At one in the morning, Ferris Street Coffee held nothing but Marin and the fading hum of the espresso machine cooling down.

Word count target: ~1,500 words

Six months later.

The morning sun over Lake Geneva was so bright it turned the deep water into a sheet of liquid silver. In the distance, the snow-capped peaks of the Alps rose against a cloudless blue sky.

The private clinic sat on a hillside surrounded by terraced vineyards. The air smelled of alpine pine, clean water, and spring blossoms.

Marin stood on the balcony of Room 302, holding a porcelain cup of black coffee. She wore a simple white linen dress, her dark hair tied back loose over her shoulders. The small cuts on her hands from the shattered glass on Ferris Street had healed long ago, leaving faint white lines that were almost invisible in the sunlight.

Behind her, the balcony door slid open softly.

Julian stepped out onto the stone patio. He wore a dark blue sweater, his face rested and tan, though he still walked with a faint, barely perceptible limp. He wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, resting his chin on her shoulder.

"You're up early," he murmured, kissing the side of her neck.

"Habit," she smiled, leaning back against his chest. "Four years of one-a.m. shifts don't disappear in six months."

"How is he today?" Julian asked, looking toward the open room.

Marin turned her head, looking through the glass doors.

Inside the room, Leo was sitting upright in an armchair beside the window. He wasn't connected to a ventilator. He wasn't tied to a bed of monitors. He was holding a small leather sketchbook, drawing the mountains outside with slow, steady movements of his right hand.

The neurosurgeons in Zurich had spent three months removing a small, dormant blood clot near his brainstem—a clot that the doctors in Boston had deemed too risky to operate on. Two weeks ago, Leo had spoken his first full sentence in six years.

"He asked for more blue paint this morning," Marin said, a genuine, radiant smile lighting up her face. "He said the sky here doesn't look like Boston."

"It doesn't," Julian said softly. "Nothing here looks like Boston."

After the night at Marlo Ridge, the federal investigation had cleared Marin entirely. The Bennett syndicate had collapsed completely within weeks of Arthur Bennett's death, its primary assets seized, its lieutenants arrested by federal task forces using encrypted files Julian had anonymously delivered to the Department of Justice.

Ferris Street Coffee had been rebuilt, bought out by Estelle with an insurance payout that had been surprisingly generous—funded secretly by an offshore trust that had no name attached to it.

Marin took a sip of her coffee, turning around in Julian’s arms to face him.

"No more envelopes?" she asked softly, eyeing him with a playful glint.

"No more envelopes," Julian promised, raising his right hand in a mock oath. "The accounts are clean. Legitimate investments. Fully reported to Swiss authorities."

"And what about you?" she touched the faint scar on his chest beneath his sweater. "No more ghosts?"

Julian looked deep into her eyes, his hands resting on her hips. The dark, haunting shadow that had lived in his gaze for six years was finally gone, replaced by a quiet, steady warmth.