you accuse me of bribery,” he said, “it’s a book.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“What kind?”
“A detective novel.
The owner said it’s good.”
He handed it to me.
Inside the front cover was a short note from the bookstore’s elderly proprietor recommending the story.
I laughed.
Nico watched me as though the sound surprised him.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.
I just haven’t heard you laugh like that in a while.”
We stood beneath the awning while rain tapped against the sidewalk.
Then he asked a question that was almost impossibly ordinary coming from him.
“Mara Quinn, would you allow me to take you to dinner?”
I tilted my head.
“Are you going to interrogate me about my plans afterward?”
“No.”
“Order me to change my clothes?”
“Never.”
“Send someone to inspect the restaurant?”
He paused.
I narrowed my eyes.
“Nico.”
“I’m learning,” he admitted.
I smiled.
“Seven o’clock.
Somewhere quiet.
And you arrive as yourself, not as the man everyone is afraid of.”
He nodded.
“Seven.”
As we walked toward the corner, he offered me his arm.
I took it because I wanted to, not because he expected me to.
That difference mattered more than either of us could have understood eight months earlier.
My father used to tell me that broken things weren’t always beyond repair, but you had to understand what caused the damage before you could fix them.
I had spent years searching for the truth about his death.
I had found it in a place I never expected, through people I hadn’t known whether to trust, and at a price that changed all our lives.
The man walking beside me was still responsible for his own past.
The future wasn’t guaranteed.
Neither was forgiveness.
But I no longer needed someone else to decide what I could know, where I could go, or whom I could love.
And when Nico opened the bookstore’s heavy gate for me and waited while I stepped into the rain, I realized something.
The first time I had told him I was going on a date, he had tried to stop me.
This time, he had simply asked whether he could be the man waiting across the table.
And I was finally free to decide.
