I took a step toward the door. One step.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. Quiet. Not a threat. Worse than a threat – a statement of fact, delivered with the calm of a man who’s already calculated every possible outcome and knows which one will happen.
“Try and stop me.”
“Marlowe.” He said my name differently now. The sharpness was gone, replaced by something that might have been regret. “I didn’t want it to be this way. I wanted to give you time. But you’ve left me no room for gentleness, so here it is: your brother is sick.”
The fire in my chest flickered.
“He has a lung disease,” Caelum continued, his voice steady and deliberate, the voice of someone delivering news they’d rather not deliver. “Advanced. Worsening. He needs treatment that costs more money than you or he will ever have. And you know this is true, Marlowe. You’ve smelled the cigarettes. You’ve heard the coughing he thinks you don’t notice. You know.”
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Because he was right. The late-night coughing fits Rowan tried to muffle with his pillow. The appointments he lied about. The pharmacy bags he hid in his coat pocket. I’d noticed all of it and told myself it was nothing, because the alternative – that the last person I had in this world was being stolen from me by his own lungs – was a thought I couldn’t afford to think.
“I can save him,” Caelum said. “I have the resources, the connections, the money. All of it. But I need something in return.”
“Me.” The word came out like a death rattle.
“You.”
The room blurred. I felt my knees buckle, and then I was sitting on the floor, which was not something I’d planned, and the tears were back – not the angry tears from Sterling’s call, but something deeper, more fundamental, tears from a well I didn’t know existed. Rowan. My Rowan. The brother who’d given up everything for me, who’d worked doubles and triples, who’d aged ten years in five – he was dying, and the price of saving him was my life.
“Don’t cry.” Caelum’s voice reached me from what felt like a great distance. “Please. I don’t… I didn’t want this. I never wanted to tell you this way. But you didn’t give me a choice.”
I laughed – a wet, broken sound. “That’s funny. You’re taking away my choice and telling me I didn’t give you one.”
He had the decency to look uncomfortable. For a moment – one brief, flickering moment – I saw something behind the boardroom composure. Something human.
“All you have to do,” he said, “is go downstairs and tell your brother you’ve agreed. That’s it. You say yes, and I’ll make sure he gets the best treatment available. Anywhere in the world. Whatever he needs.”
I sat on the floor of my childhood bedroom and weighed my life against my brother’s, and the math wasn’t even close.
“Okay,” I said.
I got to my feet. Wiped my face. Straightened my shoulders with a physical effort that felt like lifting a car. Then I walked downstairs, each step a small surrender, Caelum’s footsteps measured and steady behind me.
Rowan was waiting in the living room. He looked up when he heard us, and I watched hope and guilt fight for control of his face.
“Rowan,” I said, and I was amazed at how steady my voice sounded, how completely it betrayed nothing of the earthquake happening inside me. “I’ve decided to marry Mr. Caelum.”
My brother’s face cracked open into a smile so wide and so relieved that it almost broke me. “I knew you’d come around,” he said. “Caelum’s a good man, Marlowe. You just needed time to see it.”
I smiled back at him. It was the best performance of my life – a smile that reached my eyes and crinkled the corners and looked, from every possible angle, like happiness. Inside, I was screaming.
“I’ll go pack,” I said. “So I can sign the documents and leave with Mr. Caelum.”
I climbed the stairs one more time. In my room, I pulled a suitcase from under my bed – the same suitcase we’d used when we moved here after our parents died – and began filling it. Each item I folded and placed inside felt like a small goodbye. The quilt Mom made. The photo of us at the beach, all four of us, before the world decided two wasn’t enough. My textbooks. My journals. The seven-dollar blue dress.
My hands moved mechanically, but my mind was somewhere else – spinning through futures I hadn’t chosen, trying to find the version of my life where this made sense. Sterling was gone. Priya was gone. And now I was trading what was left of my freedom for my brother’s lungs.
I zipped the suitcase and sat on the bed for one last moment. Looked at the walls. The window where I used to sit and read. The ceiling I’d stared at through a thousand sleepless nights. This room had held every version of me – the child, the teenager, the girl learning to be a woman – and I was leaving it with a stranger.
I picked up the suitcase and went downstairs.
Rowan smiled when he saw me. That same wide, relieved, unbearable smile. Caelum stood beside him, and on his face I saw something that made my skin tighten – satisfaction. The quiet, proprietary satisfaction of a man who’d acquired what he came for.
“I’m ready,” I said, keeping my voice flat and even, because if I let a single crack show, the whole thing would come apart.
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.