Page 173 of Lady and the Hitman

In the office, a framed letter on thick cardstock sat on the desk, addressed to Greg and Hope Hughes. It was unsigned. But I knew the hand.

The world still needs beauty. You’ve given it that, year after year. Let us give some back.

I walked outside, breath shallow.

Then I saw it.

At the far end of the gardens—where the fig trees once stood before the hurricane took them out—a new sculpture had been installed.

Bronze. Life-size. Simple and stunning.

A pair of hands, palms cupped toward the sky, holding a sapling. Just barely sprouting.

But if you looked closely—if you tilted your head just right—you saw what the hands had been made from. Military dog tags. Bent and melted. Blended into the metal like history buried in soil.

I covered my mouth.

There was a plaque at the base. No name. No artist. Just one line:

From ruin, growth.

I sank to the grass and wept.

Not because it was extravagant.

Not because it was expensive.

But because it had taken time.

And hands.

His hands.

His sculpting.

Ronan Hale hadn’t just thrown money at the problem. He hadn’t just fixed the systems or paid the debts. He’d come here. He’d worked. He’d sculpted something for the man who taught me to hold a shovel and told me to plant things that mattered.

He’d taken metal meant for violence and shaped it into something that could hold life.

He’d done it for them.

But also—somehow—for me.

I didn’t know how to fix what we’d broken.

I didn’t know what words I could say to undo the silence between us.

But I knew one thing with absolute, aching clarity.

I was going to get him back.

Even if I had to show up on his doorstep, no blindfold, no contract, no safe distance—just myself, trembling and honest, asking the question I should have asked the night he walked away:

Will you still choose me?

Because I already knew my answer.

And it was yes.