“Can you hug me for two minutes?”

Time in Chicago moves in seasons of steel and fire.

Winter yielded to the wet, muddy promise of spring, which quickly burned into the humid, electric heat of July.

Emma didn't open a bakery. She didn't move to Florida or California.

Instead, she bought a small, brick row house near Logan Square, two blocks from a quiet tree-lined park. She spent her mornings renovating the kitchen, sanding down the pine floorboards her father would have loved, and her afternoons working as the program director for the Owen Lawson Foundation.

The foundation occupied the Winnetka estate.

Where armed men had once stood guard with hidden submachine guns, children now ran across the manicured lawns. The third-floor bedroom where Emma had watched the storm was converted into a bright, airy art studio for children who had lost parents in the line of duty.

Once a month, Emma drove down to Terre Haute.

The Federal Correctional Institution sat amidst flat, green cornfields sixty miles south of Indianapolis. It was a minimum-security facility surrounded by high chain-link fences, but there were no guard towers, no dark stone walls, no shadows of River North.

The visitation room smelled of industrial floor cleaner, stale coffee, and faint floor wax.

Every third Sunday, Emma sat at a small wooden table near the corner window, watching the heavy steel door open at 1:00 PM.

Adrian Vale looked different without the charcoal suit.

He wore plain grey khaki trousers, a dark blue button-down shirt, and canvas shoes. His dark hair had grown slightly longer, curls touching the collar of his shirt, and his skin was tanner from hours spent working in the facility's agricultural program.

The ruthless edge was gone. The coldness in his green eyes had been replaced by a quiet, steady stillness.

He sat down across from her, setting two cans of club soda on the table between them.

"You look well, Emma," he said, his voice deep and smooth, free of the rough, exhausted strain she had heard on that storm-filled night.

"So do you," Emma said, smiling. "Mrs. Gable told me you’ve been reading three books a week."

"Four," Adrian corrected, a small smile appearing at the corner of his mouth. "The library here is surprisingly well-stocked on nineteenth-century naval history. It turns out that when you aren't running an offshore logistics syndicate, you have a great deal of free time."

Emma laughed softly, the sound bright and warm in the quiet room.

They spoke for two hours.

They didn't talk about George Kessler. They didn't talk about the Gary rail yards, or the blood on the marble floor, or the silver hawk ring that now sat in an evidence locker at the FBI headquarters in downtown Chicago.

They talked about the foundation.

They talked about the children who were playing on the lawns in Winnetka. They talked about Emma's new kitchen, about her mother’s garden in Valparaiso, and about the strange, beautiful way the sky looked over Lake Michigan in late September.

And when the guard called for the end of visiting hours at 3:00 PM, Adrian stood up.

He didn't touch her—rules prevented physical contact beyond a brief handshake—but his green eyes rested on her face with a warmth that felt like a physical touch.

"Thank you for coming, Emma," he said softly.

"I’ll see you next month, Adrian," she replied.

He nodded, turning to walk back toward the heavy security door. But just before he stepped through, he looked back over his shoulder.

"Emma?"

"Yes?"

"What's the weather like in Chicago today?"