“Good.” Caelum straightened his cuffs. “Let’s go.”
The briefcase was Italian leather. Of course it was.
Caelum crossed the room with the unhurried stride of a man who had never been late to anything in his life and retrieved a document from inside it. The pages were crisp, heavy stock – the kind of paper reserved for contracts that change the shape of people’s lives. He placed it on the table between them like a dealer laying down a final card.
“Here is the agreement,” he said, addressing Rowan. “Your signature, and Marlowe’s.”
Rowan took the document. I watched his eyes scan the page – not reading, I realized, but confirming. He’d already seen it. He’d already agreed to whatever was written there. The pen moved across the signature line with the quick, decisive stroke of a man who’d made his decision long before this moment and was tired of carrying the weight of it.
He handed it to me.
I stared at the paper. The words blurred and sharpened and blurred again, as though the document itself couldn’t decide whether to let me read it. I caught fragments: terms of arrangement, financial provisions, obligations of both parties. It read like a mortgage – clinical, transactional, the kind of language designed to make something ugly look legal. Somewhere in the middle was a line about matrimony, and the word hit me like a stone dropped into a pond.
My pen hovered above the signature line. I thought about Sterling – his laugh, the way he smelled of expensive cologne and cheaper intentions, the girl he was taking to bed tonight who used to braid my hair in fourth grade. I thought about Rowan, coughing into his pillow at three in the morning. I thought about Mom and Dad, and the version of my life they’d imagined for me, and how spectacularly far this moment was from anything they would have recognized.
Then I signed.
The pen scratched against the paper, and something inside me – something I couldn’t name but would miss later – went quiet.
Caelum and Rowan shook hands. It was a businessman’s handshake: firm, brief, sealing something that mattered to both of them for entirely different reasons. Rowan turned to me and pulled me into a hug. He held on longer than usual, and I felt his chest shudder once – just once – before he pulled back and smiled that smile of his, the one that said everything is going to be fine even when we both knew it wasn’t.
“Take care of yourself,” he said. The simplest words, carrying the heaviest weight.
“You too,” I said. And meant: don’t die. Please. Whatever else happens, don’t die.
We walked outside. The afternoon sun hit my face like an accusation, too bright and too warm for a day that felt like a funeral. And there, parked at the curb like a prop from a film I hadn’t auditioned for, sat a Rolls-Royce. Silver. Gleaming. The kind of car that costs more than our house and the two houses on either side of it combined.
A driver emerged – and I use the word “emerged” because the man didn’t simply get out of a car, he materialized, as though the vehicle had produced him from its own machinery. He was immaculate in a way that seemed almost aggressive: white shirt pressed to lethal sharpness, white trousers creased like origami, shoes polished to the point of weaponry, and a cap perched on his head with geometric precision. He nodded to Caelum with the deference of someone who’d been trained to exist in the background and had perfected the art.
“Mr. Caelum.” His voice was neutral as bleached linen.
“Elliot. The bags, please.”
Elliot loaded my suitcase – my battered, scuffed, held-together-with-duct-tape suitcase – into the trunk of the Rolls-Royce, and the juxtaposition was so absurd I almost laughed. Almost. But then I turned back toward the house.
Our house. The house with ivy crawling up the east wall in patterns that changed with the seasons. The house with the creaky third step and the kitchen window that stuck in summer and the garden where Mom had planted rosemary that still grew, stubbornly, beautifully, as though she’d never left. I’d learned to ride a bike in that driveway. I’d had my first kiss behind the garage – Brian Cho, seventh grade, more teeth than technique. I’d sat on the porch with Rowan on the night they told us about the accident, both of us staring at the same patch of sky, trying to find the stars through the blur.
I looked at it now the way you look at something you’re about to lose – greedily, desperately, trying to memorize every crack and shadow, every angle of light.
The tears came silently. I didn’t wipe them away. I let them fall, because some moments deserve their full measure of grief, and pretending otherwise would be a kind of lie.
I hugged Rowan one more time. His arms closed around me, and I breathed in the smell of him – cigarettes and laundry detergent and something underneath both that was just Rowan, just my brother, the last piece of a family that kept getting smaller.
“Go,” he said into my hair. “I’ll be fine.”
Liar.
I got in the car.
The leather seat received me with a soft, expensive sigh, and then we were moving, pulling away from the curb, and I twisted in my seat to watch the house shrink through the rear window. It got smaller and smaller – the ivy, the porch, the garden – until it was a thumbnail sketch, then a memory, then gone.
I turned forward. The tears were still falling, but quieter now, running down my cheeks and dripping off my jaw without permission.
Beside me, Caelum was silent. He sat with his hands resting on his thighs, looking straight ahead, giving me the courtesy – or perhaps the calculation – of unwitnessed grief. The car hummed beneath us. The city unfolded outside the tinted windows like a story I was being told without my consent: neighborhoods I knew giving way to neighborhoods I didn’t, the houses getting larger, the lawns getting wider, the cars getting shinier, until we crossed some invisible boundary where everything looked polished and faintly unreal.
Then his hand reached across the space between us and covered mine.
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.