Chapter 39 – What Bars Can't Fix
(Serena's POV — City, Three Weeks Later)
Grief is not one thing.
People talk about it like it's a season — something you walk into and eventually walk out of, blinking, back into the light. But it isn't. It's a roommate you didn't invite, who rearranges your furniture at three in the morning and never apologizes, who sits across from you at breakfast reading your newspaper and breathing too loudly.
It had been three weeks since I left.
I was staying in a flat I'd rented with the last of the emergency money I'd been quietly setting aside in the months since Lucian had given me a household account for expenses. An act of control that had accidentally become my lifeline.
My siblings were safe. Ethan was in school; Chloe had taken a part-time job and been
