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Suddenly she was nothing more than the same scorned woman she'd always been, standing in the center of a room full of people who stared at her for an outburst she couldn't stop herself from making.[break][break]

Was it so easy to exchange one man for another? For their cold disappointment to even mirror one another in the way their glare cut across the room?[break][break]

"I wanted you to be different," was her drunken confession, though the anger didn't fade. It just fed on itself like an Ouroboros, unable to stop itself from pursuing its own insatiable hunger. "You're right. I was wrong."[break][break]

Hadn't she known that? Hadn't she made so many half-promises to herself, to never let this spark between them get further than it should have? How had she deluded herself into thinking that those phone calls were like having some imaginary friend, some person she could confide in without the full dangers of sharing that confidence?[break][break]

"But I see I've disappointed you. Though I expected that, I think."[break][break]

That part had been inevitable, even if he had been the good man he'd faked being. The one she'd let herself pretend he was, that night in the light of the crystablooms.[break][break]

The man that maybe she hoped, despite her denial of that hope, someone like GIDEON GRAVES might be.[break][break]

Despite FERNANDO SILPH being the one drenched in champagne, Elisabeth Fiorelli acutely felt as if she was the eyesore in this place. She turned on her heel, the weight of his stare now an unbearable and miserable thing.[break][break]

Unlike all the other nights she'd endured like this one in the past decade, she was free to leave this one.[break][break]

Her loneliness was both a small mercy and a cruelty, in that way.

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