The grand public romance unraveled exactly as such things do: once the salary and the prestige and the four-bedroom house were gone, Chloe Ruiz was gone too, within ninety days.

Last I heard, through mutual acquaintances in the aviation network, Luca was working as a regional ground-handling supervisor for a budget cargo feeder in Ohio, living in a rented one-bedroom, pulling night shifts, paying down a mountain of legal debt.

He was granted limited, court-supervised video calls with Leo, once a month.

He rarely uses them.

And this is the part I find genuinely sad, rather than satisfying, because it is the deepest failure of the whole man: the same fragile ego that drove him to propose over a public-address system, that needed the grand gesture and the applause and the shine, cannot bear the small, humble, unglamorous reality of looking his son in the eye from the bottom of the ladder.

He could stand in front of two hundred strangers and be a hero.