That night, Aracely walked out through the front entrance of the hotel beside the father she had just met.

Not hidden in a corner.

Not ashamed of her dress.

And, for the first time in as long as she could remember, not alone.

She did not yet know how to hold what had happened — a father, a name, a whole family grieving an empty grave for three decades.

But she knew, walking out under the lights with her hand in the crook of Lysander Fairholme’s arm, that some door inside her that had been shut her whole life had come quietly open.