The irony of spending the afternoon building a legal case against Victoria Ashford and then realising, at six-fifteen p.m., that today was the anniversary of her divorce being finalised — that particular irony was not lost on Elara.
She noticed it when Diana left and Helena excused herself to make calls and suddenly it was just Callum and Elara in her kitchen with the remnants of tea and a document that had changed everything, and the specific silence that had been building between them for weeks.
"Today's a strange day," she said.
"Yes." He was washing the mugs at her sink because he'd asked if he could help and she'd gestured vaguely and he'd just — started cleaning. She watched him do it and felt something tilt uncomfortably in her chest. He'd always done that. Looked for the practical thing he could contribute when the emotional landscape was too open to navigate directly.
"One year," she said. "Since it was finalised."
He went still at the sink. Then kept washing. "I know."
"You know?" She looked at him. "How?"
"Helena pulled the court records last week. For the full case file." He set a mug on the drying rack. "I read everything."
"Callum—"
"The transcript of the divorce proceedings." He turned the tap off but stayed facing the sink. "My attorney — the one I was using then — referred to you in the documentation as the departing spouse. Like you were—" He stopped. "Like you were incidental."
"That's standard legal language."
"It's not the language I'd have used." He turned to face her. He leaned back against the counter and looked at her across the small kitchen with an expression she was learning to read — the one where the memory and the present were in the same place at once. "I read our marriage certificate too. I had to request a copy for the legal case." He paused. "I signed it in blue ink. You signed it in black. Your handwriting is neater than mine."
She looked at the table.
"Stop," she said quietly.
"I'm not trying to—"
"I know what you're trying to do." She looked up at him. "And I understand it. You're trying to reclaim something. To make it real in the only way you can right now because you still don't have the memory to make it real the proper way." She held his gaze. "But it doesn't work like that for me, Callum. I can't — I can't hear these things and process them academically. For me they have weight." She pressed her hand to her sternum briefly. "So please. Not tonight."
He was quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," he said.
He picked up his jacket. He moved toward the door.
"For what it's worth," he said, at the door, "I think one year ago today was the worst decision I've ever made. And I made it with someone else's mind." He looked at her. "I want you to know that I know that. Whatever happens next."
She stood in the kitchen and let herself feel the full weight of that.
She gave herself sixty seconds.
Then she cleaned up the rest of the mugs and went to bed.
— ✶ —
She didn't sleep.
At two in the morning she was at her kitchen table with her sketchpad. Not working — not really. Just drawing lines that went nowhere, the way she'd done in the early months after he'd left, when her hands needed to move even when her mind was too tired to direct them.
She drew a door. Then a window. Then a garden with lavender along a fence.
She stared at the lavender.
She turned the page.
She wrote, at the top of the fresh page, a question she'd been refusing to ask herself for weeks:
*If he remembers everything — all of it, completely — what do I do with that?*
She sat with the question.
She didn't write an answer.
But in the margin, without quite deciding to, she wrote one word.
*Terrified.*, { italic: true }
She closed the pad.
She went to make more tea.
Her phone lit up on the table.
A text from a number she'd never seen. Not Garrett. Not Callum. Not anyone in her contacts.
*Ms. Voss. My name is Dr. Lena Marsh. I was the attending physician on duty the night Callum Reid was admitted to Harmon Medical. I was not the staff member who was paid — I want to be clear about that. But I was present. And I saw things that night that were not in any report.* A pause between messages, then: *Specifically, I saw who was in the hospital before the ambulance even arrived. And it was not Victoria Ashford.*
Elara read it twice.
Then: *I've been afraid to come forward for fourteen months. I'm not afraid anymore. Can we meet?*
Elara's hands were very still on the phone.
She typed: *Tomorrow. Eight a.m. You choose the place.*
The reply came in under thirty seconds.
A café address. And then: *Come alone. And Ms. Voss — whatever you think you know about th
at night? You don't have the full picture yet.*