Page 149 of Lady and the Hitman
Because it wasn’t just the loss of land or buildings or money.
It was the loss of everything I believed was unshakable.
If this could fall … what couldn’t?
My dad stood eventually, his hands going back to the soil. A reflex. A habit. One he couldn’t quit even as everything he’d built slipped through his fingers.
I watched him for a while before slipping out the greenhouse door and heading back toward the house.
Mom was on the porch, her eyes rimmed in red, a cup of tea forgotten in her hands.
I sat beside her and took her hand. Neither of us spoke.
There were no words big enough for grief like this.
Just silence. And air thick with endings.
Eventually, she laid her head on my shoulder. “I’m so proud of you, Zara.”
My throat ached. “I’m proud of you, too.”
Even now. Especially now.
Because my parents had spent their lives building something beautiful with their bare hands. And maybe it was ending—but that didn’t make it any less worthy.
I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to this place.
29
Ihadn’t planned to stay the night.
I told myself I was just dropping by—that I needed comfort, clarity, a place to breathe. But when my mother offered to make up my old bed, I didn’t say no. When she handed me a pair of clean pajamas folded with a lavender sachet tucked inside, I nodded like I was twelve again. And when I curled up beneath the same quilt I’d had in high school, the weight of it felt like permission to stop pretending I was okay.
I didn’t have the strength to go home to my townhouse. Not after watching the pieces of my life splinter like glass.
So, I stayed.
I didn’t answer Ronan’s calls. I didn’t read his messages. They came in waves throughout the evening, each vibration of my phone like a reminder of everything I couldn’t make sense of. I left the phone facedown on the dresser, trying to pretend none of it existed. That I wasn’t unraveling. That the ache in mychest wasn’t the sound of something breaking open inside me.
The truth was, I didn’t trust myself to respond.
Not when the pain still felt fresh. Not when my hands still remembered the trembling woman on the video floor, or the cracked soil of my family’s failing legacy.
So, I lay there.
In my childhood bed.
In the quiet of the house that raised me.
Surrounded by the familiar creak of the floorboards, the distant hum of the ceiling fan, the soft scent of magnolia drifting through the open window.
And eventually, I drifted.
But what came next wasn’t rest.
It was a nightmare.
Worse than any I’d ever had.
