Chapter 1
PART 2: The Empty Penthouse 047
At 12:45 a.m., Norah stepped into the rain with nothing but a worn duffel bag, the clothes she had chosen before falling in love with Nico Moretti, and the certainty that she could not remain in a home where her heart had become an inconvenience.
She did not look back at the penthouse.
If she had, she might have seen the warm squares of light glowing above the city and remembered how often she had waited behind those windows for Nico to come home.
She might have remembered the first night he had brought her there, nervous beneath all his confidence, offering her the keys as though the enormous apartment belonged to her more than it belonged to him.
She might have remembered the way he had once said, “You’re the only place I can rest.”
So she kept walking.
The rain soaked through her hoodie before she reached the corner.
A taxi slowed beside her, but she lifted one hand and shook her head.
She had spent three years letting Nico solve every practical problem before she even knew it existed.
Tonight, she needed to solve one thing alone.
She walked six blocks to a twenty-four-hour café tucked beneath an old apartment building, the kind of place where the coffee was bitter and the booths were cracked, but nobody asked questions about the rainwater dripping from her hair.
The woman behind the counter glanced at the duffel bag and then at Norah’s face.
“You all right, sweetheart?”
Norah opened her mouth.
The truth rose first.
No.
Instead, she managed, “I’m fine.”
The woman did not believe her, but she poured coffee anyway.
Norah sat in the back corner and wrapped both hands around the paper cup.
Her fingers were trembling.
Not because she was afraid of Nico finding her.
Not yet.
They were trembling because she had spent ten minutes making the most decisive choice of her life, and the world had not changed around her.
The city still moved.
Cars passed through the wet streets.
A delivery truck groaned at the curb.
Somewhere above the café, a child laughed in an apartment with yellow curtains.
Nothing had shattered except the life she had believed was real.
At 1:37 a.m., she took the old phone from the bottom of her bag.
It was a simple device she had kept for emergencies, with no connection to the number Nico knew and no photographs stored inside it.