“I am not apologizing to Caelum.”
“Not for being angry. You had a right to be angry. Apologize for the method. The slapping was – I think we can agree – not your finest diplomatic moment.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. She was right, and I hated that she was right, and I hated more that the thought of Caelum’s face – shocked, hurt, a thorn in his thumb and two handprints on his cheeks – made me feel something dangerously close to guilt.
“If he ever does something like that again,” Sable said, gentler now, “if he tries to reach you again – promise me you’ll let him. Promise me you won’t break his hand this time.”
I looked at her. She looked back, steady and patient, the way you look at someone you’ve decided to believe in.
“Fine,” I said. “I promise.”
“Good.” She exhaled. “Now. Tomorrow we’re going to sit down and you’re going to tell me your full story – everything, no skipping – and I’m going to listen and probably cry, and then we’ll-“
The knock cut through her sentence like a blade.
My stomach clenched. I rose slowly, walked to the door, and opened it with the resignation of a woman facing a firing squad and hoping for bad aim.
Caelum stood in the hallway. His left cheek was still faintly pink. His suit jacket was wrinkled – actually wrinkled, which on him was the equivalent of complete dishevelment. And in his hand, slightly crushed, held with the stubborn optimism of a man who apparently doesn’t know when to quit:
A rose.
He looked at me. I looked at him. And then, without a word, he lowered himself to one knee.
Behind me, I heard Sable’s breath catch.
He knelt there and the world held still.
I stood in the doorway of my room in a red dress I’d put on for my dying brother and a lipstick I’d applied like war paint, looking down at a man who, by any reasonable assessment of the situation, should have been furious with me. I had slapped him. Twice. In front of his servants, on his own balcony, with his own romantic dinner cooling behind me. If our positions were reversed – if someone had struck me while I was kneeling and offering my heart – I would have burned the building down and salted the earth where it stood.
But Caelum was kneeling again. Same knee. Same rose. Same impossible, infuriating, bewildering refusal to be defeated.
What is this man made of? I thought. And then, unbidden: what kind of person does this? What kind of person gets slapped and comes back not with anger but with a flower?
“What do you want?” I asked, and I aimed for arrogance, I aimed for ice, but the words came out softened by something I couldn’t control – a tremor, a crack, the sound of a wall developing structural issues.
He looked up at me. His eyes were dark and full of something I hadn’t seen in them before. Not the boardroom confidence, not the calculated composure. Something raw. Something that looked, terrifyingly, like vulnerability – as though he’d left his armor at the door and walked in wearing nothing but the truth.
“Marlowe.” His voice was quiet. Steady, but barely. Like a rope pulled taut. “I don’t know what I’ve done to make you hate me this much.”
My throat tightened. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t, because speaking would mean choosing a version of myself – the angry one or the honest one – and I wasn’t sure which I was anymore.
“I know I forced this marriage on you,” he continued. “I know I leveraged your brother’s illness against you, and I’ll carry the shame of that for the rest of my life. I’ve apologized, and I meant it, but I know apologies don’t undo damage. They’re just… acknowledgments. Receipts for the harm.”
He paused. Swallowed. The rose trembled slightly in his hand.
“Since then, I’ve tried. I brought Sable because I thought you needed someone – not a servant, but a friend. Someone your own age, someone who could understand things I can’t. I’ve been working on getting you transferred to a university in New York, somewhere you could study and build a life that isn’t just… this.” He gestured vaguely at the apartment around us – the luxury, the emptiness, the gold-plated loneliness of it all. “I’ve been trying to fix what I broke. And I know – I know it’s not enough. I know a friend and a transfer don’t undo what I did. But they were the best I had.”
I watched his hands. They were trembling. This man – this billionaire, this force of nature who bent university vice chancellors to his will with a raised eyebrow – his hands were trembling.
“What else can I do?” he asked, and his voice cracked on the word do, a hairline fracture that revealed everything underneath. “Tell me what to do, Marlowe. Tell me what to give, what to say, what to be, and I’ll do it. I’ll become it. Because I’ve found a place for you in my life, and I hope – I hope there’s somewhere in yours for me. And if you’re still angry about whatever it is I’ve done…” He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all of it.”
The words settled over me like snow – soft, accumulating, cold in the moment but melting into something warmer the longer they sat. I looked at him kneeling on my floor, and I thought about the last three days. Seventy-two hours. That’s all it had been. Seventy-two hours since a stranger sat at my kitchen table and upended my entire existence. And in those seventy-two hours, this man had: coerced me into marriage, moved me across the city, given me a friend I didn’t ask for but desperately needed, arranged for my education to continue, set up a romantic dinner I’d responded to with violence, and come back – come back, with a bruised face and a wrinkled suit and the same damn rose – to try again.
What kind of person does that?
And then, like a light switching on in a room I didn’t know was dark, I understood why I’d slapped him.
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.