank me for tomorrow.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Pasta,” he replied. “Proper this time, not the emergency version.”

“There’s an emergency version?”

“Everything has an emergency version.” He appeared in the doorway briefly, tea towel over his shoulder, glasses slightly steamed again. “Wine’s on the counter. Help yourself.”

I got the wine. Poured two glasses, stood in his kitchen doorway and watched him cook the way he had at Zara’s weeks ago, that same quiet competence, hands moving without hesitation, entirely in his element.

“You do this a lot?” I asked. “Cook for people.”

“I cook for myself mostly.” He stirred without looking up. “Takes the same effort to make enough for two.”

“Very practical.”

“I’m a practical person.”

“You lit candles, Ace.”

He pointed the spoon at me without turning around. “I said don’t.”

I smiled into my wine glass.


We ate with the city lights doing their thing below us and the candles doing their unbothered casual thing between us and somewhere in the middle of it the conversation found the comfortable depth it always found eventually when it was just the two of us.

He asked about Flora. Not intrusively, just opened the door and waited to see what I’d walk through, and I found myself telling him more than I’d planned— the song, the cup, the way her hands looked like mine, the phone call this morning where she’d remembered the crack in the kitchen window and laughed for the first time like someone who’d found a piece of themselves they’d stopped looking for.

He listened the way he always did, fully, without preparing his response while I was still talking.

“You’re going back this weekend?” he asked.

“Saturday.”

“Alone?”

“She asked for just me.” I turned my wine glass slowly. “There are things she wants to tell me. About before. About my father.”

Something shifted in his expression briefly. “Are you ready for that?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But she is, so I have to be.”

He looked at me across the candlelight and there it was again, that thing he did where his whole face was present and unguarded in a way that made me feel simultaneously seen and dangerously exposed.

“What?” I raised a brow.

“Nothing.” He looked back at his glass. “You’re braver than you give yourself credit for.”

“I don’t feel brave.”

“The brave ones never do,” he replied simply.

I looked at him. “Can I ask you something?”

“Always.”

“The night Rina died.” I kept my voice even. “On the trip. You told the police you’d gone to her room to pick up Alejandro. But the timeline you had dropped me off and the one where you went to find him are almost the same."

The table went very quiet.

Ace looked at me steadily, not flinching, not shifting. “I dropped you first, then went in search of him.”

“And you didn’t find him?”

“I guess so? I mean he was gone when I arrived,” he corrected, his voice patient.

“And the man at the supermarket?”

“The investigator.” His eyes held mine. “Mira. What are you asking me?”

I looked at him.

At the steady unbothered surface of him, the candles reflected in his glasses, the complete stillness he wore like a second skin.

“Nothing,” I said finally. “I’m not asking anything.”

He held my gaze for a moment longer than was entirely comfortable.

Then something in his expression loosened and he reached across the table and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, fingertips grazing my jaw, and whatever question had been forming in my chest dissolved somewhere in the warmth of that.

“Come here,” he said quietly.

“I’m right here.”

“Closer.”

I looked at him.

Then I stood up, moved around the table, he turned his chair and I sat on the edge of the table in front of him and his hands settled on my waist like they belonged there, warm and certain, and he looked up at me with that expression that had stopped pretending to be anything other than what it was weeks ago.

“I keep thinking about the days I have left,” I said quietly.

“Don’t,” he replied.

“It’s hard not to.”

“I know.” His thumbs moved slowly against my waist. “But tonight you’re here and the food was good and you’re not on Zara’s couch staring at the ceiling.” He tilted his head slightly. “That’s enough for tonight.”

I looked down at him.

“You make it sound simple,” I said.

“It is simple,” he replied. “Everything else is complicated. This part is simple.”

“Ace—”

He stood up.

Not fast, not suddenly, just unfolded himself from the chair until he was standing close enough that I had to tilt my chin up slightly, his hands still at my waist, and whatever I’d been about to say dissolved somewhere between the candles and the city lights and the way he was looking at me.

“Still simple,” he murmured.

I put my hand flat against his chest and felt his heartbeat beneath it, steady and present and real.

“I’m scared,” I admitted, and I wasn’t entirely sure what I meant by it.

“Of what specifically?” he asked, equally quiet.

“All of it. Switzerland. My mother. Feeling things I don’t have time to feel properly.” I held his gaze. “You.”

Something moved through his expression.

“You don’t have to be scared of me,” he said softly.

“I know,” I replied. “That’s almost the problem.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he kissed me.

Slow and deliberate, nothing urgent about it, one hand moving from my waist to the back of my neck like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it. I felt it everywhere— not the electric destabilizing thing that knocked the air out of me, something different, something that built slowly and settled deep, like warmth after a long time in the cold.

I kissed him back.

His other hand moved up my back, I leaned into it and the city lights blurred pleasantly outside the window and for a long suspended moment nothing existed outside this apartment and his hands and the steady certain weight of him.

When we finally pulled apart he rested his forehead against mine.

Neither of us said anything.

I closed my eyes and just breathed.

“Stay,” he said quietly. “Not anything complicated. Just—” he echoed my own words back at me from weeks ago, “I sleep better when someone’s here.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him.

Then I nodded once.

He took my hand and led me from the kitchen and I didn’t let myself think about anything outside these four walls.

Not Switzerland.

Not Marlo’s unfinished sentence.

Not Alejandro somewhere in this city not sleeping properly.

Not any of it.

Just this.

Just tonight.

But at 2am when Ace was asleep beside me and the apartment was dark and quiet, one arm loose around my waist and his breathing slow and even, I lay there staring at the ceiling and felt the familiar ache in my chest settle in for its nightly reminder.