Emma didn't sleep that night.
She lay in her apartment—the one that still felt like hers, not theirs—and stared at the ceiling until the numbers on her clock stopped making sense. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw James's face that morning in the empty house. The hurt. The disappointment.
The hope underneath it all.
By six AM, she'd given up on sleep entirely. By seven, she was dressed and pacing. By eight, she was standing outside her mother's building with two coffees and a desperate need for guidance.
Her mother answered the door in her bathrobe, took one look at Emma's face, and ushered her inside without a word.
"He proposed," Emma said, collapsing onto the familiar couch she'd grown up curling into whenever life felt too big. "And I panicked."
Her mother handed her a tiss
