Lila's P.O.V
The weeks after Felicia's retreat felt like a fragile peace, the kind that settles over a battlefield after the smoke clears but before the scavengers arrive. Ethan and I slipped back into our rhythms in Blackwood—him sketching blueprints for a new eco-lodge upstate, me buried in client meetings at the firm, where Diane kept shooting me those knowing glances over coffee. "You're glowing again," she'd say, but I knew she meant the opposite; the weight of it all still clung to me like damp soil after rain. The vineyard was secure, the council's grip firm, and Damien's silence stretched on, a taut wire I half-expected to snap.
We'd decided to celebrate properly, though. A weekend getaway to the city—New York, not Paris this time. No shadows of the past lurking in cobblestone al
