The city outside her window moved without her. Paris, pale and glistening under a wet October sky, carried on as if something immense hadn't just broken inside her.

Maria lay motionless in the dim hush of her apartment on Avenue Georges Mandel. Dark hair fanned across the pillow, damp with sweat and tears. The silk sheets clung to her body—grief, and something deeper, unnameable, had soaked her through. The curtains hadn't been drawn; she hadn't moved in hours. Light shifted slowly across the parquet floor, tracing time in silence. Her eyes were swollen. Her throat ached. Her chest burned like it had been hollowed out with a scalpel.

She hadn't touched the phone. Every ring felt like a bullet. The world knew now. The papers were already running with it, glossy spreads of that white-dressed American widow stepping onto Skorpios like she belonged there, like she hadn't been a shadow trailing Maria for years.

He had done it. He had really done it. Married her. Married Jacqueline Kennedy.

Not even a call. Not even a warning.

Just absence. Vast, unbreachable, final.

Maria curled deeper into herself, breath ragged. Her limbs felt heavy, unreal, like they belonged to another body. She had given him everything. Not in some breathless, romantic way— no, she had sacrificed for him, with eyes open, heart desperate. Her husband, her art, her voice—none of it had been enough. And the child—God.

She pressed the back of her hand to her lips.

No one knew about that part. Only he did. And he had made sure it stayed buried.

If you have it, I leave. It's that simple, Maria.

His voice had been like ice then. Efficient, clinical. He hadn't needed to raise it. His power was never in volume, only in certainty. A master of leverage.

And she had obeyed. She had loved.

Now she was just... discarded. Not even with cruelty—that would have acknowledged her. Just silence. Erasure.

The sobs had wrung her dry hours ago, but her body still trembled from their echo. At some point, exhaustion took her. Not rest—just the final surrender of a body too worn to fight what the heart couldn't survive.

She fell asleep with mascara staining the pillow, the ache still lodged beneath her breastbone like a second heart, beating hollow and wrong.

Outside, the bells of Notre-Dame rang in the distance. A wedding for ghosts.

And Maria slept.

Alone.