The jazz club hasn't changed.
It's the same dim lighting. The same worn wooden bar. The same stage where a piano player no one recognizes performs for an audience that doesn't care. Scarlett used to come here before everything broke. Before Alexander. Before her father. Before she learned that people she loved could become strangers overnight.
She sits at a corner table with a glass of wine and realizes something that changes everything.
Life already broke her.
Cameron didn't break her. Her fiancé broke her. Her father broke her. Her friends broke her. Life itself broke her into a thousand pieces and left her sleeping in a car.
Cameron just caught some of the pieces as they fell. He just tried to gather them up and put them back together without asking permission. That's not love destroying her. That's love manifesting as control because he's terrified of loss.
She understands that now.
