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“Are you alright? I don’t mean about the promotion. I mean wherever you are. Are you safe?”

My eyes close, and I nearly laugh. “Depends on how you define safe.”

“Veda—”

“Physically, I am fine. Better than fine. I’m sleeping better than I have in years.”

“And the rest of it?”

I draw a long breath. “Sorting through some stuff. Figuring out my next steps.”

“Figure them out soon. Your patients miss you. Boston misses you.”

The call ends quickly. Took me ten years to get where I am, and two minutes to lose it.

But that’s not true. I’ve been here a lot longer than two minutes.

Pruitt says Boston misses me. But I’m not sure if I miss Boston. I’m not sure I was ever really there in the first place.

My body undergoes its peculiar sorting—cold hands, a constricted chest, and a rushing calm where my ambition once was. I expect tears to come, but instead, I get a catalogue. The years lay themselves out in my mind.

I answered overnight calls in a single ring, even from a dead sleep. I worked on birthdays, left weddings early, and spent nine Novembers in conference ballrooms with name tags. Two relationships ended by voicemail because I was needed on the floor. The chair at the break-room table, pushed in neatly, was assumed to be used again by me.

A month ago, that would have been a fair assumption.

I end up at the piano in the conservatory without deciding on the trip. My hands go to scales because scales are the equivalent of comfort food. It’s a dusty old room with space for waltzes. A small dance floor, huge windows along the walls that overlook the vineyard on one side and a copse of trees on the other. Moonlight pours in, leaving icy white squares on the dark floor.

A shadow casts long lines over half the keys, and then I see him there.

Lupo in the doorway, jacket gone, day worn down to shirtsleeves. “Haven’t heard you play before⁠—”

“The headship went to Hollis.” My hands keep moving. “Unanimous. I missed the dinner, and that’s that.”

“Who made the call?”

“Pruitt gave me the autopsy herself, out of respect. It took two minutes to tell me that I ruined ten years of hard work by getting kidnapped. Well, she didn’t say the last part, but I heard it.”

He crosses the room and sits on the bench beside me, facing the other way, his back to the keys, shoulder resting against mine. He sighs, and somehow, my hands slow.

He looks at the dark garden. Not me. I think it’s on purpose. “You built that life for ten years, and it was taken from you because a man decided his family required you.”

“Lupo—”

“I knew. I knew about the promotion. I took you anyway. Tonight, my mistake is costing you everything you worked for.”

The scales stop alongside my breathing.

“I won’t insult you with an apology. I won’t pretend I’d do anything differently,” he says, quieter. “But here’s what I know from a life of taking things. The theft says nothing about the value of what’s taken.”

He turns his head, and in the dark his eyes hold the same steadiness they held at a hotel bar, delivering the honesty nobody else would tell me. “Boston chose the person standing nearest, doc. That’s presence, not worth. Nobody in that room is worth half of you, and they all know it. Dollars to donuts, they are relieved you’re not there to take the job, because they know they’d have to work even harder to hold a candle to you.”

My eyes sting, and then they overflow. It’s a brief and ugly sob, and I let it happen against his shoulder, his hand cupping the back of my head, neither of us pretending it isn’t happening. Grief, and rage under the grief, and under the rage the terrible lightness of a woman whose calendar just emptied.

I don’t want to be relieved, but I am.

“Who am I without the ladder?” I say into his shirt, and it’s the barest truth I’ve handed anyone in years. “I’ve never once thought to check.”

“I know precisely who you are.” His mouth is at my hair. “Come upstairs, and I’ll show you.”