Los Angeles felt unusually still the morning Luna Nozawa was laid to rest — gray skies stretched over the cemetery like a veil, as though the city itself exhaled in mourning. The service was not extravagant, nothing like the lavish Forrester affairs fans are used to. Instead, just a small gathering, quiet voices, and white lilies catching soft sunlight whenever the clouds broke. It was intimate… and heavy in a way no grand funeral could ever be.

Finn stood beside Steffy with Hayes at his side, fingers resting protectively along Steffy’s back. Regardless of Luna’s mistakes and fractured relationships, she had been family, and grief — even complicated grief — demanded presence. Steffy hesitated to bring Hayes, but she eventually agreed. Whether anyone liked it or not, Hayes and Luna shared blood. Death makes bonds louder, not quieter.

Across the grass stood Lee, stone-faced, unreadable, bearing the kind of pain only a mother can hide behind steel. Beside her, Poppy gripped her hand, silent but strong — two women mourning a daughter in very different ways. Even Sheila slipped into the crowd, drawing side-eyes but no objections. Love, in this family, doesn’t follow rules.

The service itself was hushed and restrained — a pastor spoke gently of forgiveness, redemption, and the hope that even troubled lives may find peace. No hysterics, no breakdowns. Only the tightly-held ache of people who learned long ago how to hide pain behind good posture.

But when the crowd began to thin, life quietly shifting back toward normal, something no one expected happened.

Hayes stopped walking.

His hand slipped from Steffy’s and he pointed with trembling certainty toward the still-scattering mourners.

“Mommy… that’s Luna. Right there.”

Steffy’s heart lurched. She scanned the graveyard, expecting nothing, seeing nothing but moving silhouettes and dark coats. She tried to rationalize, telling Hayes he must have confused someone else for his sister. But Hayes insisted — with an innocence adults don’t possess — that he knew who he saw.

Steffy brushed it aside. A child overwhelmed by grief, imagination, fantasy — a logical explanation was easier than entertaining the impossible.

Only later that night, glass of wine in hand, did the doubt creep in. Hayes was bright, perceptive beyond his age. What if — just once — his instincts were not childish fantasy, but truth?

When she finally told Finn what happened, the air shifted. Neither wanted to voice the unthinkable, but the silence between them carried the question clearly:

What if Luna never died?

What Steffy didn’t know — what Hayes somehow glimpsed — was the truth. Luna Nozawa was alive. Hidden in the shadows that morning, disguised beneath a wig and dark frames, she watched her own funeral. The “accident” that supposedly ended her life was a carefully executed escape plan — a final break from consequences closing in on her.

She vanished into the world, dead in name only.

But Hayes saw her.

And secrets like this never stay buried in Los Angeles.

The next chapter? The truth cracking open — slow, silent, unavoidable. Luna’s ghost isn’t a ghost at all.

And the Bold and the Beautiful is about to erupt.