Chapter Forty
Daniel Quinn moved back to the city three weeks after Cassian’s sentencing, a small apartment two blocks from Amara’s mother’s house, close enough to finally begin rebuilding the relationships five years of hiding had cost him.
The transition was not smooth. Amara’s mother, though relieved beyond measure that her husband was alive, carried an anger she had not fully processed until he was standing in front of her again, no longer an abstract grief but a real man who had made a real choice to let her believe he was gone.
“I do not know how to just forgive this,” she told Amara, the week before Daniel’s official move-in date. “I loved him. I still love him, apparently, which makes this so much harder. But five years, Amara. Five years I spent thinking I had failed to keep hi
