The coffee house was three blocks from Rora AI.
Aurora had been coming here since before the company launched—back when this neighborhood was where she could afford to rent a desk by the hour and pretend she had an office. Back when a single cup of coffee was a budget decision she made consciously.
She didn't think about that every time she walked in.
Just sometimes.
She chose a corner table. Back to the wall, facing the door. Old habit. David sat across from her, Ricky beside him, and for a moment—just a moment—the years collapsed. They were twenty-five again. Broke and hungry and impossibly certain that something was coming, even when the evidence suggested otherwise.
"You look the same," David said, studying her face across the table.
"I look older," Aurora said.
"You look like yourself." He said it like there was a difference. "Which is more than I can say for some people."
Ricky snorted. "She looked pretty exhausted back then. At least now she can afford good concealer."
Aurora looked at him, her lip curled in a playful sneer. "Thank you, Ricky."
"Anytime."
David laughed—that full, unguarded laugh she'd forgotten the specific sound of. It landed in her chest in a way she wasn't prepared for.
"God, I've missed this," he said. Shook his head. "Freya keeps telling me we stayed overseas too long."
Aurora wrapped both hands around her coffee cup. "How is Freya?"
"Wonderful. Impossible. Exactly the same." His expression softened the way it always did when he talked about his wife. "She sends her love. She was furious I came to see you before calling her first."
"She should be furious. Tell her I'll call this week."
"She'll hold you to that." David glanced at Ricky. "And the kids are asking about their Uncle Ricky, for the record."
Ricky's expression did something complicated. "Tell them Uncle Ricky will bring presents."
"You say that every time."
"And I always deliver."
"You delivered a drone to a seven-year-old."
"He loved it."
"He crashed it into my car."
Aurora watched them and felt something loosen in her chest. The particular ease of people who had shared something real—not the polished professional ease of boardrooms and alliances and carefully managed impressions, but the ease of people who had seen each other at their worst and decided to stay anyway.
She hadn't realized how much she'd missed it until it was sitting across from her ordering a flat white.
"Do you remember," Ricky said, leaning forward, "the night before the competition? We were in that terrible diner on—"
"Forty-third," Aurora said immediately.
"Forty-third. And you had exactly one dollar forty-seven left in your account—"
"Ricky—"
"—and you ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and pretended you weren't hungry—"
"I wasn't hungry."
"You ate half my fries."
"They were there."
David was watching them both with an expression that was equal parts warmth and something quieter underneath it. "I didn't know that," he said. "About the dollar forty-seven."
Aurora looked at her cup. "There was a lot you didn't know yet."
"Tell me," he said simply.
She looked up.
He meant it the way he always meant things—without pressure, without agenda. Just an open door. The same door he'd held open for her at twenty-five when she'd shown up at his firm with a competition certificate, a cash prize she'd already spent half of on a bus ticket, and absolutely no idea what came next.
She'd told him eventually. Not all at once—it had taken months, the story coming out in pieces, late nights in his kitchen when the apartment he'd given her felt too quiet and the pills weren't working and she didn't know how to be still.
Now she told it differently.
Not because the facts had changed—they hadn't—but because she had. Because she could say my mother died when I was twenty-one without her voice breaking. Because she could say I worked three jobs for three and a half years without feeling the specific exhaustion of it in her bones the way she once had.
She told them about the years after the Ashfords. The apartment in Asheville that was never quite warm enough. Her mother's health declining in increments—slowly at first, then all at once, the way those things always went. The night Imelda died in a hospital room that smelled like antiseptic and old coffee, with Aurora holding her hand and understanding for the first time what it meant to be completely alone in the world.
The years after that were harder to describe. Not because she didn't remember them—she remembered everything, catalogued and filed with the same precision she applied to everything—but because they existed in a register that didn't translate cleanly into words.
The pills had started as something practical. Sleep, mostly—she wasn't sleeping. Then something to get through the day. Then something she needed before she could get out of bed at all. She'd watched it happen from inside it, with the detached awareness of someone who knew exactly what was occurring and couldn't find the mechanism to stop.
"I knew something was wrong," Ricky said quietly. "When we met. At the competition."
Aurora looked at him. "You didn't say anything."
"Neither did you." He held her gaze. "We were both pretending pretty hard that year."
David was quiet. Listening the way he always listened—fully, without interrupting, without filling silences that weren't his to fill.
"I'd heard about the competition six months before," Aurora said. "Someone at one of my jobs mentioned it. Tech innovation. Open entry. Cash prize." She turned her cup slowly in her hands. "I spent those six months saving. Not for the entry fee—that was manageable. For the train ticket. For one night in a hostel. For enough food to think clearly."
Most of her savings had gone long before that—into legal paperwork, into officially changing her name from Isabella to Aurora, into the minor surgical work she could manage at the time—removing the chin mole, softening scars—and into face masks she wore religiously to hide the rest.
But she didn't say that out loud; it was a lot to unpack.
"You took the overnight train," Ricky said.
"I took the overnight train." She almost smiled. "I slept sitting up and arrived in New York at five AM and found a bathroom in Penn Station to change in and walked to the venue."
"And came first," David said.
"And came first." A pause. "Ricky came second."
"By four points," Ricky said immediately. "Four."
"He's been saying that for eight years."
"It's been true for eight years."
David laughed again. Softer this time.
"That's how you met," he said. Not a question—he knew the broad version. Just filling it in.
"He was the only other person there who looked like he'd also slept on a train," Aurora said.
"I had slept on a train," Ricky said. "From Philadelphia. My father was in the hospital and I needed the prize money for his bills." He said it without self-pity. Just fact. "We got talking. Found out we had more in common than the competition."
More in common. Aurora thought about what that had meant at twenty-five—two people circling the same wound from different angles, neither of them ready to name it yet. Ricky's father and his stolen algorithm. Her mother and the Ashfords. Two different stories with the same architecture underneath.
It had taken time. Months of working side by side at David's firm, of late nights and shared frustrations and the slow accumulation of trust that happened when you spent enough hours with someone in close quarters. Ricky had told her about his father first—quietly, over takeout in the break room, like he was testing whether she would flinch.
She hadn't flinched.
She'd told him about the Ashfords three weeks later.
They hadn't talked about it again for a month. And then one evening Ricky had come to find her in the office after everyone else had left, sat across from her desk, and said: I've been thinking. About what you told me. About what we could do about it.
That was how the plan had started.
Not with strategy. With two people who understood each other's damage and decided, quietly, to do something about it.
"I lost my sister too," Ricky said. He was looking at his cup. "I don't think I ever told you the full version, David."
David went still.
"She was sick. Needed a specialist. The kind of specialist you can only afford if you have good insurance or money." Ricky's voice was even. Practiced. The way voices got when they'd told a story enough times to sand the edges smooth. "My father's legal fight with Ashford had drained everything. By the time it was settled—or rather, by the time they'd buried him under enough paperwork that he gave up—there was nothing left." He paused. "She was nineteen."
The table was quiet for a moment.
David reached across and put his hand briefly on Ricky's arm. Nothing more than that. Ricky nodded once.
Aurora looked at the window. At the street outside—ordinary, indifferent, people moving past with coffee cups and phones and lives that had nothing to do with any of this.
She'd known about the sister for years. Had carried it alongside her own history—not as fuel, exactly, but as weight. The specific weight of understanding that what the Ashfords had done hadn't happened to just her. That the damage had radius.
Ricky's phone buzzed on the table. He glanced at it.
"Sorry." He pushed his chair back. "I need to take this."
He stepped away from the table, moving toward the door. Aurora watched him go and then looked back at David.
He was watching her.
"How are you?" he asked. The question he always asked. The one that meant something different from the version other people asked.
"I'm managing Ray Carver," she said. "Which is about as fun as it sounds."
"That's not what I asked."
She almost smiled. "I know."
David wrapped both hands around his mug. Considered something. "I saw the news yesterday morning," he said. "The alliance announcement. Both companies, joint statement, coordinated timing." He paused. "It was very well structured."
"Thank you."
"I wasn't complimenting it." His voice was gentle. "I was noting that it was very well structured for something that happened very quickly after a threat emerged." He looked at her steadily. "Almost like the threat was an opportunity rather than a crisis."
Aurora said nothing.
David nodded slowly. Like her silence had confirmed something he'd already suspected.
"I knew a man once," he said. "Built his whole life around getting somewhere. Spent twenty years with his eyes fixed on a destination—a specific place, a specific outcome. Worked for it. Sacrificed for it." He turned his mug slowly. "He got there eventually. Stood at the exact spot he'd been walking toward for two decades." A pause. "And realized he had no idea what the road behind him looked like anymore. Couldn't remember the last time he'd looked up."
Aurora kept her eyes on the table.
"The destination hadn't moved," David said. "But he had. And the version of him that arrived wasn't the version that had started walking."
The coffee house hummed quietly around them. Someone laughed at the counter. A door opened and closed.
"David—" Aurora started.
"I'm not telling you what to do," he said. Simply. Without apology. "I never have. You know that." He looked at her with the particular directness of someone who loved her enough to say the hard thing and wise enough not to say it twice. "I'm just asking you to look up occasionally. To notice what the road looks like. What you look like, on it."
Aurora was quiet for a long moment.
She knew exactly what he meant. Not the alliance, not the business. He was talking about the revenge plan—the years she had spent building toward it, the power she was quietly consolidating, and what she would ultimately gain from it. He saw the stakes, even when she didn't say a word.
Then she asked, "How long are you in New York?"
David held her gaze for one beat. Recognizing the subject change for exactly what it was. Letting it go.
"Two weeks," he said. "Freya's joining me at the weekend."
"Then we're having dinner." Aurora picked up her coffee. "All of us. You, Freya, me, Ricky. Somewhere that isn't a crisis meeting or a board presentation."
David smiled. The full one. "Freya will be insufferably pleased."
"She's earned it."
Ricky reappeared at the table, sliding back into his chair and reaching for his cup. "What did I miss?"
"Dinner plans," Aurora said.
Ricky looked between them. Caught something in the quality of the silence—the particular texture of a conversation that had covered more ground than dinner plans.
He didn't ask.
He'd learned, over eight years, when not to ask.
"Good," he said instead. And picked up his coffee.
***
They lingered for a few minutes after that, the conversation softening into smaller things—Freya's travel plans, David's work, a version of normal that felt almost unfamiliar.
David checked his watch eventually.
"I have a meeting across town," he said, standing. "Some habits don't change."
Aurora nodded, rising with him. "Of course."
They stepped outside together. The air was cooler than before, the street louder now with early afternoon traffic.
A black car pulled up to the curb.
David paused before getting in, his eyes moving between them once—like he was committing something to memory.
"Dinner," he said.
"Dinner," Aurora confirmed.
He smiled, then ducked into the car. The door closed. The car pulled away.
Aurora stood there a second longer than necessary, watching until it disappeared into traffic. It struck her quietly—how many years had passed since the last time she'd seen him in person. Not because she couldn't. Because she hadn't made the time.
"Hey," Ricky said beside her, not looking directly at her. "You want me to drive you back to the office?"
Aurora blinked once. The solemn expression was already gone.
"Of course," she said lightly. "You were the one who drove us here. Who else would drive me back?"
Ricky nodded once, a small, quiet acknowledgment of her humor.
They turned toward the car.
Aurora didn't look back at the street again.