“While he was proposing to you. On a candlelit balcony. With a rose.”
“Yes.”
“Marlowe.”
“I slapped him twice, actually.”
Sable put her face in her hands. For a moment I thought she was crying again, but when she looked up, her expression was something more complex – horror and awe and a kind of baffled admiration, as though I’d done something simultaneously terrible and impressive.
“Why?” she asked. The word came out almost plaintive.
I tried to organize the chaos inside me into something resembling an explanation. “I don’t know. I don’t – everything hit me at once, Sable. Sterling lying about Priya. Caelum lying about his wife and his child. Everyone lying, everyone keeping things from me, everyone deciding what I should and shouldn’t know about my own life. And there he was, on one knee, offering me a flower like that fixes anything, like romance is a band-aid you can slap over a wound the size of a-” I stopped. Swallowed. “I was angry. And the anger had nowhere to go. So it went into my hand.”
Sable was quiet for a long time. The kind of quiet that meant she was thinking, not just waiting.
“Marlowe,” she said finally. “Can I say something you won’t like?”
“You’re going to say it regardless, so go ahead.”
“Have you thought about why it bothers you so much? Not the slapping – the reason. The fact that Caelum kept his past from you.”
“Because it’s dishonest. Because I had a right to know.”
“Yes. But there’s another reason. A reason you’re not looking at because you’re too busy being angry.”
I stared at her. “Which is?”
“You care about him.” She said it simply, the way you state a fact that’s already been proven. “You wouldn’t be this hurt if you didn’t. Angry, maybe. Annoyed, sure. But this – this betrayed, burning feeling you’ve got right now? That’s not the anger of a woman trapped in a contract. That’s the anger of a woman who was starting to let someone in and discovered a locked door.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?”
“I don’t – I’m not falling for Caelum. I’ve known him for three days.”
“And in those three days, you shook his hand and called it friendship. You smiled when he said you were beautiful. You spent twenty minutes getting dressed in a gown you claim had nothing to do with him. And when you found out he’d been married before, you didn’t shrug. You didn’t file it away as irrelevant information about an irrelevant man. You slapped him. Twice. On a candlelit balcony.” She paused. “That’s not indifference, Marlowe. That’s the opposite of indifference.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to assemble a wall of words between her logic and my heart, to find the flaw in her reasoning, the crack in the argument. But the problem with Sable’s observation was the same problem with all accurate observations: it fit. Every piece of evidence she’d cited was true, and the conclusion she drew from it was the only one that made all of them make sense.
Was I falling for Caelum?
The question made my stomach drop, like missing a step on a staircase.
“Even if – even if what you’re saying has some microscopic grain of truth,” I said, each word chosen with the caution of someone crossing a minefield, “it doesn’t matter. I’ve ruined it. I slapped him in front of his staff. He’s never going to speak to me again.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I slapped a billionaire, Sable. Twice. On his own balcony. While he was holding a rose.”
“So apologize.”
The word landed between us like a grenade.
“Absolutely not.”
“Marlowe-“
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.