Chapter 808: (END)

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She was standing at the railing with her coat pulled tight, watching the lights of Cheson blink on one by one as the evening settled. She heard his footsteps but didn’t turn around.

“How did you get up here?” she asked.

“Helena.” He came to stand beside her, hands in his pockets. “She has a gift for giving out information she probably shouldn’t.”

Monique almost smiled. Almost.

Romаnс𝘦 ո𝗼𝘃e𝗅𝗌 oո 𝘨𝗮lno𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗌.𝗰𝘰𝗆

In her hand was the letter—still sealed, creased now from weeks of being carried and set down and carried again. Leonino glanced at it but said nothing.

“I’ve been thinking about what Dr. Clark said,” Monique murmured. “About the observing self. Noticing what you feel without immediately trying to fix it or explain it away.” She turned the envelope over in her fingers. “I’ve been practicing.”

“And?”

“And it turns out I feel quite a lot.” Her voice was wry, but underneath it ran something real and unguarded. “That’s inconvenient.”

Leonino turned to look at her profile—the line of her jaw, the way the city light caught the edge of her expression. He thought of the patients he’d treated, people who couldn’t hear the world. He understood what it meant to restore something that had gone quiet. Standing next to Monique, he suspected he was still learning what that meant.

“You don’t have to read it,” he said. “The letter. Not tonight. Not ever, if you don’t want to.”

Monique was quiet for a moment. Then she held it out to him. “Read it to me.”

He looked at her.

“I’ve been the one carrying it for weeks,” she said. “I think it’s your turn.”

Leonino took it carefully. He broke the seal, unfolded the single sheet inside, and read—not dramatically, but steadily, in the same even tone he used when explaining a procedure to a patient who needed to trust him.

It wasn’t a long letter. It didn’t need to be.

When he finished, the city hummed below them and neither of them spoke for a while.

“You wrote that before you even knew me,” Monique finally said.

“I knew enough.”

She looked up at him—those eyes of hers, tough and delicate in equal measure, exactly as he had once tried to describe them to himself in a boxing ring while dodging Dorian’s fists. He hadn’t done them justice then. He wasn’t sure anyone could.

“I’m not easy,” she said. “You understand that.”

“I’m a surgeon,” he replied. “I have patience.”

The almost-smile became a real one—brief, quiet, and entirely her own. She took the letter back, folded it carefully along its original creases, and tucked it into her coat pocket.

“Okay, Dr. Prescott,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow.

“Okay,” she said again, simply.

It was enough.

Weeks later, the six of them found themselves gathered around the long table in the Wilson dining room—Alden and Helena, Leonino and Monique, and Delaney, who had taken to leaving her jewelry sketches spread across one end of the table as naturally as if she’d always lived there.

The seventh seat was occupied by a bottle of Alden’s best wine, uncorked in honor of no occasion in particular—or perhaps in honor of all of them at once.

Helena raised her glass first. “To Valeria,” she said. “Wherever she is tonight.”

“To Valeria,” the others echoed.

Monique glanced at Leonino over the rim of her glass. He met her eyes and said nothing. That, she had come to understand, was its own kind of language.

Delaney set down her pencil at the end of a particularly difficult line and looked around the table with the quiet attention of someone who had learned not to take ordinary evenings for granted. She had lost many of them. She intended to keep the ones she had left.

Alden refilled glasses without being asked—a habit Helena had stopped trying to break. Under the table, her hand found his, and he held it without looking up from the conversation he was already halfway through with Leonino. Neither of them let go.

Outside, Cheson settled into its nighttime rhythm—its lights, its noise, its ten thousand private stories pressing on behind closed doors. Some of those stories were still unfinished. Most of them were.

But at this table, for this evening, everything that needed to be said had been said. And everything that remained could wait until morning.

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The end

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Message from Noa: Have a beautiful morning dear readers. God loves you and Noa wishes you all the best. (─‿‿O)

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