“Relax. It’s not a horror movie.” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the white linen, the candlelight dancing between us like a third participant. “The game is called Get to Know Your Partner Better. Simple rules: we take turns. Each turn, you share something real. Something from your past that mattered. No corporate bios, no curated highlights. The raw stuff.”
He studied me for a moment, and I could see the calculation happening – the part of him that assessed risk for a living, weighing the cost of vulnerability against the potential return. Then something in his face relaxed, like a lock turning.
“Alright,” he said. “I’m in. Who starts?”
“You. You owe me, remember. Secrets you didn’t share. Consider this back payment.”
He smiled – a wry, self-aware smile that acknowledged the hit without flinching from it. He picked up his wine glass, turned it slowly in his fingers, and stared into the red as though the past were in there, waiting.
“I was fifteen when my father died.”
The words arrived quietly, without fanfare, and they changed the air at the table the way a single drop of ink changes a glass of water. I said nothing. I waited.
“Heart attack. Middle of the night. My mother found him in the morning.” He paused. Swallowed. “He looked peaceful, which is the thing people always say and which was, in his case, actually true. He looked like he was sleeping. And for about thirty seconds – the longest thirty seconds of my life – my mother stood in the doorway and believed he was.”
The piano played. The candles flickered. Somewhere beyond our vine curtain, a woman laughed, and the sound felt like it belonged to a different universe.
“After that, everything changed. Not gradually – overnight. I went from being a fifteen-year-old with homework problems and a crush on a girl in my biology class to being the inheritor of a business empire I didn’t understand and a family I was suddenly responsible for. My mother ran the company while I finished school, but the weight of it – the knowledge that people’s livelihoods depended on decisions I wasn’t old enough to make – that settled on me like a coat I couldn’t take off.”
He set down the wine glass. His hands, I noticed, were still.
“My sister was seven. She didn’t understand what death meant, not really. She kept asking when Dad was coming back, and every time she asked, my mother would leave the room and I’d have to sit there and come up with a new way to explain permanent absence to a child who’d just learned to tie her shoes.” A pause. “Lysander was there. Through all of it. He slept at our house for two weeks straight. Didn’t ask permission. Just showed up with a bag and stayed.”
“That’s why you’re so close,” I said.
“That’s why I’m so close. He’s not my friend. He’s my brother with a different bloodline.”
The weight of his words hung between us, real and heavy and honest. I felt the urge to reciprocate – not out of obligation, but out of the need to meet his openness with my own, to balance the scales of trust that we were building, one story at a time.
“My parents died when I was eight,” I said.
He looked at me. Not with pity – I’d learned to recognize pity and defend against it – but with the steady attention of someone who understood that the words I was about to say had been lived, not just remembered.
“Car accident. It was raining. The roads were bad. A truck driver fell asleep.” I’d told this story before, but never in candlelight, never to someone whose own grief created a bridge between his experience and mine. “I don’t remember the funeral. I remember the rain. I remember my brother Rowan holding my hand so tight I thought my fingers would break, and I remember thinking: he’s squeezing this hard because he’s trying not to fall apart, and if he’s trying not to fall apart, then the world must be ending.”
Caelum reached across the table. His hand covered mine – warm, careful, asking permission with the pressure before I could grant it with words. I didn’t pull away.
“Rowan was seventeen,” I continued. “He dropped out of school. Got a job. Then two jobs. Then three. He raised me on tips and stubbornness and this insane, irrational belief that we’d be okay even when every piece of evidence said otherwise. He put me through college. He kept the house. He made sure I never felt like an orphan, even when that’s exactly what I was.”
My voice wavered. I steadied it.
“And then I found out he’d been smoking. For years. And now he has lung cancer. And the person who saved me – the person who gave up his entire life so I could have one – is dying, and the only reason I’m sitting here, in this dress, at this table, in this life…” I looked at Caelum. “Is because a stranger walked into my kitchen and offered to buy what was left.”
The silence that followed was the kind that has depth – not empty, but full, the way a lake is full, holding things beneath its surface that you can’t see but can feel.
“You’re stronger than you know,” Caelum said. And the way he said it – without decoration, without performance, just the plain conviction of a man stating what he’d observed – made me believe, for one fragile moment, that it might be true.
“We both have scars,” I said, and managed a smile that was half-real and half-armor. “But that’s enough sad for one evening. Let’s go somewhere lighter.”
The shift was deliberate, and he followed it with the grace of someone who understood that grief needs air but also needs doors.
“You already know about Lydia,” he said. “And Ash. No need to revisit that tonight.”
“Agreed. Tell me something else. Something I couldn’t find in a magazine profile.”
He thought. Took a sip of wine. “I’m afraid of heights.”
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.