Right now, Ezra can still have everything. He’s young, powerful, and connected. His life stretches out in a thousand brilliant directions, each path open before him, doors just waiting for him to walk through.
And what do I have? Nothing but ghosts.
I close my eyes, remembering my grandfather’s face the last time I visited him in prison. How the light had gone out of him, how the hands, once capable of painting masterpieces, had become thin and trembling. How he died alone in an infirmary, surrounded by concrete walls instead of beauty.
Is that what I want for Ezra? To drag him down with me when the past inevitably catches up?
Two minutes, he said. Two minutes to decide the course of both our lives.
My hands clench at my sides, fingernails digging into my palms until the pain brings clarity.
I turn and run in the opposite direction, feet silent on the manicured lawn as I flee toward the eastern wall. My heart pounds, not from exertion but from the knowledge I’m leaving behind the only person who will ever truly see me.
But that’s why I have to go.
Because Ezra deserves someone whole, someone real.
As I scale the wall and drop to the other side, landing in a crouch on damp grass, I taste salt on my lips, and I swipe away the tears.
Straightening, I walk away from Halcyon Hall, from Ezra, and from the possibility of a life I never deserved.
10
The morning sun filters through my blinds, casting thin strips of light across the wooden floor of my loft. I lie still in bed, watching dust motes dance in the golden beams, reluctant to disturb them with my movement.
Three months since Halcyon Hall, and I still wake with his name stuck in my throat, the ghost of his fingers on my skin. Some mornings, I can almost convince myself it was just another role I played, but the charcoal drawing on my easel tells a different story.
I push back the thin blanket and pad across the cool floorboards, my body moving through the familiar morning ritual while my mind drifts elsewhere.
The loft is sparse, with a king-sized bed, kitchenette, bathroom, and the large area I designated as a studio. No one else’s belongings clutter the surfaces. No one else’s scent lingers in the air.
Just me and the masks I put on and take off like coats.
My bare feet carry me to the easel where his face stares back at me, rendered in smudged charcoal on thick paper. I drew himfrom memory the day after I fled Halcyon Hall, desperate to exorcise his image from my mind.
It didn’t work.
If anything, the act of creation crystallized him further, trapping him on paper where he continues to haunt me.
Ezra’s eyes follow me across the room, the silver streak in his hair catching nonexistent light. I captured him in a rare moment of vulnerability, head tilted, lips parted as if about to speak. Before the tattoos. Before I left him the first time.
I traced the contours of his face for hours, fingers blackened with charcoal, chest aching with each stroke. Trying to take us back to before I broke his heart. Before he mapped his pain across his body.
The box of charcoals sits untouched beside it, layered with dust thick enough to trace my name through. I’ve told myself a hundred times I’ll put it all away tomorrow. The drawing, the charcoals, and the memories.
But tomorrow becomes another day of the same promise, broken before it’s made.
In the kitchen corner of my loft, I prepare my morning tea with the precise movements of Tobias Crane. Two level spoonsful of sugar. A splash of milk to turn the liquid the exact shade of wet sand. Tea steeped for three minutes, not a second more or less.
Tobias is methodical, reliable. Everything I’m not.
Of all my personas, Tobias most resembles a well-worn sweater, comfortable, if a bit itchy around the edges. The quiet bookseller with irregular hours and a penchant for obscure volumes is unremarkable enough to fade into the background of anyone’s memory. The perfect disguise for a man who needs to disappear.
I carry my mug down the narrow staircase to the bookshop below.
The steps creak beneath my weight, announcing my descent to an empty room. The shop sits caught between night and day, shadows retreating into corners as sunlight creeps through the front windows. Shelves tower to the ceiling, crammed with books arranged in an organizational system only I understand. Fiction bleeds into philosophy bleeds into forgotten academic texts that no university library wanted.
The familiar scent of paper, leather, and the faintest hint of vanilla wraps around me. The perfume of aging pages no candle has ever successfully replicated. A thin layer of dust covers the less popular sections, undisturbed for weeks despite my half-hearted attempts at cleaning. The register on the counter is digital but designed to appear antique, another layer to Tobias Crane’s carefully constructed world.
