“Good evening, Marlowe.”
I paused. Not because I wanted to – because the words surprised me. There was something in his voice I hadn’t heard before. Something that sounded almost… tentative. As though the greeting was a question disguised as a statement.
“I’m fine,” I said. Which was not a greeting, not an answer, not even grammatically responsive to what he’d said. But it was what came out, so there it was.
I started to walk away.
“Wait.” His voice, behind me. “Marlowe, I know you don’t like me. I know I took you from your home and your life, and I know that was wrong. And I’m… sorry.”
I stopped.
Turned around.
Stared at him.
For a disorienting moment, I genuinely considered the possibility that I was hallucinating. That the headache and the grief and the emotional whiplash of the last forty-eight hours had finally done their work, and my brain was producing compensatory fiction. Because Mr. Caelum – the man who’d walked into my house, negotiated with my brother, leveraged my dying sibling’s medical bills against me – had just apologized. Voluntarily. Without a gun to his head.
I almost pinched myself. Then decided that would be too dramatic, even for me.
“I’m sorry too,” I heard myself say. “For being… difficult. And for the things I said.”
The words tasted strange, like a food I hadn’t tried before and wasn’t sure I liked. But they were true. I had been cruel. Justified, maybe – but cruel.
“You were angry,” he said. “You had every right to be.”
A beat of silence. The kind of silence that recalibrates the air between two people.
“You look beautiful, by the way,” he added. And for once, the words didn’t sound like a transaction. They sounded like an observation someone had made before thinking about whether to say it.
“Thanks,” I said. And for once, I didn’t undercut it with sarcasm.
“Friends?” He extended his hand.
I looked at it. Large, steady, open. The hand of a man who could crush things and was choosing not to.
“Friends,” I said, and shook it.
He smiled. And – God help me – it changed his whole face. The severity dissolved. The architectural angles softened. His eyes crinkled at the corners, and something warm moved behind them, and for one treacherous second, I thought: oh. Oh, that’s what he looks like when he’s not performing. That’s the real one.
I crushed the thought like a bug under my shoe.
“I’ll go freshen up,” he said, and disappeared upstairs, and I stood in the foyer feeling like I’d just survived an earthquake that had rearranged all the furniture without breaking anything.
I turned to Sable. She was standing perfectly still, her eyes shining, her lower lip trembling.
“Oh no,” I said. “Sable. Are you crying?”
“I can’t help it.” She fanned her face with both hands. “You two – that was so – the handshake – and he said sorry-“
“Sable.”
“These are tears of joy, Marlowe. I’m a crier. It’s my thing. Leave me alone.”
I stared at her. This girl – this beautiful, dramatic, K-drama-raised girl – was weeping over a handshake.
I laughed. A real laugh, the kind that starts in your stomach and climbs through your chest and comes out louder than you intended. The kind that surprises you with the reminder that even on the worst days of your life, something can still be funny.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.