....
Years later, Elara ran a small chain of cafés that thrummed like heartbeats across the neighborhood.
Luca's enterprises paid taxes and tended to the city in old ways and new. They had children, and life folded around them in ordinary wonders: scraped knees, bedtime stories, a stolen cup of coffee in the dawn light before everything became noisy again.
Sometimes, when trouble whispered at the edges — a legacy of choices that refused to die — they handled it the way they had learned: with truth, with swift resolve, and with promises kept.
They had been tested. They had learned to convert dangerous currencies into something gentler: responsibility, accountability, and love that was not possession but partnership.
Under the rooftop garden's basil and beneath a sky that had once been all rain and streetlight, they stayed — together, by choice. The city continued to spin its complicated tales, but in their small corner, a vow had become a quiet revolution.
The end.!