"My first wife died of cancer when Leon was just eleven," James said, his voice carrying that quiet, heavy weight of memory, the kind that settles deep in the chest and refuses to move no matter how much time passes.
Seraphine felt a pang in her chest, an unspoken ache that made her stomach tighten, and she murmured softly, "I'm sorry."
"No, it's fine," James replied, shaking his head as if trying to cast the sorrow aside like a shadow he had learned to live with. "I waited five years before I married Mila, and don't read her wrong.
She's forty-two, and she's been everything a man could ask for in these years we've had together. We struggled with childbirth until Tyler came along, but the difficulties, the heartbreak, the things that happened to Leon's mother… all of that shaped him, gave him a passion, a fire for medicine that I've never seen in anyone else.
