He tilted his head. “You want to return?”
“Not to live,” she said. “Not as the widow anymore. But I want to fix it. Rebuild it. Make it something new. A home forwomen like me—those who need a place to start over. Quiet. Safe. Invisible, if they choose to be.”
Elias’s eyes warmed. “You want to turn your grave into a sanctuary.”
“Yes,” she said. “Because it saved me. And now… it can save others.”
He rose slowly and pulled her to her feet. “I think that might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
She smiled, but it trembled with something deeper. “Do you really think there’s life for me after this?”
Elias pulled her into his arms and held her tightly. “There’s not just life, Isobel. There’s afuture.And I’d like to share it with you, if you’ll let me.”
Her answer came not in words, but in the way she buried her face against his chest and nodded once, slowly. A quiet yes.
Outside the window, the fog that had clung to the city for weeks began to lift. And in the golden light of a new morning, Isobel Fairfax was no longer a ghost, no longer a whispered name carved in stone, but a woman with a voice, a future, and a life she had finally claimed as her own.
The End
