Chapter 41

• The morning air carried a kind of stillness that didn’t belong to any ordinary day.
• It wasn’t peace. It wasn’t calm. It was the pause before consequence, the breath before something irreversible. I arrived at the boutique before the sun had climbed past the rooftops, before traffic stirred or the city exhaled into routine. I came alone, needing to stand inside this space, to trace the curves of the walls that once shaped the best and worst of me, and ask whether it could truly be mine again. Not by memory. Not by force. But by reclamation.
• The floorboards creaked faintly beneath my boots, but the silence held.