“What did you say?”
“I couldn’t answer.”
Alina was hurt. Of course she was. She had married a man with shadows, but she had not known those shadows had names, parents, a sister, and a bedroom left untouched for twenty-three years.
Still, the next morning, she packed Levi’s bag herself.
When Jesse tried to apologize to her again, she looked at him and said, “You can apologize to me when you come back. Right now, go apologize to your mother.”
The second day, Jesse spoke with an attorney connected to his old relocation file. Most of the people who had threatened him were dead, imprisoned, or too old to matter. The case was no longer active in any meaningful way.
Returning to Ohio was not risk-free in the way nothing in life is risk-free, but the old danger was gone.
