Thornwick's POV
I am becoming someone I don't recognize.
Three weeks ago I was a man with a plan. Controlled. Strategic. Feeling nothing I hadn't approved first. Now I wake up reaching for her before I'm fully conscious. Now I rearrange my schedule to be home for dinner. Now I catch myself smiling at my phone like a teenager because she sent me a photo of a painting she found in a secondhand bookshop and wrote exactly four words underneath it: "You. But make art."
I showed Marlowe the text by accident. She didn't say a word. Just raised one eyebrow and went back to her notes.
That was enough.
The truth is Elodie and I have been burning through the last three weeks like people who know they only have so much time. We keep it private. We agreed to that over toast and guilty coffee the morning after everything changed. Nobody knows. Not the staff, not Marlowe, not Senna, not the mystery voice that called Elodie with its accusations about my fingerprints—accusations she told me about three days later with her hands fisted in her lap, watching my face.
"Your fingerprints," she said carefully. "On Calista's balcony railing."
"I was on that balcony four days before her fall," I told her. "We had a fight. She wanted to move up the wedding. I needed more time. I was gripping that railing hard enough to leave marks." A pause. "Someone has been watching very closely and feeding you just enough truth to make the lies stick."
She studied me for a long time.
Then she said, "I believe you."
And I realized that was the most frightening thing anyone had ever said to me. Not because it was dangerous. Because it mattered more than it should.
I go to the hospital on a Tuesday morning while Elodie is at a gallery consultation. Alone. No announcement. I tell myself I go every week and this is no different.
It's different.
Calista lies in that bed exactly as she has for two months. Still. Pale. Machines breathing steadily around her. She looks like a photograph of herself.
I sit in the chair beside her and try to find the words I owe her.
"I'm sorry," I start. My voice comes out rougher than I expect. "I don't know if you can hear me. I don't know if that makes this better or worse."
I press my hands together between my knees. Look at the floor.
"I'm falling for your sister." The words land in the room like something dropped from a height. "I didn't mean for it to happen. I don't think either of us did. But it's real and I can't—I can't unknow it. And you're lying here fighting to live and I'm out there living and I don't know how to hold both of those things without feeling like the worst kind of man."
My throat closes.
"I'm betraying you," I say. "And I can't stop."
"That," says a voice behind me, "is the most honest thing I've ever heard you say."
I turn fast.
Quinlan Vale—Calista's younger brother, the one who became a doctor instead of a businessman and never quite forgave the family for being surprised by it—is standing in the doorway in scrubs, a chart in one hand, watching me with calm dark eyes that look nothing like Calista's and everything like Elodie's.
"How long were you there?" I ask.
"Long enough." He comes in, pulls up the other chair, sits like he planned to be here all along. "I check on her every morning. You usually come Thursdays."
I say nothing.
Quinlan looks at his sister for a long moment. "Can I ask you something? And I need you to actually think before you answer."
"Go ahead."
"Were you ever actually in love with Calista?" He holds up a hand before I can speak. "Not—were you fond of her. Not—did you intend to be a good husband. Were you in love with her. The way you sound right now when you talk about Elodie. That kind of in love."
The room goes very quiet.
I think about Calista the way you're supposed to think about someone you planned to marry. I think about admiring her. Respecting her. Being proud to stand beside her. I think about how she made every room feel important, and how I thought that was love because it was the closest thing to it I'd been offered.
Then I think about Elodie sending me four words and ruining my whole morning meeting because I couldn't stop smiling.
"No," I say. The word costs something real. "I don't think I was."
Quinlan nods slowly. Not surprised. Not judging. Just absorbing.
"I know my sister," he says quietly. "Both of them. And I've watched Elodie disappear her whole life. Watched her make herself smaller so Calista could be bigger. She never once complained." He stands. "Whatever this is between you two—don't let her disappear again. That's all I'm asking."
He leaves without waiting for my answer.
I call Elodie from the car.
"Come to the hospital," I say. "Please."
She arrives twenty minutes later. I meet her in the lobby and I don't explain, just take her hand and bring her upstairs, and when we step into Calista's room she goes very still.
She hasn't been here since the wedding.
I watch her look at her sister. The machines. The stillness. I watch something move through her face that is too complicated for one name—grief, love, guilt, old wounds that never healed right.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. Not to me.
"Me too," I say.
We stand there together and neither of us tries to fix it or explain it or make it smaller than it is. We just stay.
And then Elodie turns to me, eyes wet, and says three words so quietly I almost miss them.
"I love you."
Something in my chest breaks open.
"I love you too," I say. "First real thing in my life. I mean that."
She leans her head against my shoulder. I wrap my arm around her. And we stand in that room with everything complicated and unresolved and real, and for one moment it is enough.
We drive home in the slow quiet of two people who have said the enormous thing and are still learning to carry it.
I drop Elodie at the building entrance while I park the car two levels below in the private garage.
She gets out. I watch her walk through the lobby doors. I pull forward.
That's when I see it.
On the windshield of my car—tucked under the wiper on the driver's side, like a parking ticket, like something utterly ordinary.
A note.
I stop the car. Get out. Take it with two fingers like it might burn me.
Seven words, printed in clean block letters with no handwriting to trace.
"She is living a life that isn't hers."
I look up at the garage around me. Empty. Still. Security cameras at every corner.
Whoever left this note knew exactly where I park. Knew exactly how long I'd be gone. Knew the precise window between dropping Elodie at the door and pulling into this space.
They've been watching us. Not just tonight.
For how long.
I pull out my phone to call Elodie—and then I stop.
Because I suddenly remember something. Something I buried under three weeks of warmth and trust and four-word text messages.
The security footage from Room 14B. Elodie outside Calista's door at 11:47 PM. Reaching up. Covering the lens.
I asked her about the footage two days after I found it. She explained it—said she'd come to check on Calista alone, panicked when she saw someone else in the corridor, covered the camera out of fear, left without confronting anyone.
I believed her.
Standing in this garage holding this note, I ask myself for the first time—did I believe her because it was true? Or because I was already too far gone to want it to be anything else?