“Sterling-“
“Oh, by the way.” His tone shifted again – casual now, almost breezy, the way someone mentions they picked up dry cleaning. “I asked Priya out yesterday. Your best friend Priya. She said yes.”
The world stopped. Not metaphorically. I mean something inside me – some essential mechanism that kept my thoughts moving in a forward direction – seized and went silent.
“What?”
“We’re going out tonight. And I’m going to do with her everything you were too scared to do with me.” A pause. Calculated. Surgical. “And just so there’s no confusion: we’re done. You and me? Over.”
The line went dead.
I sat on the edge of my bed holding a silent phone, and for a few seconds, I felt nothing at all. A vast, white nothing, like the moment between a lightning strike and the thunder. Then the thunder came. It came as a sound I didn’t recognize as my own – a raw, animal noise that tore from somewhere deeper than my throat – and then I was crying in a way I hadn’t cried since the night they told us about Mom and Dad. Not pretty crying. Not the kind you see in movies where a single tear traces an elegant path. The kind where your whole body gets involved, where your ribs ache and your nose runs and you can’t breathe because grief has its hands around your lungs and it’s squeezing.
Sterling and Priya. My boyfriend and my best friend. The two people I’d trusted most outside of Rowan, and they’d folded together like a deck of cards while my back was turned.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Time does strange things when you’re falling apart – it stretches and compresses, and you can lose whole minutes to the act of staring at a wall and trying to remember how your face is supposed to work.
Meanwhile – though I didn’t know this yet, wouldn’t piece it together until much later – something else was happening downstairs.
Rowan and Caelum sat in the dining room, talking in the low, careful tones of men negotiating a deal that both of them knew was ugly but necessary. The breakfast dishes had been cleared. The table between them was empty, which felt appropriate.
“Can I speak with her?” Caelum asked. “Alone.”
Rowan studied him for a moment. My brother had always been difficult to read – a skill he’d developed in childhood and perfected in the years since – but something crossed his face then. Not doubt, exactly. Something closer to the expression of a man pushing a boat away from shore, knowing he can’t swim out to retrieve it.
“Go ahead,” he said. “You’ll be marrying her, after all.” A beat. “But remember our deal.”
“I remember.” Caelum’s voice was even, steady, the voice of a man who built empires and understood that every structure required a foundation, and foundations were never pretty. “I’ll keep my word. As long as I get Marlowe.”
He rose from the table and climbed the stairs.
The knock on my door reached me through a fog of misery. I scrambled to my feet, wiped my face with my sleeves, pressed the heels of my palms against my swollen eyes. Rowan. It had to be Rowan. Coming to check on me, coming to apologize, coming to tell me the strange man in the expensive suit had been a hallucination and my life was normal again.
I opened the door, and it wasn’t Rowan.
Caelum stood in the hallway, filling the doorframe in a way that seemed intentional, as though he’d been specifically designed to occupy space with authority. Up close, he was even more unsettling – not frightening, exactly, but overwhelming in the way a thunderstorm is overwhelming. You don’t run from it. You just stand there and accept that you’re about to get very wet.
“What do you want?” The question came out ragged, and I didn’t have the energy to soften it.
“May I come in?” The politeness was a thin shell over something harder. He asked, but his body was already angled toward the room, already assuming the answer.
I stared at him for a beat that lasted longer than it should have, then stepped aside. “Fine.”
He entered and sat on the edge of my bed – my bed, the one I’d slept in since I was sixteen, covered in a quilt our mother had made – with the ease of a man sitting in a chair he’d purchased. He looked at me. I looked at him. The room felt too small for the two of us and the enormous, unnamed thing between us.
“What do you want from me?” I asked, and I could hear the exhaustion in my own voice, the Sterling-shaped wound still bleeding underneath every word.
“I want you to marry me.” No preamble. No flowers. No getting-to-know-you. Just the blunt fact of it, laid on the table like a contract. “And you don’t have a choice.”
Something inside me – something that had been crumbling all morning – caught fire.
“No.” I stood straighter. “You’re wrong. I do have a choice, and here it is: I won’t marry you.”
Caelum smiled. Not warmly. Not cruelly either, exactly. The way a chess player smiles when their opponent makes an expected move.
“You rich men,” I continued, and now the words were pouring out, fueled by the morning’s accumulated grief and rage. “Born with silver everything, raised to believe the world is a store and every person in it has a price tag. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Caelum, but I’m not for sale. I’m going to walk through that door, go downstairs, and tell my brother that this marriage isn’t happening. And then you’re going to get in whatever absurdly expensive car brought you here and drive back to whatever absurdly expensive life you came from.”
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.