The town is called Crestfall Harbor. It’s a place where the sky is perpetually the color of old pewter and a fine, salty mist clings to everything, making the world feel perpetually damp. The sun is a distant, hazy memory. Gilda is not Gilda here. She is Helen Price, the quiet woman who runs the town’s used bookstore, "The Final Chapter." The irony is not lost on her.

The brass bell above the door jingles, a sound that always makes her flinch. It’s too cheerful for this place. A young couple steps inside, shaking the drizzle from their coats. They are vibrant and laughing, their energy a violent splash of color in her grayscale world. Helen keeps her head down, her fingers tracing the faded gold lettering on the spine of a worn copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. Revenge stories no longer hold any appeal.

The man has a deep, confident laugh that echoes off the tall shelves. It’s a sound that strikes Helen like a physical blow. It isn't Harvey’s laugh, not exactly, but it’s a ghost of it—the laugh of "Apollo" before the work had carved permanent lines of exhaustion around his eyes.

Her hand stills on the book.

For a moment, she is no longer in the damp bookstore. She is back in the warm kitchen of their Gotham home, years ago. Harvey is leaning against the counter, tie loosened, recounting a courtroom victory. He throws his head back and laughs, a full-throated sound of pure, untainted triumph. In that memory, his face is whole. His eyes are clear. The smile is genuine.

But her mind, a cruel and perfect archive, immediately corrupts the image. The memory flickers. The warm kitchen light becomes the harsh glare of a hospital room. The triumphant laugh dissolves into a pained groan. The handsome face melts into a scarred, monstrous visage.

He was useful, a cold voice whispers in her head, her own voice from that dark basement. Even fun for a time.

The lie tastes like ash in her mouth. It wasn't fun. It was a desperate, frantic attempt to hold onto the man whose laugh could fill a room, a man she had loved not just as a weapon, but as a shield against the silence inside her. A man she had systematically destroyed.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

Helen looks up. The young woman is standing before her, holding a slim volume of poetry. Helen’s own eyes are reflected in the glass of the counter—wide, haunted, the eyes of a stranger. She realizes she hasn’t breathed.

She forces a thin, brittle smile and takes the book. Her hands are trembling slightly as she wraps it in brown paper. The couple pays and leaves, the bell jingling their cheerful departure.

The silence they leave behind is immense, heavier than before.

That night, in her sparse apartment above the shop, Helen doesn't turn on the lights. She sits in a wooden chair, listening to the lonely sound of a foghorn from the harbor and the hiss of rain against the windowpane. From a small, locked box in her drawer, she removes the only thing she kept from her old life. It’s not a photograph. It’s a simple, tarnished silver dollar. Not his coin, but one from a roll he once left on the dresser.

She doesn't flip it. That was his ritual.

She simply holds it, feeling its cold, dead weight in her palm. It is the perfect weight of a promise. The promise of a family she could never have. The promise of a justice she had twisted into vengeance. The promise of a man she had loved and condemned in the same breath.

Batman had let her go. She had once thought it was mercy. Now she knows better. Arkham was a prison of stone and steel. This is a prison of memory, with no bars, no guards, and no possibility of escape.

The foghorn cries out again across the water. Helen closes her eyes, clutching the coin. Tomorrow, the bell will ring again. And she will wait for a customer, another ghost, another sound to remind her that she is not done. She is finished.