“To new chapters,” he said.
She touched her cup to his.
“And to not looking back,” she said. “Except to understand.”
He smiled.
“Except to understand,” he agreed.
Outside, the city moved on. Somewhere in it, in offices and meeting rooms and the particular liminal spaces of decisions not yet made, the story of Ethan Carter was continuing—more slowly than he had planned, with more uncertainty than he had intended, on a foundation he was still mapping, still learning was smaller than he thought but more truly his. Whether he would do something real with it, whether the humbling would teach him the things it might teach a person of a certain depth of character, neither Emily nor her father would know, because it was not their story to follow.
This was hers.