Zara stood very still, the green dress, the cold air, the warmth of his hand still faintly present against hers from the dinner table, and felt the last of the careful architecture this is fake, this is strategic, this doesn’t count come down all at once, not gradually this time, not an inch at a time, but completely, like something that had been held up by nothing more than her insistence that it should be.
“Okay,” she said. The fourth time. The weight of it was almost unbearable now.
He stepped closer. Slowly. Giving her, as always, every chance to stop him.
She didn’t.
And just as his hand reached her face just as the moment that had been building since the lake finally arrived, no cameras, no audience, nothing performed a car’s headlights swept across the parking lot, slow, deliber
