Chapter 74

• Dante
• The light in the living room seemed colder than usual, reflecting the emptiness that had long since seeped into every room of the house I shared with Ester. I tried to focus on the paperwork spread across the dining table—contracts, financial reports, company balance sheets. But the truth was that none of it made sense. Not when my conversation with Olivia was still echoing in my mind.
• Ester was sitting across from me, flipping through the same papers, but I knew she wasn’t really focused. Every so often, I felt her eyes on me, as if she were trying to measure how far my thoughts had drifted. The tension between us was constant, a thin line neither of us dared to cross. We were anything but a couple. Just two people trapped in a reality we had created to protect someone who hadn’t even come into the world yet.