My sister fractured my skull when I was eight, and my parents covered it up to protect her pageant career—then she attacked me again at my wedding...

Six months later, in late May, the Mediterranean looked like melted turquoise poured into a bowl of limestone.

We sat on the private terrace of a villa in Ravello, perched a thousand feet above the Amalfi Coast. The air was thick with the scent of lemon blossoms, wild rosemary, and the cold, clean salt of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Below us, tiny white fishing boats drew straight, chalky lines across the sapphire water, their engines silent from this height.

Declan sat across from me at the small iron table, wearing a crisp linen shirt, his sunglasses resting on his dark hair. In front of him was a plate of grilled sea bass, an open bottle of crisp Greco di Tufo, and a bowl of green olives.

“You’re quiet,” he said, reaching across the table to cover my hand with his.

I smiled, turning my palm up to interlock my fingers with his.

“I was just thinking about the silence,” I said.

“The silence?”

“It’s been six months since I checked a family group chat. Six months since I worried about what Vesper was posting. Six months since I waited for my father to call and ask for something he had no right to have.”

I lifted my wine glass, watching the sunlight refract through the pale yellow wine.

“It turns out that when you cut out the noise,” I said, “the world is remarkably quiet.”

Declan laughed softly. “You deserve the quiet, Sloane. You fought an entire army to get it.”

My recovery had been complete. The scar above my right ear was now completely hidden beneath my hair, a quiet, invisible seam known only to me, Declan, and the stylist who had cut my hair before we left for Rome. The headaches had ceased entirely three months ago.

My corporate life was thriving. We were preparing Aegis Tech for an initial public offering in the autumn, and the industry journals had recently profiled our financial management as an example of operational excellence in a volatile market.

There had been small, pathetic ripples from the past, of course.

Uncle Leander had tried to send an email through my corporate address in March, claiming that Delphine’s health was failing in Fredericksburg and that I had a moral obligation to contribute to her medical bills.

Our company’s IT security department had blocked his domain within twelve minutes, and Michael Vance had sent Leander a formal notice that any further communication would be treated as an actionable violation of our non-contact order.

We had heard nothing since.

Vesper was currently three months into her community service, working twenty hours a week wiping down therapy mats at a rehabilitation clinic in Woodbridge, wearing gray scrubs and an ankle monitor that tracked her every movement.

Her Instagram account remained dead. Her digital footprint had been replaced by the public court archives, where anyone searching her name found the docket for the Commonwealth of Virginia v. Vesper Mercer.

She had finally achieved the status she had spent her life pursuing: she was unforgettable. But not as a goddess. As a warning.

Declan stood up, walked around the table, and pulled me to my feet.

We walked to the edge of the terrace, leaning against the warm stone balustrade. The sun was beginning its slow, majestic descent behind the mountains of the peninsula, turning the sky into an explosion of gold, apricot, and deep, imperial violet.

Declan wrapped his arms around me from behind, his chin resting against the side of my neck, right over the pulse point that beat with a steady, unhurried rhythm.

“Happy honeymoon, Mrs. Kincaid,” he murmured against my skin.

“Happy honeymoon, Mr. Kincaid,” I answered, leaning back against his chest, feeling the solid, unbreakable strength of the man who had stood between me and the world until I could stand on my own feet.

I looked out at the endless horizon, where the sea met the sky without a seam, without a border, without an end.

I was thirty-one years old.