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“You lie.”

“I would never.” I take another bite and pretend to wince. “Er, just one question, though… How many eggshells entered the batter?”

“None remain. Let’s leave it at that.”

I laugh and pull him down for a kiss. People cheer.

Then Angelica demands we take a photo. Niko fulfills his customary role of arranging everybody, including me when I try to scurry to an edge.

“Nope,” Niko says. “Behind the cake. Dead center. Go.”

Laughing, I go stand behind the crooked cake in the middle, with Zara on my hip and Priya’s arm around my waist, and Kane just off my shoulder.

I look right into the camera and smile with my whole heart.

A little before midnight, they’re all gone. Zara went out asleep over Priya’s shoulder, still in the crown. Stepan drove Jolene and Cameron home. Skye left last and told me on the step, “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,” which from her is basically a kiss on the mouth with tongue.

The house is quiet in their absence. Anton clears the last of the glasses and disappears, leaving behind just me and Kane in the parlor with the banner sagging on one corner and half of a very good, very bad cake on the table.

“One more thing,” he says.

“You already did too many things,” I retort.

“And yet I persist in doing more.” He hands me an envelope. Plain, black, sealed, and too thick to be a letter.

I open it.

It’s a photograph. Printed, matte, five by seven.

Of me.

On his bed, three weeks ago. The candles are in it, warm and low. I’m on my back with my head tipped toward the camera. The blindfold’s on. My wrists are cuffed and up above my head, the chain arcing off the top of the frame.

My legs are apart. There’s no sheet, no shirt, no arm across my stomach, no hand covering anything.

Every part of me is in it.

The whole soft length of me, the hips, the thighs, the stomach I have spent thirty-two years hiding.

But I don’t look ashamed. Not one bit.

I look free.

“This is the only copy in existence,” Kane explains. “I felt guilty about not telling you, but… Well, it just felt like it had to go this way. I couldn’t bear to let the moment pass without capturing it. But you can destroy it if you want. It’d be a pity, in my opinion, but I won’t stop you.”

A year ago—three months ago—hell, even four weeks ago, I’d have had it in a dozen pieces before he finished the sentence.

Now, I’m not so sure.

“Why’d you take it?” I ask.

“Because you couldn’t see yourself.” He crouches down in front of me, elbows on his knees. “You are perfect in that picture, Lilah. There is not one inch of you I would change. So I wanted you to look at it and see what I saw, which is a beautiful woman taking her own pleasure and not apologizing to anybody for it.”

I look at it again.

Naked, cuffed, blindfolded, hiding nothing. Enormous by every measure my family ever handed me—and wanted anyway.

Visibly, obviously wanted—and more than that, wanting. There’s lust and greed in my open mouth, and I actually don’t hate it.