The bricks were just where she’d set some of it down for a while.

Chapter 20 — Home

I finished my tea, and I set the cup down on the porch rail, and I looked out at the small, safe, sunlit world I had chosen over the grand one that had been stolen from me, and I understood that I had come out ahead in every way that would ever matter.

Luca spent our marriage believing that a wedding ring was a deed — that marrying a woman gave a man an automatic claim to everything she had built before he arrived, and that her quiet nature meant she would never make him prove it.

He learned, in the most expensive way a man can learn anything, that none of that was true.