(Emery’s POV)
The cursor blinked at her like a dare.
Emery sat in the sunlit corner of the nursery, laptop perched on her knees, Aurora asleep in the bassinet beside her.
She’d written three words.
Then deleted them.
Then wrote two more.
Then backspaced those, too.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know where to begin.
She just didn’t know how to begin without breaking.
Until Luca walked in, placed a steaming mug of tea beside her, and said without looking:
“Start at the night everything changed.”
So she did.
The fire wasn’t the beginning.
It was the middle of the story no one wanted to tell.
The beginning was a boy with blood on his knuckles and ice in his voice, standing between me and everything I didn’t know was trying to kill me.
⸻
She wrote for hours that day.
And when she s
