Isabelle’s POV
I didn’t speak to Brian for the rest of the day.
Not because I was angry.
Not exactly.
But because anger was too easy a word for the way my chest felt—tight, heavy, slow to rise and fall. Like every breath came with a question I wasn’t ready to answer.
I spent most of the afternoon by the windows, curled into the corner of the couch with a book I didn’t read. My eyes flicked over the words, but my mind kept circling back to his voice.
“Kaia knows something.”
“I laundered money.”
“I’m trying to be the man who finally puts it down.”
The sentences played on repeat, no matter how many times I tried to replace them with silence.
He had lied to me.
Not just about the past.
But about who he was while standing beside me through some of the hardest months of my life. Whil
