After My Fiancé Let Me Burn, I Took Everything Back

Six years later.

The mirror in the rented studio was cracked at one corner. I liked it that way. It made the woman staring back at me look like she belonged here — in this walk-up on the wrong side of Lexington, with peeling paint and a radiator that clanked all night.

I leaned closer and studied my work. No foundation. No lipstick. A shadow of gray under each eye, courtesy of a cheap powder I'd bought at the drugstore on the corner. My hair was pulled back tight, the kind of tight that pulled the softness out of a face. The coat hanging on the hook by the door was two sizes too big and one winter too old.

I looked like a woman who had lost everything.

Good.

My phone buzzed on the counter. A text from Mia. Three words.

*He's leaving now.*

I slid the phone into my pocket and took a breath. On the shelf above the sink, a single gardenia floated in a water glass — the only beautiful thing in the apartment. I brushed a petal with my fingertip.

"Wish me luck, Mom."

---

The funeral parlor sat between a dry cleaner and a shuttered bank on Forty-Ninth Street. Muted brass letters. Heavy oak doors. Inside, it smelled like lilies and furniture polish, the kind of smell that tries to pretend death has manners.

I'd been there twice already this week. The director knew my face now. She thought I was a grieving daughter, finally ready to purchase memorial urns for parents six years gone. She wasn't entirely wrong.

"Miss Taylor." She met me in the lobby with a soft, professional smile. "I have the catalogs pulled for you. Take your time."

"Thank you." My voice came out flat. Tired. Exactly right.

I sat on the leather bench near the front window and opened the first catalog on my lap. The clock on the wall read 10:52.

At 10:54, a black Escalade pulled up outside.

I didn't look up. I turned a page. My heartbeat was steady, which surprised me. I had imagined this moment for six years. I had rehearsed it in every version — screaming, weeping, striking. In the end I chose the one that would hurt him most.

Nothing.

The front door opened. A rush of cold air. Footsteps on the marble.

"—the eleven o'clock is at the Henderson building, sir, we should—"

And then silence. Complete, sudden silence, like a needle scratched off a record.

I turned the page.

I let him stand there for five full seconds before I lifted my eyes.

Atlas Henderson had gone gray. Not his hair — his face. His mouth was slightly open. His hand had lifted halfway to his chest, frozen there like he'd forgotten what he'd meant to do with it. The assistant beside him kept talking for another moment before noticing that his boss had stopped breathing.

Our eyes met.

He looked older than I remembered. Sharper at the jaw. Softer somewhere behind the eyes, in a way that had nothing to do with kindness. He looked like a man who had been carrying something too heavy for a long time.

Good.

I didn't blink. I didn't smile. I let my gaze rest on him the way you'd rest a hand on a stranger — with no history, no weight, no anything.

"Celine." His voice cracked on the second syllable.

I closed the catalog. Set it gently on the bench. Stood.

He took a step toward me. "Celine — my God — you're—"

I walked past him.

I didn't rush. I didn't slow. My shoulder brushed the sleeve of his coat as I passed, and I felt him flinch like I'd burned him. The doors opened for me. Cold air. Traffic. A woman with a stroller. A cab honking.

Behind me, I heard him say my name again. Then again. The third time it came out broken.

I kept walking.

At the corner I risked one glance back through the funeral parlor window. He was still standing where I'd left him, one hand braced on the back of the leather bench I'd just vacated. His shoulders were shaking.

I turned the corner and let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

---

By that night, the gifts had started.

The first was a bouquet, so large the delivery man had to set it on its side to fit through the stairwell. White roses. My mother's favorite. He remembered. Of course he remembered. I left them in the hall.

By morning there were three more. A velvet box with a diamond pendant. A cashmere coat, still in its Bergdorf tissue. A card, handwritten: *Please. Just tell me you're alive. Just that.*

I didn't open the card. Legend's people photographed everything and sent me copies. Evidence, for later.

The voicemails came next.

*"Celine, it's me. Please pick up. I need to — I need to hear your voice. Please."*

*"I know you're there. I know it's you. I saw you. Six years. Six years I thought—"*

*"Where were you? Where the hell have you been? Do you have any idea what you did to me, disappearing like—"*

That one made me smile, just slightly, into the dark of the apartment. There it was. The turn. The thing underneath.

*What you did to me.*

By the fourth day, the voicemails had stopped pretending to apologize. He wanted to see me. He *needed* to see me. Didn't I owe him that much? After everything?

I played them once. Deleted them. Let the gifts pile in the hallway until my neighbor complained.

Every silence tightened the wire around him. I could feel it from across the city — the way an angler feels a fish exhausting itself on the line.

---

On the fifth night, my phone rang with a different name.

"How is he?" I asked.

Mia's voice was clipped, low, amused. "Not sleeping. Screaming at the staff. He punched a hole in the study wall yesterday. Reign's asking questions."

I went still. "What kind of questions?"

"The kind she asks the security team when she thinks no one's listening. She wants to know where he goes. Who he's calling. She knows something's wrong." A pause. "She just doesn't know it's you. Yet."

I walked to the window. Below, the city glittered, cold and indifferent. Somewhere out there, in a penthouse she'd killed my parents to sit in, Reign Ortiz was starting to feel the floor shift under her feet.

"Let her look," I said quietly. "Let her find me."

I hung up and picked up the gardenia from the shelf. The petals were beginning to brown at the edges.

Soon, Mom. Soon.

I turned out the light.