Hazel's POV
The morning after the gala, London looked washed clean, like the rain had scrubbed something loose from the sky overnight. I stood at my apartment window with a cup of tea going cold in my hands, watching people hurry past with umbrellas they no longer needed, folding them closed one by one as the sun broke weakly through the clouds, and I thought about the six months Julian had asked me to give him.
Six months had never felt so short and so long at the same time. I turned the number over in my mind the way I used to turn a difficult phrase of choreography over in my body, testing it from every angle before I trusted it enough to perform. Six months to decide whether five years of silence could be undone. Six months to decide whether the man who had flown across an ocean to t
