POV: Jasmine
"Finn and Asher love you very much," I said. "And they are going to keep coming."
Aurora looked at me. Then at Finn. Then at Asher. She nodded — serious, deliberate, the nod of a child who was not performing understanding but actually arriving at it. She looked down at the rabbit in her lap, adjusted its ears, and went back to holding it.
That was all. No tears. No collapse. Just a small girl sitting between two men who had shown up without being asked, holding a stuffed animal from a trip that had changed everything, deciding that the answer she had been given was enough for now.
Finn looked at me over her head. I looked back. Neither of us spoke.
Two days later, Aurora came out of her room before breakfast.
Finn was on the couch. He had stayed again — he stayed most nights now, and I had stopped telling him he didn't have to. She walked up to him with her shoes already on, which meant she had been awake long enough to plan this.
"Can we go to the park?" she asked without mention of Daddy.
Finn looked at her. Then at me in the kitchen doorway. I gave him a small nod.
"After breakfast," he said. "Deal?"
"Deal." She climbed onto the couch beside him and waited, her feet swinging above the floor.
I stood in the kitchen doorway and felt the knot in my chest loosen by one degree. Not gone. Just looser.
She had asked to go somewhere. She had asked Finn to take her. She had not attached a condition that could not be met.
Something in her had shifted — not past the grief, but through it, one small step closer to a world she could move inside again.
The nanny arrived and took Aurora to daycare. Finn and I stood in the kitchen with coffee.
The apartment was quiet in the way it was quiet now — not the pressurized silence of something unspoken, but the easy quiet of two people who had stopped needing to fill every gap.
"She didn't ask about him," Finn said. "Is that good?"
"The therapist said she'll ask again. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in a week. But the fact that she asked you to go to the park without making it about him — yes. That's good."
He nodded. Drank his coffee. Did not say anything else about it, and I was grateful for that, because I was afraid that if I talked about it too much the relief would turn into something I couldn't hold.
The same week, I went back to Cadence.
Half day. That was what I had told Asher — half day, nothing more, just enough to sit in the chair and see if I could still do it.
Finn drove me. He didn't offer to come up. He understood the difference between support and hovering, and today I needed to walk into the building alone.
The elevator opened on my floor. The corridor was the same. The carpet, the light, the glass walls of the offices on either side.
I walked past Liam's office without stopping. The door was closed. Someone had left flowers on the small table outside it — white, wilting slightly, the kind of gesture that was well-meant and inadequate.
My office was exactly as I had left it.
The same stack of folders on the left side of the desk. The same half-empty water bottle. The same sticky note in my own handwriting on the monitor — a reminder about a call I had never made, because the morning after I wrote it I was in a wedding dress and then I was in a hospital corridor and then I was somewhere else entirely.
I sat down. The chair was the same. The view from the window was the same. Everything in this room had stayed exactly where it was while my entire life had rearranged itself around an absence.
The inbox had over three hundred unread items. A long list of decisions waiting — contracts, scheduling conflicts, artist issues, budget approvals.
Each one a small piece of the company Liam had built and I had inherited and now had to hold together with hands that still shook when I wasn't paying attention.
I worked through a portion. Signed what needed signing. Flagged what needed Asher. Responded to two emails that had been sitting for weeks with replies that were brief and professional and gave nothing away about where I had been or what it had cost.
Then I stopped.
Not because I couldn't continue. Because the effort of being normal in a building full of people who knew what had happened was heavier than I had expected.
Every corridor had a version of Liam in it — leaning against a wall, laughing at something Finn said, carrying two coffees because he always brought me one without asking.
The memories were warm. They were also exhausting. I closed my laptop and stood.
On the way out I passed people in the corridor.
The first was a woman from legal. She touched my arm and said she was so sorry, that Liam was such a wonderful person, and that she couldn't imagine what I was going through. Every word was kind. Every word made it worse.
The second was a junior producer who stopped me to say that Liam had changed his life, that he wouldn't be where he was without him, and that if there was anything he could do — anything at all.
He meant it. I could see that he meant it. I thanked him and kept walking and felt the grief press harder against my ribs with every step.
The third was a man from A&R. He saw me coming. He looked at the floor. He said nothing. He stepped to the side and let me pass.
That one was the worst. Not because it was cruel — because it was honest. He didn't know what to say, so he said nothing, and the nothing was louder than all the kind words combined.
I kept walking. My heels on the marble floor. The building moving around me the way it always had — busy, purposeful, full of people making things. Liam's building. My building now.
I reached the elevator. Pressed the button. Waited.
The doors opened.
The rapper was standing inside. The same one from the meeting before Italy — the drunk driving, the assault charge, the vaping indoors, the feet on the table.
His manager was beside him, phone in hand, mid-sentence about something.
They both looked up.
The rapper saw me first. His expression shifted — recognition, then something I couldn't read.
The doors stayed open. The three of us looked at each other.