Nathan almost smiled.
“That seems fair.”
They crossed the street separately, a careful distance between them.
His phone vibrated over and over in his pocket.
The board meeting.
For the first time in years, Nathan ignored it without hesitation.
Inside the café, Lily wrapped both hands around a mug of hot chocolate topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings. She drank slowly, carefully, as if sweetness might disappear if she trusted it too fast.
Nathan sat across from her, trying not to stare at the butterfly pendant.
It gleamed against her worn jacket like a piece of another life.
“So,” Lily said, direct as a blade, “why do you care?”
“I designed that pendant for my wife, Elizabeth. It was custom-made. There shouldn’t be another one like it anywhere.”
Lily’s fingers closed around it again.
“My mom’s name was Eliza Williams.”
Eliza.
Nathan’s chest tightened.
Before Elizabeth became Elizabeth Reed, before she became Elizabeth Taylor, she had once joked that she used to be “just Eliza from Ohio.” He had thought it was a fragment of an old self, nothing more. People reinvented themselves in New York every day.
“Do you have a photo of your mother?” he asked.
Lily’s eyes narrowed.
“Why?”
“Please.”
She hesitated, then pulled a worn wallet from her jacket pocket. From inside, she removed a folded photograph and smoothed it on the table.
A woman sat on a park bench in Central Park with her arm around a younger Lily.
Dark hair longer than Nathan remembered.
Same smile.
Same dimple in the left cheek.
Same graceful hands.
Elizabeth.
His Elizabeth.
Nathan felt the blood leave his face.
Lily saw it.
“You know her.”
His mouth was dry.
“I knew her as Elizabeth Reed. She was my wife.”
Lily pushed back from the table so fast the chair legs scraped the floor.
“No.”
People glanced over.
“My mom died in 2018.”
“Lily—”
“I was there. I went to her funeral. That’s not possible.”
Nathan pulled out his phone with shaking hands and opened a wedding photo.
He and Elizabeth under white flowers. Her laughing face turned toward his. The butterfly pendant at her throat.
He slid the phone across the table.
Lily stared.
All the anger drained from her face, replaced by something worse.
Confusion.
Fear.
Betrayal.
“That’s my mom,” she whispered.
Nathan said nothing.
Because there was nothing simple enough to say.