Chapter 234:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

Corinne POV

I don’t remember how I said goodbye to Cyrus and Daisy that evening. I only remember his worried eyes and his parting words: “Call me if you need anything.”

I declined his offer to drive me all the way home and took a cab back to my Manhattan apartment instead. The cold air helped clear my head as I stepped out. I limped toward the stairs, my right ankle throbbing from the sprain, the compression bandage biting into my skin with every step. On the drive back, I had been too distracted to notice the ache. Now, in the quiet, it made itself known.

But I didn’t go straight inside. Instead, I walked to the edge of the East River and let the cold wind whip against my face. The water was dark and steady, its surface rippling beneath the city lights. I stood there for a long moment, letting the cold air fill my lungs and the rhythm of the water settle my thoughts.

I had stood on this same riverbank once before, years ago, before my mother fell gravely ill and began her long-term recovery at the specialized Swiss medical retreat. She had brought me here after my first major academic setback, a rejection from a research program I had poured my heart into. She had stood beside me in silence, not offering advice, not trying to fix anything. She had simply stood there and let the river do its work. After a long while, she said, “The river doesn’t stop, Corinne. It keeps moving. And so do you.”

I hadn’t understood it then. I understood it now.

I pulled out my phone and found the only picture I had of Blake and me together: our wedding photo. I was smiling in it, naive and hopeful. The sun had been bright that day, the kind of golden afternoon that makes you believe in forever. I had worn my mother’s pearl earrings, the same ones she had worn at her own wedding. I had looked at Blake and believed, truly believed, that we would grow old together.

That version of me felt like a stranger now.

𝖳𝗵e 𝖻е𝘀𝘁 r𝘦a𝗱𝗂ո𝘨 𝘦xpеr𝗶𝘦ոсe o𝗇 𝘨𝖺l𝗇ovе𝗹𝗌.co𝗆

I stared at the photo for a long moment, my thumb hovering over the screen. I remembered the weight of the phone in my hand as I had scrolled through the album earlier that day, and the way I had stopped on this image without meaning to. At first I had felt nothing, just a quiet, hollow recognition. Then, slowly, something else had surfaced. Not grief, not anger, but a kind of distant tenderness for the woman in that dress, the woman who had believed so fiercely in something that was never real.

I swiped to delete the photo.

It vanished, and with it, the last trace of the woman I had been.

I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel my heart break. It had already broken, healed, and rebuilt itself into something stronger. What I felt instead was the last of the ashes being swept away. There was nothing left to mourn.

My phone rang. The name “Blake” flashed across the screen.

The first time, I watched the screen light up and let it ring until it fell silent and went dark.

The second time, I felt a faint pull, a muscle memory of obligation, but I let it pass.

The third time, I almost reached for it. My hand moved halfway to the screen before I stopped myself. What would I even say? What could he possibly offer that I hadn’t already heard? Nothing.

The fourth time, I simply let it ring. I watched the name appear and disappear, the screen brightening and dimming in a steady, familiar rhythm, and I felt nothing at all.

When the screen finally went dark, I tucked the phone into my pocket and walked back toward my building, my steps steady and my direction clear.

.

.

.