I told my fiancé Tyler was only coming to congratulate us, but one private kiss outside our engagement party exposed the messages I thought I'd hidden.

Spring arrived in the city not with warmth, but with a persistent, gray rain that washed the salt from the sidewalks.

I started seeing a therapist named Dr. Alvarez in February. I didn't go to her to figure out how to win Marcus back; I went to her to figure out why I had detonated my own life the moment it became safe and beautiful.

"You have an addiction to chaos, Jessica," Dr. Alvarez told me during our tenth session, peering at me over her horn-rimmed glasses. "Tyler represents the turbulence you grew up with—the unpredictability of an alcoholic father, the emotional highs and lows. Marcus was stable. Marcus was peaceful. And to an unregulated nervous system, peace feels like death."

The words were hard, brutal medicine, but they were true.

I had spent my entire life confusing anxiety with passion. I had mistaken Marcus’s quiet, steady devotion for boredom, and Tyler’s toxic unpredictability for "sparks."

I spent my weekends volunteering at a community garden in the East Ward, hauling soil, pruning overgrown apple trees, digging my bare hands into the cold, wet dirt until my muscles ached. I stopped wearing makeup. I stopped checking Marcus's social media—not that he posted much anyway. I learned to sit alone in my small studio without the television blaring, learning to tolerate the silence I had spent twenty-nine years running away from.

In May, Emma had her first child—a little girl named Maya.

I went to the hospital with a bouquet of white peonies and a soft knit blanket I had spent three months crocheting. When I walked into the maternity ward room, Emma was sitting up in bed, looking exhausted but radiant, nursing the baby.

She looked up at me. For six months, our conversations had been stiff, formal, limited to holiday greetings and brief check-ins about our mother.

"She has your chin," I said quietly, hovering by the door.

Emma looked down at the tiny bundle in her arms, then back at me. Her eyes softened with an understanding that only sisters possess. She patted the side of the hospital bed. "Come here, you idiot."

I dropped the flowers on the side table, sat on the edge of the mattress, and broke down. Emma reached out, pulling my head onto her shoulder, letting me cry against her gown while the baby slept peacefully between us.

"I’m sorry," I whispered. "I'm so sorry for being such a mess."

"You made a colossal screw-up, Jess," Emma murmured, her fingers stroking my hair. "A truly magnificent, horrific screw-up. But you're doing the work. Mom sees it. I see it."

"Does Marcus?" I couldn't help asking.

Emma sighed. "Marcus sent a crib last week. With a handwritten card wishing me and David the best."

My heart squeezed. "Did he mention me?"

Emma hesitated. "He asked how you were doing. Just one sentence: 'I hope Jessica is finding her footing.' That was all."

It wasn't a proclamation of love. It wasn't an invitation. But it was the first time in seven months that his thoughts of me hadn't been filtered through lawyers, bank accounts, or cold fury. He didn't hate me anymore. He had simply moved past me.