Isabelle barely slept that night.
The ceiling above her held no answers—just shadows and silence. The sheets felt cold despite the summer air, her skin chilled beneath the weight of a thousand unsaid things.
She lay still, hand pressed flat against her stomach, breathing slow and shallow.
She kept thinking about the phone call.
Not the words—because she hadn’t heard them—but the timing. The pattern. How even after everything, Victoria’s voice could still pull Sebastian out of the present like a riptide. How his face had changed the second he saw her name light up on his phone. Not with desire. Not even affection.
With obligation.
And maybe that was worse.
Because Isabelle knew obligation. She’d lived through it—choked on it in the years when their relationship had crumbled under the
