She had imagined it would require forgetting him, or at least filing him far enough back that he stopped surfacing, and she had resisted that cure instinctively because forgetting Gabriel felt like a second betrayal, like letting him fall twice.

But that had never been the choice.

The ghost had not been Gabriel.

The ghost had been her guilt wearing his face, a thing she had built herself out of her own unforgiven grief and then mistaken for him, and laying it to rest had not cost her a single true memory of the man.

She remembered him better now, in fact, than she had in all the months of flinching, because she no longer had to look away.

She could keep the grinning sideways photograph on a shelf and look at it over morning coffee.