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“And what do you want?”

I look across the ballroom.

Celia catches my eye and lifts a hand in greeting. Beside her, the vice president I’d met earlier waves me over to join another conversation.

Business cards fill my clutch, meetings already wait on my calendar, and every opportunity in this room belongs to the woman I’ve become instead of the one I used to be.

A smile finds me before I answer. “I think I already found it.”

Lena smiles. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

She falls into step beside me, and together we head back into the crowd, my silenced phone forgotten inside my bag.

If Spencer finds another number, I’ll block that one too. I’m done letting him drag me back into conversations I’ve already ended.

Whatever he thinks he’s trying to save between us is already gone. I’ve spent too long getting my life back to let him interfere with it now.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Bane

MAY 21ST

The heavy bag swings toward me, and I step into another combination that drives it across the gym before the chain snaps tight overhead and sends it back again.

I meet it with another jab, pivot into a cross, finish with a hook, and feel the impact travel over my shoulders, sweat already soaking through my shirt.

Most mornings, the repetition clears my head long before the workout ends, but today every punch drags me straight back to Haven House.

I see Eleanor setting another folder on the table. Janice describes the mother who kept her apartment because Celeste quietly covered seven months of rent.

Marilyn smiles as she remembers my wife finding excuses to disappear whenever anyone tried to thank her, and every story circles the same truth from a different direction.

One woman remembers legal fees that saved her family. Another remembers school uniforms arriving before the new term began.

Someone else talks about childcare, groceries, or a security deposit that turned a shelter into a temporary stop instead of a permanent address.

I drive another combination into the bag, but the memories refuse to give way.

After Celeste died, I spent years honoring the promise I made to her by traveling wherever shelters needed another pair of hands. I painted bedrooms, repaired playgrounds, unloaded food deliveries, and listened to women rebuilding lives after escaping men who’d taken too much from them.

I’d believed those months brought me closer to understanding why the work mattered so much to her. But I’d only been standing near the edges.

The women at Haven House never spoke about Celeste as another volunteer who showed up when she had spare time.

They remembered her as the woman who appeared when life had cornered them, solved the problem nobody else could, and disappeared before anyone had the chance to repay her.

I catch the bag against my gloves before it swings back into me and lean my forehead against the worn leather.

I shared a home with her for twelve years.

I knew the woman who curled against me on the couch after long days, laughed whenever Sprout stole food off the counter, and kissed our daughters goodnight before checking on them one last time after they fell asleep.

I loved every part of that life.

Yet somewhere beyond it, she’d built another one that touched people I’d never met, changed futures I’d never heard about, and carried burdens she never brought home.

The thought follows me through the rest of the workout until my arms begin to tire and the heavy bag refuses to swing as hard as it did twenty minutes earlier.