Not because he’d hidden his past. Not because of Lydia, or the child, or the secrets. Those were the surface reasons, the ones I could point to and say there – that’s why. But underneath them, buried so deep I hadn’t found it until this exact moment, was the real one: I’d slapped him because he was getting through. Because somehow, impossibly, against every wall I’d built and every bolt I’d thrown, Caelum was reaching a part of me I thought Sterling had killed. And the terror of that – the absolute, knee-shaking terror of being vulnerable again, of opening a door that had been blown off its hinges once before – had converted itself into the only language I had left.
Anger.
I’d hit him because I was starting to feel something, and feeling something was the most dangerous thing I could do.
Sable’s words echoed in my mind: That’s not indifference, Marlowe. That’s the opposite of indifference.
I looked at Caelum. Really looked. Past the suit and the money and the power and the arrangement. Past the man who’d walked into my kitchen uninvited and rearranged my life. What I saw underneath all of that was someone tired. Someone who’d lost a wife he loved and was trying, clumsily, imperfectly, with more money than emotional vocabulary, to find his way back to something human.
Did I love him?
No. Not yet. Love doesn’t work like that – it doesn’t arrive in three days, fully formed, wearing a suit and carrying a rose. But something was there. A seed. A possibility. The first, tentative green shoot of something that could become love if I stopped pouring poison on it.
“Get up,” I said.
He blinked. Uncertainty flickered across his face.
“Get up, Caelum. Please.” My voice was softer than I intended, but I let it be. I was so tired of being hard. “Don’t kneel for me. Not anymore.”
I reached out and offered him my hand. He looked at it – this small, ordinary hand extended toward him – and I saw something move behind his eyes. Something that had been braced for another blow and was slowly, carefully, standing down.
He took my hand and rose to his feet. We stood face to face, closer than we’d been since the handshake, close enough that I could see the faint pink mark on his left cheek where my hand had been.
“I’m sorry I slapped you,” I said. The words tasted strange, like medicine – bitter going down, but necessary. “Both times. That was… that wasn’t me. Or maybe it was me, the worst version of me, and you didn’t deserve it.” I took a breath. “I did it because I found out – about your wife. About your child. And the fact that you didn’t tell me… it hurt. More than I expected it to.”
His eyes widened. I could see the question forming – how did she know – and the answer arriving almost simultaneously.
“Who told you?” he asked, and his voice was barely a whisper.
“It doesn’t matter who told me. What matters is that you didn’t.”
He closed his eyes. A muscle worked in his jaw. When he opened them again, I saw something that looked like shame – real shame, not the performed kind, but the kind that lives in your chest and makes it hard to breathe.
“You’re right,” he said. “I should have told you. I was going to – I wanted to find the right time, the right way to explain everything about Lydia, about my son, about the life I had before you. But there is no right time for that kind of conversation, and waiting just made it worse.” He paused. “I’m sorry. I won’t hide anything from you again.”
The sincerity in his voice was unmistakable. Not practiced, not performed. Just a man, standing in a doorway, telling the truth because he’d run out of better options.
“You know what?” I said.
“What?” He braced himself visibly, as if preparing for another blow – physical or verbal.
And here’s where the honest part gets hard. Because what I was about to say wasn’t a conclusion I’d reached through logic or deliberation. It was something that had been building beneath the surface, quiet and persistent, like roots growing in the dark. And standing here, looking at this complicated, flawed, surprisingly tender man who’d taken a slap and come back with a flower, I couldn’t keep it underground anymore.
“I don’t know if this is love,” I said. “I’m not sure I even know what love is anymore – the last person I thought I loved turned out to be a lie wearing an expensive shirt. But… something is happening. Something I didn’t expect and didn’t want and definitely didn’t plan for. And I’m scared of it, Caelum. I’m scared because the last time I let someone in, they destroyed me. And I can’t afford to be destroyed again.”
He stood very still. His eyes hadn’t left mine. The rose hung forgotten in his hand.
“But I think,” I continued, and the words were coming from a place deeper than thought, deeper than strategy, from the place where things are simply true whether you want them to be or not, “I think I might be starting to care about you. And that’s as much as I can offer right now. It’s not a declaration. It’s not a promise. It’s just… the truth.”
The silence that followed was the most terrifying of my life.
Then Caelum smiled. Not the boardroom smile, not the charming smile he’d worn at Sterling’s party, not the confident smile of a man who knows he’s won. A different smile. Smaller. Realer. The smile of a man who’s been given something fragile and understands the weight of it.
“That’s enough,” he said. “That’s more than enough.”
“I have conditions.”
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.