The waitress only wanted to save a stranger from a bullet. Minutes later, the mafia boss she’d just shielded pressed fifty thousand dollars into her hands and called her “protected.” She didn’t understand the danger in that word until he leaned in and whispered the truth: the men hunting him now had her face — and wouldn’t stop until one of them was dead.

PART 1

The first time I ever touched Vincent DeLuca, I was dragging him out of the path of a bullet.

I didn’t know his name.

I didn’t know powerful men whispered it behind closed doors, that restaurants grew quiet when he walked in, or that even seasoned detectives watched him from a distance they never dared cross.

All I knew was that a man in a soaked black coat had just pulled a gun from beneath his jacket, aimed it toward booth seven, and everyone inside Maple & Pine Café froze.

Everyone except me. After fourteen exhausting hours on my feet, I should have been too tired to react. The smell of burnt milk filled the air, soft jazz crackled through old speakers, and the rain hammered against the windows.
Instead of hiding, I dropped my tray and ran. “Move!” I screamed.

The man in the charcoal coat turned just as I grabbed both sleeves of his jacket and yanked him with every ounce of strength I had.

The gun fired.

A porcelain coffee cup exploded where his head had been only a heartbeat earlier. Sharp fragments sliced across my wrist as customers screamed and chairs crashed across the floor.

The gunman fired again.

This time, both of us hit the ground together.

For one terrifying second, I thought I had gotten us both killed.

Then the stranger rolled over me, shielding my body with his own. One powerful arm protected my head while his other hand disappeared beneath his jacket.

“Don’t move,” he whispered against my ear.

His voice wasn’t frightened.

It was calm.

Cold.

Controlled.

More gunshots echoed through the café.

Men shouted in Italian. Glass shattered. The air filled with smoke, rain, and the metallic scent of blood.

The man covering me fired exactly once.

Not wildly.

Not desperately.

Just once.

A heavy body collapsed near the front entrance.

Silence crashed over the room with even greater force than the gunfire had.

I lay frozen beneath him, my heart pounding so hard it hurt.

I just saved someone who can kill without hesitation.

Slowly, he lifted himself off me.

Rain still clung to his dark hair, and a single drop slid down his cheek as his unreadable eyes studied my face.
“Are you hurt?” he asked quietly.

I tried to answer.

Nothing came out.

His gaze dropped to the small cut bleeding across my wrist.

His jaw tightened.

Before either of us could speak again, another gunman burst through the kitchen entrance.

Everything happened instantly.

The stranger grabbed my waist, pulled me behind a wooden divider near the restrooms, and shielded me again just as another bullet slammed into the pastry display.

My manager screamed somewhere behind the counter.

I covered my ears, trembling uncontrollably.

He never flinched.

With one sharp command, the men who had entered with him disappeared like shadows through the overturned tables.

Another shot.

A cry.

Then silence.

Moments later, police sirens echoed outside.

Red and blue lights flashed through the shattered front windows, washing over the stranger’s face.
I finally learned his name from the officers surrounding him.

“Mr. DeLuca,” one detective called, gun raised. “Hands where we can see them.” The man stood slowly, completely calm, raising his hands without taking his eyes off me.

I was still shaking behind the divider.

Only then did he speak.

“Say as little as possible,” he told me. “My attorney will handle everything.”
His words should have terrified me.

They did.

Later, wrapped in an emergency blanket, a detective sat across from me and asked the question everyone else seemed afraid to ask.

“Why did you run toward a man with a gun?”

I stared down at my bandaged wrist.

“I saw someone about to die,” I whispered. “I couldn’t just stand there.”

The detective studied me for a long moment.

Then he leaned forward.

“You have no idea who Vincent DeLuca is… do you?”

PART 2
I slowly shook my head.
The detective let out a quiet sigh and rubbed a hand across his face.
“Most people in Brooklyn spend their lives trying not to cross paths with Vincent DeLuca.”
“I thought he was just another customer.”
A faint smile crossed the detective’s lips.
“That’s probably why you’re still alive.”
Before I could ask what he meant, the café doors opened again.
Every officer instinctively stepped aside.
Vincent walked back inside wearing the same rain-soaked black coat as though the gunfight had been nothing more than an inconvenience.
His attorney followed close behind, carrying a leather briefcase.
The room fell silent.
Even the detectives who had questioned him only moments earlier lowered their voices.
His eyes found me immediately.
He walked straight toward my table.
My pulse quickened with every step.
“I believe this belongs to you,” he said, placing my cracked employee name tag in front of me.
I stared at it in surprise.
“I didn’t even realize I’d lost it.”
“You lost more than that.”
His gaze settled briefly on the bandage around my wrist.
“You bled because of me.”
“It was only a scratch.”
“To you.”
Without another word, he nodded to his attorney.
The older man placed a thick envelope onto the table.
“What is this?”
“Compensation,” Vincent answered.
I opened it just enough to glimpse stacks of cash.
There had to be fifty thousand dollars inside.
“I can’t accept this.”
“You can.”
“I saved you because it was the right thing to do, not because I wanted money.”
For the first time, something almost resembling respect appeared in his cold expression.
“That is precisely why you deserve it.”
I pushed the envelope back toward him.
“I’m not for sale.”
The corner of his mouth lifted almost imperceptibly.
“No.”
He slid the envelope back into my hands.
“You’re under my protection.”
I frowned, not understanding.
“I don’t need protection.”
His expression hardened.
“The men who tried to kill me saw your face.”
A heavy silence settled over the room.
“They now believe you matter to me.”
My blood ran cold.
Vincent leaned closer, his voice barely above a whisper.
“From this moment on, they won’t stop hunting you until one of us is dead.”

PART 3
The words hung in the air longer than any gunshot had.
For a moment, the café around us seemed to fade — the flashing lights, the murmuring officers, the shattered glass glittering under emergency lamps — all of it collapsing into the small, terrible space between his sentence and mine.
“You’re lying,” I said, though my voice betrayed me with a tremor I couldn’t hide. “You’re saying that to scare me into taking the money.”
“I never lie about who wants me dead.” Vincent’s tone stayed level, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. “It’s the one subject I take seriously.”
Behind him, his attorney quietly closed the briefcase, as if this conversation had already been decided before either of us spoke a single word.
“Then tell them I’m nobody,” I said. “Tell them I’m just a waitress who panicked. I’ll go home, I’ll forget your name, I’ll forget this ever happened.”
“They already have your photograph.” He said it without cruelty, only fact. “Taken outside this café eleven minutes ago. It’s already been sent to three phones I don’t control.”
My knees weakened. I gripped the edge of the table to stay upright.
“Why would anyone want you dead badly enough to do this?”
Something shifted behind his eyes — not guilt, exactly, but the shadow of it.
“Because six months ago, I refused to let my family’s organization keep trafficking girls through the ports we control. My uncle disagreed. So did the men he answered to.” He paused. “Tonight was their answer to that disagreement.”
I stared at him. “You’re telling me I almost died because you tried to do something good.”
“I’m telling you that in my world, good intentions get people killed faster than bad ones.”
A detective called his name from across the room. Vincent lifted one finger — a small, unhurried gesture — and the man actually waited.
“Come with me tonight,” Vincent said, turning back to me. “Just until my people confirm the shooters. One night. After that, if you want nothing to do with me, I will personally see to it that you disappear from every record connected to this.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then I’ll have men watching this building anyway, whether you invite them or not. I would simply rather you slept somewhere I can guarantee.”
I should have called it manipulation. Later, lying awake, I would wonder if it was. But standing there with shattered glass still glittering across the floor and my own blood drying on my wrist, all I felt was the terrible, undeniable logic of it.
“One night,” I said.

Before we left, the same detective who had questioned me earlier caught my arm gently, pulling me a few steps aside while Vincent spoke with the officers processing the scene.
“Elena.” His voice had dropped the professional edge it carried before. “You don’t have to go anywhere with that man. I can put you in a car to a shelter right now, no questions asked, and no one connected to DeLuca will ever find out where.”
“You think he’s lying about the danger.”
“I think,” the detective said carefully, “that Vincent DeLuca has never once in his life offered anyone protection without expecting something in return. I’ve watched that family operate for eleven years. Nothing is free.”
“And if he’s telling the truth? If those men really do think I mean something to him?”
The detective’s jaw tightened. He didn’t have an answer for that, and we both knew it.
“Take my card,” he said instead, pressing it into my palm. “Detective Ray Holloway. If anything about this feels wrong — anything at all — you call me before you call anyone in his world. Do you understand?”
I nodded, slipping the card into my pocket, though some small, stubborn part of me had already decided to trust the man who’d thrown his body over mine without a second’s hesitation.
Holloway watched me walk toward the black car waiting at the curb, and something in his expression looked less like suspicion and more like worry for a stranger he’d only just met.

The car that carried us out of Brooklyn was armored, black, and silent except for the rain drumming against reinforced windows. Two men rode in front. Neither spoke.
Vincent sat across from me, elbows on his knees, watching the city blur past like he was memorizing an exit route.
“What’s your name?” he finally asked. “I never got the chance to ask before people started shooting at me.”
“Elena. Elena Cruz.”
“Elena.” He said it once, testing the shape of it, then didn’t repeat it again. “You’ve worked at that café how long?”
“Two years. Long enough to know the regulars’ orders by heart. Not long enough to know one of them ran half of Brooklyn’s underworld.”
“I don’t run half of Brooklyn.” A flicker of something almost like amusement crossed his mouth. “Only the parts worth running.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
I studied him in the passing streetlight, the way his hands stayed loosely open on his knees even now, like a man who had trained his own body never to look like it was reaching for anything. “Were you always like this? Or did something make you this way?”
For a long moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then his gaze drifted to the window, watching Brooklyn slide past in streaks of orange and gray.
“My parents were killed when I was nine,” he said, in the flat, careful voice of someone reciting a fact he’d repeated to himself so many times it no longer cut as deep as it once had. “A rival family, a dispute over docks, a message meant for my father that arrived a week too late for anyone to stop it. I was in the house when it happened. I hid in a closet for six hours because my uncle told me that’s what men in our family do — we survive first, and grieve later, if there’s time left over.”
“Was there ever time left over?”
“Not really.” He looked at me then, something raw flickering behind the composure. “Until tonight, I suppose. You didn’t hide in a closet, Elena. You ran toward the gun. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who did that.”
“Maybe I just didn’t know better.”
“Maybe,” he agreed softly, “that’s exactly why it mattered.”

His home was nothing like I expected — no marble, no gold, none of the excess I imagined belonged to men like him. Just a converted brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, warm lamplight, walls lined with books that looked read rather than displayed.
A woman in her sixties met us at the door, wrapped in a cardigan, her face folding into worry the instant she saw the state of us.
“Vincent.” She pressed both hands to his jaw, checking him over the way only someone who had known him since childhood would dare to. “They said there was shooting. They said—”
“I’m fine, Rosa. This is Elena. She saved my life tonight.”
Rosa’s eyes moved to me with a sharpness that had nothing to do with suspicion and everything to do with gratitude so immediate it startled me.
“Then you’ll stay in the blue room,” she said, already turning toward the stairs. “I’ll bring towels. And soup. You’re shaking, mija.”
I hadn’t realized I was.
The house smelled of cedar and something simmering with cumin and garlic, a warmth so unexpected after the cordite and rain of the café that for a moment I simply stood in the entryway, unable to move.
“You’re safe here,” Rosa said, noticing my hesitation. She touched my shoulder briefly, the gesture of a woman who had comforted frightened strangers in this house before. “Whatever you think this place is, it isn’t that. Not inside these walls.”
“And outside them?”
Rosa’s smile faded, just slightly. “Outside is a different matter. But that’s why the walls are so thick.”
Upstairs, the blue room turned out to be exactly that — pale cornflower walls, a window seat overlooking a small garden, and a bed made up with linens so soft I nearly forgot, for one merciful hour, that three men had tried to put a bullet in someone’s skull only hours earlier.

Later, wrapped in a borrowed sweater three sizes too large, I found Vincent standing at the kitchen window, staring out at nothing, a glass of untouched whiskey sweating in his hand.
“You didn’t have to run toward me,” he said without turning around. “Everyone else in that café hit the floor. You ran the opposite direction.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
I thought about lying, about giving him some noble answer he could file away neatly. Instead, I told him the truth.
“My father died in a robbery when I was twelve. Convenience store, wrong place, wrong time. Six people watched a man point a gun at him and every single one of them looked away.” My voice cracked slightly. “I promised myself I’d never be one of the people who looked away.”
He finally turned to face me, and for the first time since the café, his expression wasn’t unreadable at all.
“That’s either the bravest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said quietly, “or the most reckless.”
“Can’t it be both?”
The faintest ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “I suppose it can.”

The one night stretched into three.
On the second day, Vincent’s men confirmed what he already suspected — the attack had been ordered by his uncle, Salvatore DeLuca, a man who had run the family’s darker business for two decades and had no intention of surrendering it to a nephew with a conscience.
On the third day, everything changed.
I was in the kitchen with Rosa, learning to fold empanadas badly, when the front door burst open and one of Vincent’s men — a broad-shouldered man named Marco — half-carried Vincent inside, blood soaking through his shirt at the shoulder.
“Ambush,” Marco said grimly. “Two blocks from the warehouse. We got him out, but—”
“Get Dr. Alvarez,” Vincent ordered through clenched teeth, waving off help he clearly needed. “Not the hospital. They’ll be watching hospitals.”
I didn’t think. I simply moved — grabbing towels, pressing them hard against the wound the way I’d learned in a first-aid course I’d taken years ago and never expected to use.
“Hold still,” I told him, my hands steadier than my racing heart had any right to be. “You’re not dying in this kitchen. I refuse to let that be the last thing I clean up this week.”
Something between a laugh and a groan escaped him. “Bossy.”
“Bleeding.”
“Fair.”

Dr. Alvarez arrived within the hour, extracted the bullet with brisk efficiency, and left with strict instructions and an even stricter bill. Vincent slept through most of the following day, and I found myself sitting in the chair beside his bed more often than I could justify to myself.
It was during one of those long, quiet hours that Rosa found me.
“You care about him,” she said. Not a question.
“I barely know him.”
“Neither did I, once. Twenty years ago, I was his mother’s housekeeper. I watched that boy grow up learning to read people’s intentions before they finished a sentence, because in this family, hesitation gets you killed.” She sat beside me, folding her hands in her lap. “I have never seen him let anyone hold a towel to his shoulder. Not once. He doesn’t let people close, Elena. Not because he’s cruel. Because everyone who gets close to him ends up in danger.”
“Like me.”
“Like you.” Rosa’s eyes were kind, but unflinching. “The question is whether you’re the kind of person who runs from that danger, or the kind who ran toward a gun three nights ago.”
I didn’t have an answer. Not yet.
“Rosa,” I said carefully, “I overheard Marco on the phone last night. He said something about not letting Salvatore’s people find out where Vincent is. It sounded like he was talking to the enemy.”
To my surprise, Rosa laughed — not unkindly, but with the tired relief of someone hearing a fear she recognized from her own past. “Marco has a sister still married into Salvatore’s side of the family. He calls her in secret to warn her when things turn dangerous, so she can keep her children away from it. He would die before he betrayed Vincent — he’s simply trying to protect a woman who happens to share his uncle’s blood.” She patted my hand. “This life makes suspects out of everyone, mija. Even the innocent ones.”
Relief loosened something tight in my chest, followed almost immediately by shame at how quickly I’d been ready to believe the worst. I understood, in that moment, exactly how easily fear could turn shadows into monsters — and how much more dangerous the real ones truly were.

Two nights after the ambush, I couldn’t sleep. I padded downstairs for water and found Marco standing in the darkened study, phone pressed to his ear, voice low and urgent.
“…I told you, not until he’s healed. If Salvatore’s people find out where he is now, it’s over for all of us.” A pause. “No. No, she doesn’t know anything. Keep it that way.”
I froze in the doorway, my pulse suddenly roaring in my ears. Was he talking to Salvatore? Had Vincent’s own man been the one to sell the ambush location?
Marco turned and saw me before I could retreat, his expression shifting instantly into careful neutrality.
“Elena. You should be asleep.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“That’s not your concern.”
“It is if you’re the reason he nearly died two nights ago.”
Something flashed across Marco’s face — not guilt, I would realize later, but exhaustion, the particular exhaustion of a man carrying a secret he wasn’t allowed to explain.
“Go to bed, Elena,” he said quietly, and walked past me without another word.
I lay awake until dawn, turning the conversation over and over, wondering if I had just discovered the very danger Vincent had promised to protect me from — hiding inside the walls that were supposed to keep it out.

Vincent woke near midnight, pale but alert, and found me still sitting there.
“You should be asleep,” he murmured.
“So should you, technically. Yet here we both are.”
He studied me for a long moment. “Marco tells me you haven’t left this house in three days.”
“Where would I go? Apparently my face is now a wanted poster in certain circles.”
“That’s my fault.”
“Yes,” I agreed simply. “It is.”
He almost smiled at the bluntness. “You’re allowed to hate me for it.”
“I don’t hate you.” The admission surprised me even as I said it. “I’m terrified of the life you live. I hate that gunfire found me because of it. But I don’t hate you.”
“Then what do you feel?”
I looked at him — at the exhaustion carved into his face, the bandage stark against his skin, the careful way he’d protected me twice without a second’s hesitation while bullets tore through the air around us.
“Confused,” I said honestly. “Grateful. And angry that those two things keep showing up together.”
“Welcome to my entire life.”

The peace didn’t last.
Four days later, Salvatore DeLuca walked into the brownstone himself, flanked by two men, uninvited and unafraid, wearing the same easy arrogance men wear when they believe consequences belong to other people.
He was older than I expected, silver-haired and impeccably dressed, with the kind of smile that never once reached his eyes. He looked less like a man who ordered murders and more like a retired executive — which, I understood almost immediately, was precisely the point.
“Nephew.” His voice filled the hallway like poison poured slowly. “I hear you’ve taken in a stray.”
Vincent stepped between us before Salvatore’s gaze fully landed on me. “You have no business here.”
“I have every business here. This family’s business, which you seem determined to burn to the ground over a matter of principle.” Salvatore’s eyes flicked toward me with contempt so casual it turned my stomach. “And now a waitress knows enough to put us all in prison.”
“She knows nothing.”
“She knows your face wasn’t at that warehouse when it should have been. She knows more than enough.”
The room went utterly still.
“If anything happens to her,” Vincent said, his voice dropping into something far more dangerous than anger, “I will burn down every port, every account, and every alliance you’ve spent twenty years building. Slowly. Publicly. And I will enjoy every part of it.”
Salvatore studied his nephew for a long, cold moment — and for the first time, something like uncertainty crossed his face.
“You’d destroy your own family for her.”
“I’d destroy anyone who threatens what’s mine.”
The word landed heavier than either of us expected. Even Salvatore’s men shifted uneasily, unused to hearing their world’s careful, coded language broken open into something so plain and undeniable.
“You’ve changed, nephew,” Salvatore said quietly, though the contempt in it had curdled into something almost like fear. “Your father would never have let sentiment stand between him and business.”
“My father is dead because men like you value business over everything that actually matters,” Vincent said. “I’d rather be the last DeLuca standing than the next one to make that mistake.”
Salvatore’s eyes cut toward me one final time, cold and assessing, as though memorizing my face for a purpose I didn’t want to imagine.
“This isn’t finished,” he said.
“No,” Vincent agreed quietly, stepping half in front of me without seeming to think about it at all. “It isn’t. But it will be. Soon.”
The door closed behind Salvatore with a finality that didn’t match the calm on Vincent’s face — a calm I was beginning to understand wasn’t the absence of fear, but the discipline of a man who had learned, a long time ago, never to let anyone see it.

That night, standing on the brownstone’s small rooftop garden under a sky finally clear of rain, I asked the question that had been building in me for days.
“Did you mean that? What you said to him?”
Vincent didn’t pretend not to understand. “Every word.”
“You called me yours.”
“I did.”
“I’m not property, Vincent.”
“I know.” He turned to face me fully, and the careful control he wore like armor slipped, just slightly. “I didn’t mean it as ownership. I meant it as the truth. Somewhere in the last week, without any permission from either of us, you became someone I would burn my entire world down to protect.”
My breath caught. “That’s not a small thing to say to someone you’ve known for eight days.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t. I’ve spent my whole life calculating risk before I speak. I didn’t calculate this. I just knew it, the same way you knew to run toward a gun instead of away from it.”
The distance between us closed slowly, deliberately, both of us aware of exactly what we were choosing.
“If I stay,” I whispered, “it doesn’t end quietly, does it? Men like your uncle don’t just walk away.”
“No. It won’t end quietly.” His hand rose to cradle my face, thumb brushing gently over the healed cut on my wrist. “But I promise you this — whatever comes next, you will never face it looking away. And neither will I.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It isn’t simple at all. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever offered anyone.” His voice dropped lower, rougher, as though the words cost him something to say aloud. “I’ve spent my whole life making sure nothing could be used against me — no attachment, no weakness, nothing anyone could hold a gun to and know I’d break. And then a waitress grabbed my sleeve in the rain and ruined every rule I’d ever built my life around.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“It’s a confession.” His forehead dropped gently against mine, the closest thing to surrender I imagined a man like him ever allowed himself. “I don’t know how to do this halfway, Elena. If you stay, I need you to understand that. It won’t be halfway.”
“I didn’t run toward a bullet halfway,” I murmured. “I don’t think I know how to do anything halfway either.”
For the first time since the gunfire, I watched every last trace of careful calculation leave his face, replaced by something unguarded and almost boyish — the version of Vincent DeLuca, I suspected, that had died in a closet at nine years old and had only just now, finally, been allowed to exist again.

Salvatore’s retaliation came two weeks later, sharper and more desperate than before — an attempt to seize the shipping records that would prove his trafficking operation, using a corrupted judge and a forged warrant to storm the brownstone itself.
But Vincent had spent those two weeks doing what men like him did best: turning patience into a weapon. Federal agents — quietly fed evidence through channels even Salvatore didn’t know existed — arrived only minutes after Salvatore’s men did, arresting uncle and enforcers alike in the same breath, the very records they sought becoming the evidence that buried them.
I watched from the window as Salvatore was led away in handcuffs, his composure finally, completely gone, shouting threats that no longer held any power.
Vincent stood beside me, his hand finding mine without either of us deciding to reach for it.
“It’s over?” I asked.
“The organization my uncle built is over. What I build from what’s left…” He exhaled slowly, something unburdening in his shoulders for the first time since I’d met him. “That’s something I intend to build honestly. Legitimate ports. Legitimate business. No more men dying over shipments no one should ever have to see.”
“And me?”
He turned to face me fully, and for the first time, the careful, controlled man from that rain-soaked café was gone entirely, replaced by someone simply, nervously, human.
“You already saved my life once without knowing my name,” he said. “I’m hoping you’ll consider staying to know it properly — not because you’re under my protection, and not because you have nowhere else to go. Because I would like, very much, for you to choose this. To choose me.”
Outside, sunlight broke fully through clouds that had not cleared once in the eight days since I first grabbed a stranger’s sleeve and pulled him out of a bullet’s path.
“I already chose,” I said softly. “The moment I dropped that tray.”
He laughed — a real laugh, warm and unguarded, the kind I suspected very few people in his life had ever heard.
“Then let’s make sure it was worth it.”

One year later, Maple & Pine Café reopened its doors under new ownership — mine, with quiet backing from a man who no longer needed shadows to move through the world. The bullet holes had long since been repaired, but I kept one small chip in the counter’s edge, a reminder of the night everything changed.
Detective Holloway stopped by on opening day, out of uniform, ordering a black coffee he clearly didn’t need. He glanced at the booth where Vincent sat reviewing shipping manifests that were, for the first time in his family’s history, entirely legal.
“Still trust him?” Holloway asked, low enough that only I could hear.
“Completely.”
“Good.” He allowed himself the smallest smile as he turned toward the door. “For what it’s worth, Elena — I’ve watched a lot of dangerous men in this city. I’ve never once watched one change because of a woman who ran toward a gun instead of away from it. Until now.”
Vincent still came in every morning, same booth, same order, though now the whole café knew exactly who he was — and greeted him not with fear, but with the easy familiarity of a neighborhood that had watched a dangerous man choose, deliberately and completely, to become a good one.
Some nights, when the rain fell just like it had that first evening, he would find my hand across the counter and simply hold it, saying nothing at all.
He didn’t need to.
We both remembered exactly what that silence had once cost, and exactly what it had given us in return — a life neither of us had been brave enough to imagine until the moment we finally stopped looking away from each other.

THE END