“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice came out in a whisper. “All those months – the coughing, the doctor’s appointments you lied about – why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Because you’d already lost enough,” he said. And then he was crying, and I was crying, and between us stretched a phone line and miles of city and the enormous, unbridgeable gap between wanting to protect someone and actually being able to.
I hung up because if I didn’t, I’d fall apart completely, and I couldn’t afford to fall apart. Not yet. Not here.
But the tears came anyway.
They came hard and fast, the ugly kind, the kind that doesn’t care about the red lipstick or the beautiful dress or the fact that someone else is in the room. Sable was at my side before I registered her moving – sitting beside me on the bed, one hand on my back, not speaking, just being there, which was exactly right. I turned into her shoulder and sobbed.
I cried for Rowan. For his lungs. For the cigarettes he couldn’t quit and the cancer they’d given him and the years he’d spent sacrificing everything for me while his own body was betraying him in secret. I cried for my parents, who’d left us too early and too suddenly and would never know what their deaths had set in motion. I cried for myself – for Sterling and Priya and the future I’d imagined and the one I’d been handed instead, wrapped in expensive sheets and sealed with a signature.
Eventually, the storm passed. It always does, even when you’re certain it won’t. I pulled back from Sable’s shoulder, wiped my face, and looked at her. She looked back at me with an expression that held no pity – just steady, quiet concern. I appreciated that more than I could say.
“Who is he?” I asked. My voice was raw, scraped clean. “Who is Mr. Caelum, really?”
Sable studied me for a moment, as though weighing how much truth I could handle.
“That,” she said, “is a longer answer than you’re ready for right now. Rest first. I’ll tell you everything – I promise. But you need to sleep.”
She brought me a glass of water. I drank it in one long swallow, handed back the glass, and lay down. The pillow was cool against my hot, swollen face. Sable stood, smoothed the blanket over me with a gentleness that made my throat ache, and slipped out of the room.
I stared at the ceiling. This stranger’s ceiling. My husband’s ceiling.
Who was Caelum? What kind of man buys a wife and arranges her transfer like a business acquisition? What kind of man sits in a poor man’s kitchen in a suit that costs more than the house and negotiates for a girl he saw once at a party?
The questions dissolved into exhaustion, and I slept.
In another part of the apartment, Caelum stood in front of his bathroom mirror, straightening his tie with the mechanical precision of a man who’d been dressing himself for boardrooms since he was twenty-two. He looked polished, composed, every inch the billionaire the world saw in magazine profiles and business columns. But his eyes – if anyone had been close enough to notice, which no one was – his eyes looked tired.
His phone rang.
He glanced at the screen. Mother. The word glowed like a warning label. He took a breath, fixed the knot of his tie, and answered.
“Good morning, Mother.”
“I have no use for your good mornings.” Celeste Caelum’s voice came through the speaker with the crispness of a woman who ironed her consonants. “Not until you tell me you’ve found a wife.”
“Mother-“
“Don’t ‘Mother’ me, Caelum. It’s been two years since Lydia passed. Two years. You promised me you would move on, and every time I call, I get excuses dressed up as patience.”
He closed his eyes. Lydia. The name still landed in a tender place, a bruise he’d learned to protect but not heal. Lydia, who’d laughed like someone who’d never been told it was too loud. Lydia, who’d died of complications from diabetes at twenty-nine while he sat in a hospital hallway and bargained with a God he’d never particularly believed in.
“I’ve found someone,” he said.
The silence on the other end was so complete he could hear his mother recalibrating.
“You have?”
“She’s young. A bit… spirited.” He chose the word carefully, the way you choose a euphemism for a natural disaster. “But I’m confident you’ll get along.”
“Spirited.” Celeste repeated the word as though tasting it. “Spirited is a word men use for women who won’t obey them.”
“Mother.”
“I’m delighted,” she said, and hung up before he could respond, which was, Caelum reflected, the most Celeste thing imaginable.
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.