His head turned sharply.
Zuri’s eyes filled.
“I saw you standing there.”
Ethan remembered that day: the black suit, the flowers, the empty certainty of everyone around him.
He remembered people telling him closure would come.
He remembered wanting to tear the word closure out of the English language.
“You could have sent one message.”
“I wrote hundreds.”
“You sent none.”
“No.”
That answer hurt more because she did not defend it.
Ethan looked at the ring on the counter.
“Why keep that?”
Her hand moved instinctively toward it.
“Because disappearing from your life did not make you disappear from mine.”
Before Ethan could answer, the curtain moved.
Clare stood there.
She looked first at Ethan, then at Zuri, then at the ring between them.
Nobody spoke.
Clare had spent two years learning Ethan’s silences.
She knew the distant one he used in meetings, the irritated one he used when somebody wasted his time, and the cold one that came before he ended a negotiation.
She had never seen this silence.
“Who is she?” Clare asked.
Ethan did not lie this time.
“My wife.”
The words landed heavily.
Clare’s face lost color.
She looked at Zuri again.
“The wife who died?”
Zuri answered quietly.
“I didn’t die.”
“That part I gathered.”
Clare’s voice was sharp, but not cruel.
She was trying to understand how the future she had boarded with had disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic.
Ethan rubbed a hand over his face.
“Clare, I need—”
“No.”
She held up one hand.
“You need answers.
So do I.
But don’t ask me to stand here while you decide whether the woman you spent five years grieving is still your wife.”
Zuri looked away.
Clare noticed.
Something softened in her expression, though the hurt remained.
“This isn’t her fault,” Ethan said.
Clare gave him a long look.
“I didn’t say it was.”
She returned to her seat.
The curtain fell closed behind her.
Ethan exhaled slowly.
“This ends tonight,” he said.
Zuri immediately shook her head.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know who they are.”
“Neither do you.
