Sable looked offended for exactly one second, and then she was laughing too, and for a moment – one brief, shining moment in an apartment that still felt like a cage – neither of us was alone.
“Why are you laughing?” Sable’s voice carried the particular indignation of someone who’d been crying beautifully and didn’t appreciate the editorial commentary.
“I’m sorry – I’m sorry -” I pressed both hands over my mouth, but the laughter kept escaping through the cracks like water through a dam. “It’s just – your face – you looked like the last five minutes of a K-drama finale.”
The silence that followed was so pointed it could have drawn blood.
“You watch K-dramas,” Sable said. Not a question. An accusation.
“Occasionally.” I wiped my eyes. “Only the ones with guys who look like Lee Min-ho.”
“So… all of them.”
“Exactly.”
Something shifted in Sable’s expression – the offended edge softening into genuine curiosity, the kind that precedes a question you’ve been holding behind your teeth. She bit her lip, glanced at the floor, then looked at me with an openness that felt almost brave.
“Marlowe… can I ask you something? And please don’t be offended.”
I sat down on the bed’s edge and folded my legs beneath me. “After the day I’ve had, it would take a lot to offend me. Try.”
“What did Mr. Caelum mean – when he said he took you away?”
The question landed in the room like a stone dropped into a well, and for a moment I could hear the echo falling through all the dark, empty spaces inside me. I looked at Sable – really looked at her – and saw someone who was asking not out of gossip or obligation, but out of the simple, uncomplicated desire to understand. And I realized, with a pang of something between gratitude and exhaustion, that I wanted to tell her. I needed to tell someone, and she was the first person in this golden prison who felt safe.
“I’ll tell you everything,” I said. “But let’s go to my room. And ask someone to bring snacks. This is a multiple-snack kind of story.”
Sable nodded, her expression shifting into a quiet solemnity that told me she understood exactly what kind of story it was going to be. She slipped away to find a servant, and I made my way upstairs, each step heavier than the last, as though the conversation I was about to have was already pressing down on my shoulders.
In his room on the other end of the apartment, Caelum closed the door behind him and leaned against it. He was still wearing the suit from this morning’s university visit, but it felt like it belonged to a different person – someone who had things under control, someone whose newly acquired wife didn’t look at him as though he were a piece of furniture she hadn’t ordered.
He crossed to the bed and collapsed onto it with the gracefulness of a felled tree. The ceiling stared back at him, offering nothing.
His mother’s voice was still ringing in his ears – that clipped, efficient disappointment she’d honed over decades. Find a wife. Move on. As if grief were an address you could simply leave, as if Lydia were a chapter you could close and shelve and never reread.
Lydia.
He closed his eyes and let the memory surface, the way he did sometimes when he was alone and too tired to keep the door locked. Her laugh – too loud, always too loud, the kind of laugh that filled a room and made strangers smile without knowing why. Her hands, always warm, always finding his under tables and across car seats. The way she’d fall asleep mid-sentence, mid-argument sometimes, just drop off into unconsciousness as though sleep were a trapdoor she couldn’t avoid. She’d been twenty-nine. Diabetes. Complications no one predicted. He’d sat in a hospital hallway while doctors spoke in the careful, padded language that people use when they’re telling you someone is dying but don’t want you to know yet.
Two years. Two years and he still reached for her side of the bed in the dark.
But then – Marlowe. That red dress descending the staircase. Those eyes that could cut glass and warm stone in the same glance. She was nothing like Lydia. Where Lydia had been soft and open, Marlowe was armored, wary, a girl who’d built walls so high she’d forgotten there was a sky above them. And yet something in her – some flicker of stubborn, furious, beautiful life – pulled at him in a way he couldn’t explain and didn’t entirely trust.
“I’ll make this work,” he murmured to the ceiling. The ceiling, characteristically, had no opinion.
He stood, stripped off the suit, and stepped into the shower. The water hit his back like a baptism, and he stood there for a long time, not thinking about Lydia, not thinking about Marlowe, trying very hard not to think about anything at all.
Back in my room, I sat on the bed and stared at my phone.
A thought had been circling me like a vulture all afternoon, and I could no longer pretend it wasn’t there: Priya. Sterling had said they were together. Sterling had said they were sleeping together. Sterling had said a lot of things, and up until forty-eight hours ago, I would have believed every word, because Sterling was the center of my universe and the center of the universe doesn’t lie.
Except the center of my universe had turned out to be a black hole. And black holes distort everything – light, time, truth.
I needed to hear it from Priya. Not Sterling’s version. Hers.
I dialed the number I’d known by heart since ninth grade, and she picked up on the second ring.
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.