I shouldn’t have come home.
Three years in London were supposed to fix it. Three years of distance, of new cities and colder weather and forcing myself not to think about the way his voice sounded when he said my name. I almost managed it.
Then the call came.
“I’m getting married again,” he said. “I need you here for the engagement weekend. Your mother would have wanted you present.”
He never said her name. He never had to. The silence after the words did all the work.
So I packed a bag, got on a plane, and walked back into the penthouse that still smelled like him—cedar, whiskey, and something darker that had lived under my skin since I was nineteen.
Roman Vale.
My stepfather.
The man who had raised me after my mother died. The man who had put me on a plane to London three years a
