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Helena paused outside the restaurant’s doors, the hum of conversation spilling faintly onto the street each time they swung open. Her reflection stared back at her in the dark windowpane. She smoothed an invisible wrinkle from her sleeve and quickly fixed her bangs.
The evening air carried a hint of rain, cool against her cheeks, and she let it brush over her as if it could wash away some of the unease knotting her stomach.
She could turn the corner, disappear into the shadows, and let the night swallow her hesitation, her doubts, the careful composure she forced herself to wear. And yet, even in that imagined escape, a quiet part of her knew it wouldn’t last. The street was empty, yes, but hollow. Safe, perhaps, but isolating. The thought left a faint ache behind her ribs, a reminder that running might ease the immediate weight but never what she had come here to face.
Her hand hovered over the handle. For a moment, she allowed the hesitation—just enough to feel its weight, to let the reality settle. She drew a careful breath, steadying herself, and stepped forward.
Inside, the shift in the atmosphere was immediate; the restaurant’s warmth folded around her, the low murmur of voices dimming just enough to mark her arrival. A few heads turned, of course—they always did. But these weren’t long stares. Only silent acknowledgements of a woman who belonged elsewhere.
Some patrons glanced briefly from their tables, forks paused mid-air, eyes tracing her for a moment, before returning to their meals. An elderly man gifted her a quiet smile, resuming his meal as if she were a passing shadow.
Even the waiter behind the counter offered a polite nod, professional but detached, his attention quickly drawn back to the menus in his hands. The room was alive, yet she felt the gentle, unmistakable divide between her and the rest. A spectator in a world that carried on without her.
This was not a place for spectacle. But only one man failed to notice her entrance.
Zufu smelled of time and decades of conversations absorbed into the fabric of the carpet. Of dishes that no longer appeared on menus in trendier parts of the city. The light overhead was too clinical, too honest, a grid of fluorescent squares washing her. It was something stubbornly preserved, as though change had come knocking and this place had simply refused to open the door. And yet…there was something about it.
It was a place where secrets could be exchanged. A place where identities could be hidden.
She could see him. Mark Scout sat hunched in a booth like a man pretending invisibility was possible.
She had chosen a table near the door, a seat that allowed her to take in the entire room. Lanterns with red tassels lined the paneled walls, their glow caught in the glass of framed waterfall prints. The booths were close and narrow, the leather seats worn smooth from years of people sliding in and out.
From the kitchen came the sharp percussion of metal against flame, punctuated by the hiss of oil and the soft clatter of plates. Her eyes started tracing. The couple bent close over their noodles, the server balancing a tray with steady hands, the neat choreography of food arriving, drinks being poured, and chopsticks clicking gently against porcelain. She absorbed it all—the lacquered counter, the brass fixtures, and the faint wave of conversation.
But her eyes betrayed her fast, dragging back to the only presence that mattered. Then at his hair, at his face, at this unaware stare. Who was she fooling? Of course she saw him. She had been watching in fragments. Quick looks she hoped he wouldn’t notice while calculating the moment, reviewing the script.
Helena hadn’t just stumbled upon him. She obviously had known. This was because the Eagan name opened many doors, but it also opened files and employees’ schedules.
Lumon kept a tidy roster of Eagan-approved establishments in the area, each one willing to honor the gift cards handed out to the severed employees. Zufu was on that list. It was quiet and orderly, unlike the chaos of Pip’s Bar & Grille.
She figured Mark couldn’t really sit with his demons there. People would’ve stared. It was too loud, too careless. Here, no one asked questions.
She had read the roster, yes, but she hadn’t needed to. She knew in her heart he would choose the quiet on a night like this. She tried to convince herself that this was not about him. That this was about the bigger threat for Lumon.
Reintegration.
Mark Scout was a risk. A grieving man, fragile and erratic. And Helena knew that fragility made people unpredictable. Dangerous. If left unchecked, it could spread.
She couldn’t deny it any longer. Every rational argument she’d clung to unraveled the moment she saw him—so close, yet impossibly out of reach.
She realized, too late, that her gaze had lingered on him longer than it should have, and at last his eyes met hers across the aisle of booths.
He looked startled, as if she’d stolen a thought from him. For a second, she looked away, heart thudding, chastising herself for letting him see too much.
She couldn’t help herself then: the crinkle of her nose, the wide smile that softened into something almost reckless. It landed a little too bright. For someone so carefully put together, it was clumsy—obvious in its intent. She felt it hang there, unsure if it charmed or unsettled. It was the kind of smile she would have given a friend if she had one, but now it was weighted with all the things she hadn’t rehearsed.
He turned, briefly, to check if her smile had been meant for someone behind him.
Her chest tightened, every instinct screaming to stay put, to sink into the safety of the booth. She willed her legs to move, to carry her forward, and for a long, tense moment they resisted, stiff and uncooperative. Slowly, almost painfully, they obeyed. She straightened, forcing the motion to look natural, and finally stood, taking careful, deliberate steps toward him.
The walk felt strangely foreign, her body betraying her with a weight she never carried toward anyone else. Each step seemed cautious and confident, and yet her pulse beat hard against her ribs.
She was not accustomed to this—this sense of being pulled forward, of moving toward someone rather than past them. It unsettled her, and she hated that it showed.
She reached him at last, and for a moment, the tension in her chest eased. She looked at him and offered him a lighthearted smile, soft and playful, as if to say she had arrived unshaken.
“Mark…Scout. Thought that was you.” Her voice was bright and easy, though her heart pounded with the weight of his name. “I’m Helena Eagan. I work at Lumon.”
He blinked, eyes narrowing, a flash of incredulity crossing his face. “Yeah…no, I know who you are.”
The words landed heavier than she expected. They were edged with something colder, like being recognized under a harsh light instead of a warm one.
His tone wasn’t one of awe or interest; it was defensive, a reminder of who she was in his world and what she represented. She forced her smile to hold, but inside, a quiet pressure settled over her heart. The brightness of her greeting already dimming into something brittle.
“Well, it’s nice to officially meet you.” She extended her hand, steady.
He stared at her, off guard. His own hand hovering just shy of hers, as though the motion belonged to some old muscle memory he couldn’t place. Like a fragile possibility that he might remember what he didn’t yet know. The pause was brief but heavy, the kind that revealed a man caught between instinct and doubt.
His hand met hers. The grip was careful and measured.
As he let go, she felt the faintest trace of warmth slip away with it. It lingered on her skin a second longer than it should have, a reminder of contact already gone. For a moment, she wondered if he’d felt it too. Or if, to him, it was nothing more than a courtesy, another formality to check off before moving on.
She let her eyes drift to the plates scattered across the table. It looked like a whole course, enough for a celebration, though the silence in the room stripped it of festivity.
“You had enough to eat?” she teased, taking a small step back.
“Uh…quite possibly,” he said dryly, the corners of his mouth twitching.
“Hope they’re feeding you at work,” she added, then tilted her head smiling, signaling at the booth in front of him. “May I?”
“Please.”
She had anticipated resistance. Instead, there was an openness. Hesitant but genuine.
She slipped into the booth, her knee almost brushing his beneath the table. She felt an odd sense that she was intruding on a space that belonged to him alone.
Strange, how unfamiliar it all seemed. Helena Eagan did not ask, did not wait, and certainly did not feel as though she were stepping into someone else’s world. Yet here she was. Barely holding herself together.
“It’s great to run into you. I’ve heard nothing but good things about your work, by the way.”
He smiled faintly. “Thank you. I haven’t heard anything at all about my work, so...”
His fingers fidgeted with a fortune cookie.
She smiled, surprised at how the banter warmed her. “Severance humor. So clever.’’
’And so easy.’’ he added.
She hadn’t expected the ease of him—the quick, understated wit, the way his eyes softened when he answered her. It disturbed her how natural it felt to sit across from him, like she’d slipped into a rhythm rehearsed in another life. She wanted to stay there, inside that fragile illusion where she was only a woman meeting a man in a quiet restaurant. Not Helena Eagan, heir to the empire that had carved him open.
But the weight of her role pressed against her, reminding her why she had come.
Her smile thinned, her voice smoothing into the company’s cadence.
“Look, I’m sorry for… the systemic error from the other night.”
She could feel him watching, measuring, and it made the elegant surface of her tone feel fragile beneath the pulse of her nerves.
“The systemic error? You mean the… overtime thing?’’
"Yes. The OTC.” She cleared her throat, a faint hitch in the sound betraying the careful control she tried to maintain. “It never should have happened. And…it never will again. We take pride, as a company, in being better than that. And… we will be better.”
“That’s nice to hear,” he said quietly. “Thanks.”
“Of course.”
The words weren’t warm, not really. More like a reflex, polite enough to close the exchange but carrying the hollow ring of someone who didn’t entirely believe what he was saying.
Silence filled the booth.
He studied her. She could feel it—his gaze pressing against the edges of her composure, searching for something beneath the mask. Inside, her stomach coiled.
Every word she’d spoken had sounded mechanical, but under his eyes, it all felt flimsy and transparent. She hated how badly she wished the apology could sound like it came from her and not the company.
“So, you know all about it, then?” he asked finally. For a moment, Helena blinked, as though reminded of who she was and who she was talking to.
The question hit her in a way she wasn’t accustomed to. He really didn’t dance around it.
A quiet, private chuckle rose within her, and a small smile followed, teasing at her lips.
“Yes, I know all about it. I’m like… the head of the company, Mark.”
Her attempt at being funny faltered. The words flowed easily enough, but in her mind, they grated against her, each one sounding wrong. What she wanted was to tell him that she had been watching him long before tonight. She wanted him to see her as a person, not a role. To make clear that the label attached to her life didn’t capture her reality.
But she reached for power instead, because power was safer. Her father’s legacy was easier to wear than her own skin.
Still, when his eyes flickered across her face, wary but curious, she felt that dangerous pull again. The same warmth from seconds ago, still alive beneath the corporate veneer.
He nodded, half-laughing. “Right. Dumb. Sorry.”
“Yeah… you should be sorry,” she joked.
“Really?” He tilted his head, catching the thread of the joke.
“I’m kidding! You’re clearly not dumb.” Her voice softened, almost earnest, before she looked away.
She felt herself easing up to him, the tension unwinding from her shoulders. For a moment, the reminder of why she had come here, her intention, her script…slipped quietly to the edges. But she didn’t care. She let herself take refuge in the safety of his humor, as though his dry wit could shield her from the weight of her own name.
He examined her face once more. “Mmm. You’re the one who invented a revolutionary medical procedure.”
“Hey, now. That was not me; that was my father,” she corrected, polite and modest. She took a deep breath.
“You should meet him sometime.” The boldness of the offer startled her even as she said it, a line she hadn’t practiced slipping free before she could pull it back.
“Your father?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“You want to take me home to Dad already?” His mouth was withholding the ghost of a smirk, though his eyes carried a glint of cautious amusement.
Something in her chest tightened, sharp and sudden, as if his words had pressed against a place she had tried to keep untouched. She bit her lip to steady herself and let the smile rise slow, shy, and playful.
“Yeah. I think it’s finally time.”
For a second, she thought he’d laugh it off and push her back into the safe distance they were meant to keep. But instead, he smiled. Small, real. A curve that softened his whole face.
“Okay. Sure, let’s do it.”
The simplicity of it undid her. No suspicion, no edge, just quiet acceptance. It landed in her chest with startling warmth, loosening something she hadn’t realized she’d been holding tight.
It wasn’t supposed to feel like this…like the floor shifting, like the room itself leaning closer. She had meant it as a joke, a line tossed into the air, but the second it left her mouth, it curled back into her, heavy with a desire she hadn’t invited.
She let herself imagine it: him at her side, walking through doors no one else had ever been allowed to cross, stepping into the hollow, guarded rooms of her life.
In her mind he fit there seamlessly, his presence softening the edges she had kept sharp for so long. She pictured his hand brushing against hers as if it had always belonged, his voice filling the silence with an ease that felt like home. The thought swelled in her chest, tender and dangerous, a sweetness so rare it almost hurt to let herself believe it and cling to it.
“You’d be the first.”
Helena bit her bottom lip as the words left her, the gesture inappropriately affectionate. It sounded less like a declaration and more like an apology whispered inward.
Beneath her title, the reach, and the endless scaffolding of power, there was only a hollow space she had never dared to name. And in saying it aloud, even in passing, she felt as though she had cracked something open—not for him exactly, but for herself. A dangerous, aching truth she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying. That she wanted him to see her.
“So, no pressure,” he said, voice low.
“Yeah,” she murmured. “None whatsoever.”
She tried to suppress a smile but failed miserably. Her lips were curving before she could stop them. Across from her, something shifted. His face lightened, the guarded weight in his expression softening. His mouth opened on a laugh, slow and almost reluctant, as if he hadn’t given himself permission to in a long time.
The silence between them pressed close, charged and unsteady. Their eyes caught in a line neither of them seemed willing to sever. It lingered longer than courtesy allowed, filled with a heat that felt terrifyingly close to longing.
She felt the script she’d prepared dissolving, the careful posture of an Eagan slipping into something uncontrolled.
She should have looked away, smoothed the moment over with another easy joke, but she couldn’t. She wanted to know if he saw past the company’s mask, if he recognized the echo of the woman who had once sat across from him in another form, in another life. The longer he held her gaze, the more dangerous her yearning became.
It felt like teetering on the edge of something she wasn’t supposed to have. And still, she leaned closer to it, letting the tension hang between them for a moment before speaking.
“But seriously, I’d love to hear about your experiences sometime,” she said.
“Oh, okay… Yeah. About severance?” He answered, looking down and then up at her again.
“I meant the overtime...” She stopped. “I meant the other night.” She paused, then pressed forward. “I can’t imagine how confusing that must have been. Traumatic, even. And I know you have already been through so much. With losing your wife and all.”
He stilled. The air between them shifted, sharp as glass.
“Hannah.” She said.
There was no looking back.
The name tasted wrong even as it left her mouth. She watched the change in him happen instantly, as if a door slammed shut inside his chest.
“Gemma.” His voice was flat, unforgiving. Eyebrow raising.
His correction lodged in the air.
Heat rose to her face, the weight of his wife’s name striking harder than she had braced for. She had told herself it was strategy, a controlled misstep meant to test his reintegration progress. But as soon as she saw his grief harden into anger, she knew she had cut too deep. What she had intended as power felt like cruelty, and for a second she wished she could take it back.
This was the mask she had chosen to wear.
“Right, Gemma. Sorry’’ Her apology almost a whisper.
She wanted to drop her gaze from him, afraid of what she might find in his eyes now.
He kept looking at her emotionless.
“It was a car accident, right?” It was all she managed to say.
“That’s right.” He muttered. His gaze stayed fixed on her, cold and impassive, impossible to read.
Her palms itched where they rested against her lap, fingers tangled together as though pressing hard enough might anchor her against the hollow rush of shame.
She had thought herself precise, calculated, and capable of managing the conversation like a game of chess. But here, across from him, the pieces had slipped from her grasp.
“It’s a shame. She was so young.”
His mouth twitched.
“Thank you,” he said, quietly.
The words hung between them, fragile and insufficient. Every tick of the clock seemed amplified, echoing in the pause that neither of them broke. She wanted to speak, to fill the void, but her thoughts tangled themselves into knots, each one more useless than the last.
Beneath the weight of her mistake, the yearning dug deeper, stubborn and unrelenting.
His words landed with the finality of a slammed door. His silence was colder than rejection; it carried the clarity of dismissal, the reminder that she had no right to touch this part of him, no right to even reach for it.
Her gaze fell to her hands at last, the air between them too heavy to meet head-on. The polished surface of the table blurred as she lowered her eyes, and for the first time since sliding into the booth, she felt small, like a mouse under the stare of a prowling cat.
Her hands felt cold. The words she’d chosen, cautious and professional to signal empathy—now felt like ash in her mouth. They were the kind of condolences one sends in a typed card, perfunctory and safe, meant to acknowledge but not touch. And yet here, across this narrow booth, they sounded mechanical, almost cruel.
She found herself circling back to Irving’s words.
Helly was never cruel.
Her fingers tightened around each other in her lap, her perfectly manicured nails pressing into skin until it stung.
She hated how rehearsed she must have sounded, like the countless executives she oversaw, each of whom paraded tragedy as proof of humanity.
Her cursed mask had already spoken for her.
It was too late.
He coughed. The sound raw. His shoulders tightening with the resolve of departure. The movement was ordinary, but it struck her with the weight of finality. Her heart tightened, as though something inside her had been cinched too fast, too hard.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“I’m fine. About finished here.”
The words could have meant his dinner. Plates still scraped clean between them. Or they could have meant her. She couldn’t tell.
His coat hung half on, half off, as if he hadn’t decided whether to stay or flee. The fabric was caught between motion and hesitation.
Completely in sync, they got up from the booth. The one she had slipped into so confidently minutes before. Her eyes had quickly caught the subtle shift in his body and mimicked it, as if standing together bound them for one last moment before the inevitable break.
“Well, it was nice to meet you, Helena,” he said, voice low, emptied of anything but formality.
She had told herself she came here to test him, to measure his reactions. But as he stood, the truth of what she was losing—this brief, charged proximity—hit her all at once, sharp and insistent, leaving her thoughts scrambling and her pulse stuttering in sudden panic.
“You too, Mark,” she whispered, his name almost breaking on her tongue. As if she were too afraid to say goodbye.
He stared at her then, and something shifted. An involuntary sparkle in his eyes, as if the sound of his name spoken that way reached past his defenses for just an instant, brushing against some hidden tenderness he hadn’t meant to show.
For a moment, she could almost believe it wasn’t just him standing there, but some deeper part of him that recognized her—an echo from a place he shouldn’t remember, a room with a green carpet or a white corridor where their paths had crossed in another life.
Neither looked away from each other. The silence held a gravity that felt dangerous. Something she had not planned for. Something she wasn’t sure she wanted to end. For a second, she almost believed they had stepped outside themselves. Out of heiress and severed employee. Into something unmarked, unnamed. As if their other selves hadn’t already written this connection in a language neither could fully read.
“What is it?” she asked softly, as if she could hold him there with nothing more than the thread of her voice.
He looked at her, down and then up, and in that pause, something quiet and undeniable passed between them.
It was the kind of moment where eyes lingered a fraction too long, where the space itself seemed to buzz with something older, heavier. A recognition that shouldn’t exist—yet did. The way he looked at her carried the question he couldn’t voice: why did this feel like déjà vu? Like his heart in some other life had written her presence, and it lingered in the corners of his mind, a quiet imprint. A sparkle, a pull. A second so piercing and unrelenting it refused to be erased.
Part of him, a tucked-away fragment of his soul, recognized her. The awareness was too fleeting for both of them to notice, too fragile to name.
For the briefest moment, Helena thought he might say something out loud, that he might name the invisible tie pulling them closer. But he didn’t. He only looked at her, and that was enough to undo her. Because in that look lived the impossible truth: he had already found her once, in another life, and something in him had not forgotten. Maybe he will find her in this life too.
The moment was gone as quickly as it came, but she felt it—like the briefest warmth before a door closed again.
“Nothing. Good night.” His gaze cooled, a wall sliding back into place. He shrugged the coat on fully this time, the motion final, leaving no room for indecision. He walked out into the night, leaving only the faint scent of fried dishes and something she dared not call longing.
The fragile spell had broken, and she was left gathering its shards in silence.
“Good night…” was all she managed to say back. Unsure if he heard her.
And just like that, he was gone, leaving her chest still bound tight, her breath shallow.
---
Suddenly, Zufu felt too large. Too bright. Her eyes lingered on the space he’d left behind. The faint heat still clinging to the vinyl booth, the chopsticks abandoned askew, and the cup of tea he hadn’t touched.
She sat down in the booth again to collect herself. The echo of his abrupt goodbye was still vibrating in her. Her chest felt tight with the weight of what hadn’t been said. She traced a finger around the rim of his teacup, half-hoping it might hum with some residue of the moment, proof it had been real.
But the restaurant had already resumed its rhythm, the clatter of dishes and muted laughter from the kitchen rising like a tide to wash over the moment. It mocked her, that easy normalcy. Reminding her that this place had never been anything more than a stopover, a room where people entered and left without consequence. Only she had been foolish enough to believe it might hold more.
This was only information gathering. Part of some larger game to serve Lumon, right?
If it truly was, then why did her control keep slipping through her fingers, no matter how hard she tried to hold it?
She rose, smoothing her expensive coat as if composure could be stitched back into place, and stepped out into the night air.
The door swung shut behind her, sealing off the warm hum of the restaurant, leaving her alone with the sharp coolness of the street and the unwelcome truth that she had not walked away untouched.
Outside, the neon buzzed overhead, the broken sign flashing only "FU" into the night. The timing almost made her laugh. Zufu itself spitting out a message as blunt as the evening’s end. It ridiculed her with the same merciless clarity as Mark’s hasty departure: a reminder that whatever fantasy she’d allowed herself, the world was already correcting her.
The air was damp, the streetlights still slick from earlier rain. She scanned the street even though she knew he was already gone. The echo of his presence haunting her like a shadow just out of reach.
Her stilettos clicked against the pavement. She was not bowed by shame but sharpened by the taste of defeat. It wasn’t humiliation. It was the taut, electric ache of someone who had set the board, moved her pieces carefully, and still lost.
He had walked away not because she’d miscalculated the game, but because some invisible part of him refused to play it at all.
For the first time in a long time, Helena Eagan felt less like a victor in control and more like a contender who’d glimpsed her match.
She had scripted this meeting a million times in her head. Every word, every inflection, the tilt of her head, and the sympathetic smile meant to coax him closer. She had treated it like a strategy, because that’s what it was. And yet, he had looked at her in a way she hadn’t prepared for. Not with awe, not with calculation, not even with contempt. Just…with human eyes. Tired, searching, uncertain. Eyes that carried his grief like a stone.
She had wanted to reach across the table and smooth that grief away with her hand, as if she had any right.
She hadn’t intended to bring Gemma into this conversation, not directly. But it had felt appropriate in the moment, since his Innie had known Miss Casey, and she wanted to test just how far along his reintegration truly was—if at all. A deliberate slip, meant to test him. She had to push it.
She thought of his expression then, the way his face shuttered as though each word she offered was another brick laid in the wall between them. She had wealth, family, and power—all of it meaningless against the heaviness of the memory she’d mishandled. And when he rose, it wasn’t rage, not even dismissal. It was worse. Calm. Deliberate. Final. He had simply chosen the door over her, and that quiet choice hollowed her out more than fury ever could.
Her red, faded car waited where she had left it. She slipped inside, the seat cold, the steering wheel worn smooth beneath her palms. There was no one to watch her face fall.
By the time she reached her residency, the glass façade reflected her back at her—pale, blurred, and streaked with rain. Inside her apartment was a life the Eagans liked to display. Slick, perfect, and curated. Wide windows, sharp lines, a minimalist hush that swallowed sound. She set her keys down on the counter, the metallic click too loud in the emptiness.
She slipped off her coat and let it fall across a chair. The place smelled faintly of cedar polish and nothing else, a hollow kind of luxury. She crossed to her walk-in closet, sliding the doors open.
There it was: Helly’s dress. Still hanging where she’d left it. A careless trophy or maybe a taunt, depending on the night. The fabric looked softer in the low light, almost alive, and she stared at it until her throat tightened. Mark’s preference had been written clearly enough—his love for Helly, his attention bending toward her instead of Helena.
Her mouth curved in something that wasn’t quite a smile. For all Helly had taken, she had won the thing Helena had wanted most: the quiet title of honoring his heart.
And yet, as Helena stood there, the memory of Woe’s Hollow rose unbidden—the cabin’s dim hush, the press of his body against hers, the rawness of skin meeting skin in the dark. His breath in her ear, Helly’s name torn from his throat. For one impossible stretch of time, she had been his completely. The recollection cut both ways: proof that she had once held him and proof that she no longer did.
She closed the closet doors gently, almost reverently, and leaned her forehead against them. The apartment hummed with its perfect silence, but inside, Helena was louder than ever. Restless, aching, chasing the echo of a man who had looked at her for a moment like she was someone worth staying for.
She moved on autopilot toward the bathroom, shedding her clothes as though they were armor she no longer had the strength to carry. The shower hissed to life, steam clouding the glass, and she stepped beneath the scalding water. Heat licked at her skin; loosening muscles wound tight since the moment she’d seen him.
She pressed her palms against the cool tile, head bowed, letting the water blur the line between her body and the air around it. For a moment she could almost pretend it rinsed away the weight of the evening.
She wrapped herself in a thick white towel and padded to the mirror. Her reflection looked pale, softened by the steam, with eyes still carrying the shadow of him. She went through the familiar rituals. Cleanser, toner, the slow press of serum into her cheeks, and moisturizer smoothed along her jaw. Each step was precise, almost reverent, like restoring order to something unruly. Yet no matter how careful she was, she couldn’t erase the faint flush that lingered beneath her skin.
She slipped into a silk camisole and shorts and drew back the white comforter. It was the kind of luxury that was supposed to cradle her into dreamless sleep, though tonight it felt more like an empty gesture of comfort than the real thing. Sheets whispered against her skin, cool and indifferent.
Her mind replayed the fragile moment where it had almost felt like recognition. She could still see the pause in his breath. It was reckless of her to dwell on it, she knew. That look might have been nothing more than politeness or the exhaustion of a man worn down by grief. And yet, lying in the dark, she could not shake the suspicion that it was something else—that he had recognized her in a past life. She turned the moment over and over, hungry for proof in the smallest details. The softening of his mouth, the way his eyes had lingered a second too long. And though he had walked away, leaving her alone with her heart hammering in the quiet, that moment still lived in her like a secret. A spark. Proof that some part of him, unreachable and unnamed, had seen her.
Her eyelids grew heavy, the rhythm of her breath slowing. The moment followed her downward, slipping between waking and dream. In the quiet space before sleep, she let herself believe it that, for a fleeting second, his eyes had found her. Really found her. That some hidden part of him carried her with him still.
And with that fragile thought clutched close, Helena drifted off.