ARIA'S POV
I heard her before I turned around.
"Wait. Please."
Two words. The please doing a lot of work. I stopped walking and stood still for a moment in the parking lot with the cold on my face and the bronze award solid in my bag and then I turned around.
Isabella.
She was moving quickly, her heels on the pavement, her coat open like she'd left without thinking to close it. She stopped a few feet from me and stood there breathing slightly faster than usual and looking nothing like the woman I had known across restaurant tables and gallery walls for six weeks.
That Isabella had always been composed. Assembled. The particular polish of a woman who had decided a long time ago that composure was armor and had never found a reason to take it off in public.
This one just looked like a
