Ellie POV

The worst of the storm had passed, but the ache in my leg remained.

It was a throbbing reminder, a physical ledger of the damage Marcus had done.

Sitting in Julian's gallery, safe and warm, my mind drifted back to the sterile white room of Mount Sinai Hospital. Back to the place where the illusion finally died.

It was two weeks after the elevator fell.

I was lying in the hospital bed, my leg in a cast, my ribs taped tight against my chest. I had been pressing the call button for ten minutes-not for a nurse, but for my husband.

He wasn't there.

The door opened. But it wasn't Marcus.

It was Chloe. Her eyes were red, swollen from crying. She held her phone like it was a grenade with the pin pulled.

"Where is he?" I asked, my voice raspy from disuse.

Chloe didn't speak. She just turned the screen toward me.

It was a photo from Page Six.

Marcus, standing outside the very hospital I was lying in. He wasn't rushing inside. He was leaning against his Porsche, his forehead resting against Izzy's. She was crying. He was holding her face with both hands, wiping her tears with a tenderness he hadn't shown me in years.

The headline: Thorne CEO Comforts Distraught Ex-Girlfriend After Tragic Accident.

"She wasn't even in the elevator," Chloe spat, her voice trembling with rage. "She was in the lobby. She claimed she heard the crash and it gave her a panic attack."

I stared at the photo.

He was comforting the witness. Not the victim.

"He's been down there for an hour, Ellie," Chloe whispered. "He hasn't come up once."

That was the moment the pain medicine stopped working.

I looked at the slow drip of the IV. I looked at the empty chair beside my bed.

"Call my parents," I said.

"Ellie, are you sure?"

"Call them," I said, my voice turning to steel. "Tell them to bring the car. Not the sedan. The SUV. I have luggage."

My parents arrived four hours later. They didn't ask questions. My father looked at my leg, then at the empty room, and his jaw set hard enough to crack stone.

"We're taking you to the gala next week," my mother said, smoothing my hair with a trembling hand. "We are going to show him you are still standing. And then, we are taking you home."

"Not home," I corrected.

I looked at the ceiling tiles.

"I want to go to Maine. To Nana's plot."

"It's a shack, Ellie," my father said gently. "It's abandoned."

"It's mine," I said. "It's the only thing I have left that he hasn't touched."

I sat up, wincing as my ribs protested the movement.

"I'm done waiting for him to come upstairs, Chloe. I'm taking the stairs down."

I closed my eyes in Julian's gallery, pushing the memory away.

The elevator had broken my bones. But that photo? That photo had broken my curse.

I looked at Julian, who was washing out a paintbrush in the sink.

He turned and smiled at me.

"Ready to go?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. And for the first time, I meant it.

Ellie POV

The memories came in relentless waves, crashing against my resolve.

But it was the final wave that broke me. The one that washed me all the way here, to the quiet coast of Maine.

It happened at the Thorn Gala. The "Goodbye" masquerading as a charity event. The night the sky fell.

We were in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza. I stood flanking my parents, leaning heavily on my cane for support. Across the room, Marcus was laughing at something Izzy had whispered in his ear.

Then, the sound.

A screech of tearing metal. The sickening pop of a straining cable giving way.

I looked up. The massive crystal chandelier above the center of the room detached.

It fell in slow motion-a glittering cloud of impending death.

I was standing directly in the impact zone. So were Marcus and Izzy.

"Ellie!"

My father lunged for me, tackling me sideways. We hit the floor hard, the marble biting into my hip as debris rained down around us like shrapnel.

I coughed, waving away the choking dust. I looked up.

Marcus was on the floor, too.

He was covering someone with his body. He was shielding them completely, his tuxedo back exposed to the shattered glass to protect the person beneath him.

It wasn't me.

It was Izzy.

He lifted his head, shaking shards of glass from his hair. He looked frantically beneath him. "Izzy? Are you hurt? Izzy!"

He didn't look for me. He didn't scan the rubble for his crippled wife.

He checked the woman who had caused the scene.

My mother gripped my hand, her nails digging into my palm. She saw it too. The whole room saw it.

"That's it," my father said, his voice shaking with quiet fury. "We're leaving. Now."

We walked out. Marcus didn't even see us go. He was too busy screaming for a medic to treat a scratch on Izzy's arm.

Two days later, I stood at the gate at JFK.

My parents hugged me tight.

"Are you sure you don't want us to tell him?" my mom asked, her voice thick with emotion.

"No," I said. "He'll figure it out when the silence gets too loud."

I boarded the plane. As we took off, I looked down at the grid of New York City. From up here, the penthouse was just a speck. Marcus was just a speck.

For the first time in years, I felt lighter.