"If you mean it, I need you to say the whole sentence."Anwe's voice was gentle but unyielding, and Voss sank slowly to his knees in the middle of the boathouse floor, both hands pressed to his skull as though trying to hold something enormous inside it by sheer force of will. The silver in his eyes flickered, dimmed, flared bright again, a war being fought in real time across his ravaged face."I don't—" His voice cracked between registers, human and vast, fighting for the same breath. "I don't know what the whole sentence is.""Try," Bara said, kneeling in front of him, close enough to feel the cold radiating off the man's skin. "Start with what you actually want. Not what it wants. What *you* want, Halden Voss, underneath thirty years of believing the wrong things for what you thought were the right reasons."Voss's hands trembled against his temples. "I wanted to matter," he said, voice breaking. "That's — that's the truest thing I've got left

"Welcome back. We kept your locker."Pak Hendra said it with a crooked, uncertain smile, standing in the doorway of the grocery store he'd once fired Bara from, gesturing at the small, dented metal cabinet still sitting at the back of the storeroom, a single sticky note long since peeled away but the faint shadow of old adhesive still visible on the paint."That's either very kind or extremely strange," Bara said, stepping past him into the store, "and I genuinely can't decide which.""Both," Reza offered, from behind the register, where he'd been restocking shelves with the quiet, dogged focus of someone still working off a debt he didn't expect to ever fully repay. "Pak Hendra's been weird about that locker since the day you left. Wouldn't let anyone touch it.""I kept thinking," Pak Hendra admitted, rubbing the back of his neck, "that if I kept it empty, it would feel less like I'd actually done what I did. Which was foolish. I know that now."<