Chapter 27
Two months after Dad died, I accepted a full-time position at Sunshine Pediatric Clinic.
The job should have felt like a beginning.
In some ways it did.
The clinic was smaller than the teaching hospital, bright with painted animals and shelves full of toys that had survived generations of nervous hands. Mia worked there too, which meant my lunch breaks came with unsolicited advice and stolen fries.
But every evening I returned to the Reeves Estate and felt as though I were living in the pause between two sentences.
Alexander remained kind.
That was almost worse.
He made sure I ate. He arranged transportation without making it feel like surveillance. When grief hit without warning, he never asked me to hurry through it.
And yet the promise he had made beside Dad’s hospital bed lived inside every gesture.
As a soldier and as her husband.
I began to wonder whether duty had simply become more comfortable than love.
The contract expired exactly one year after we signed it.
Alexander was not home.
He had been deployed to Northern Africa for a classified mission three weeks earlier. The night before he left, he had stood beside our bedroom door as if he wanted to say something, then settled for, “Be safe.”
I had answered, “You too.”
Neither of us had been brave enough to do better.
On the final day, I sat in the library with dissolution papers in front of me.
The lawyer had prepared them months ago as part of the original agreement. Clean. Civil. Simple.
I signed Grace Zane.
The name looked strange.
For a year I had been Mrs Reeves in hospitals, at formal events, on documents, in the quiet domestic habits I had never intended to form.
I removed my wedding ring.
Then the engagement ring Alexander had placed on my finger at the estate.
I set both on top of the papers.
My hands shook so badly I had to press them flat to the desk.
“You’re sure?” Mia asked from the doorway.
I had called her to help me move before courage failed.
“No.”
She crossed the room and sat beside me.
“That was not the answer I expected.”
“I’m sure I can’t keep living here wondering whether every good thing he does is because my father asked him to.”
“Did you ask Alexander?”
I looked away.
Mia sighed.
“Grace.”
“He had a year.”
“So did you.”
The truth hurt because it was fair.
Still, I packed.
I took my nursing books, clothes, the stethoscope he had given me, and the photograph of Dad I kept beside the bed.
I left behind expensive gifts I had never considered mine.
At the front door, I looked back at the marble foyer that had once felt like a fortress and later, somehow, like home.
Then I walked out.
That same afternoon, thousands of miles away, Alexander completed the final phase of his mission.
Ethan found him outside a temporary operations tent reviewing evacuation reports.
“Extraction confirmed. All teams accounted for.”
Alexander nodded.
For the first time in three weeks, the tension in his shoulders eased.
“Prepare the return flight.”
Ethan glanced at him. “In a hurry, sir?”
Alexander ignored the tone.
He had spent the deployment deciding that caution had become cowardice.
He was going home.
He was going to tell Grace that the contract could end if she wanted it to, but his marriage would not survive another day built on silence.
He would tell her he loved her.
He had no idea she had already left.
