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His handwriting.

“Found someone new. Wanted to tell you first. Also, our daughter…I need an answer about moving her from the garden at the house to somewhere proper. Mum knows a place. I said as much in the divorce papers.”

He signed it with a kiss.

A fucking kiss.

My breath broke.

My chest cracked.

My palms went numb.

To ask to move Gracie, our daughter, like she was a misplaced ornament…It tore the last threads holding me upright.

I pressed my forehead to the carpet.

No more.

He doesn’t get to break me anymore. Not when Dane is building me skyward.

I dragged my laptop close, flipped it open with shaking hands.

And I wrote.

I wrote like bleeding.

Like resurrection.

Like every memory, every wound, every truth was a spell I needed to cast to survive.

Between the sobs, between the keys tapping like prayer, I felt it:

Dane isn’t just a man.

He’s a lighthouse.

And I’m done drowning.

DANE

Leaving Penn’s office felt like walking out of a fire I’d willingly thrown myself into. My smirk was for show. The swagger? Habit. A trick I’d mastered young move like nothing can touch you, so no one sees the places already burned.

But her eyes…Christ. Her eyes stuck to me like grief with teeth.

I kept walking, boots heavy against the corporate carpet, pretending my pulse wasn’t lodged in my throat. Mail under my arm. Her softness under my skin.

Every time I blinked, I saw that envelope in her hands. His handwriting. Her tears.

I wanted to go back in there, pick her up, walk her straight out the front doors and home. My home. Where the world couldn’t touch her. Where I could ask why she still lets that man bruise her heart with paper cuts.

But I couldn’t.

Not yet.

So, I shoved open the stairwell door, leaning into the cool concrete air that always felt more honest than anything upstairs. I exhaled hard. The sound bounced off the walls.

“Get a grip,” I muttered. My voice didn’t listen.