Hazel's POV
I didn't sign the papers that day. I told myself it was because I needed time to think, folding the envelope back into my bag with hands that weren't quite steady, but the truth, sitting heavier in my chest on the walk home through streets still slick from an earlier rain, was that Julian's last sentence had cracked something open in me that I wasn't ready to look at directly yet, not with Penelope's threat still hanging unresolved over both our lives like weather that hadn't decided whether to break.
The weeks that followed moved strangely, half ordinary and half suspended, like a held breath waiting for permission to release, the days folding into one another with a strange, muted quality I hadn't experienced since the early months after my accident. Julian's legal team spe
