He found her on the roof. He always found her. The city pushed up against the edges, all hum and light. The night was colder here. She'd left his jacket folded like a patient apology on a chair by the door.
"Emma," he said, and the way he said it told her he'd already guessed what she'd heard. Of course he had. He tracked rooms for venom the way other people track exits.
"Your father thinks I'm a unit of currency," she said. "How efficient."
"I'm sorry."
"You're not responsible for his mouth," she said.
"I am responsible for the world he built," Ethan said. "And the part of me that still thinks in its math."
She turned. "And what does the math say about me?"
"That you are a loss I would take," he said. It was the ugliest, truest love confession he knew how to make.
She laughed—one sharp sound. "God, Ethan. Learn a new language."
He flinched, slight but visible. She stepped closer despite herself. "Do you even know how to want something without calculating it?"
"I'm trying," he said again, helpless and stripped. "I don't know how to fail on purpose."
"Then don't," she said. "Just… choose. Not me. You. Choose to be a person."
"It's harder than it looks," he said, and there was a small, lonely boy in the line of his mouth that made her chest ache.
They stood in a pocket of cold they'd made warm by standing inside it together. He reached for her again, hand slow, offering her time to withdraw. She didn't. His fingers touched the line of her jaw, the shell of her ear, the pulse at her throat. The world telescoped to this—his breath a thread across her skin, his eyes unarmored at last.
He leaned.
Her phone blared—Sophie's emergency tone. Emma jumped. Ethan closed his eyes like someone bracing for surgery.
"Go," he said.
Sophie's voice came out fast and furious. "There are photos," she said. "Of you at the Foundation. You look gorgeous, by the way. That's not the point. The tabloids have you as 'Ethan Blackwell's mysterious new muse.' Comments are… not kind. Also—Sienna posted an old photo of her and Ethan on her story with a timestamp. People think he left with her."
Emma looked at Ethan. "Did you?"
"No," he said. "She cornered me for a conversation I didn't want."
"Tell that to the internet."
"I'll tell it to you," he said. "I don't care about them."
"I do," she said, and hated herself a little for it. "Because they will make me into a story you get to outgrow. And I won't be a footnote in your curriculum."
He stepped back like she'd shoved him. "Then what do you want?"
"To be chosen," she said, fierce and small. "By you. Not as an investment. Not as a lesson. As a person."
"I already—" He swallowed. "I'm not good at naming things while I'm inside them."
"Learn," she said, and walked past him to the door, leaving his jacket and a stunned silence in her wake.
He stood alone with the city and, for once, didn't try to out-stare it.