The conservatory felt too small for the world that had just ruptured.
The crystal chandeliers downstairs still hummed with polite charity; beyond the glass the town’s night whispered. Inside, beneath the citrus trees and the honest hush of plants, things had unspooled — an image on a phone, a napkin with lipstick, a kiss caught like an evidence frame. I watched Dominic as if he were both the cause and the only cure.
He stepped toward me then, slow and deliberate like a man who knew how to read the cracks in his own skin. “Brie,” he said again, the single name like a rope.
“You kissed her,” I said, the sentence brittle and simple. It asked less than the knot in my chest demanded. I had the rest already: the car frame, the laughing photo, the way Angel moved like a knife in silk.
“I did,
