Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
AMELIE
The slice of pizza slipped from my hand.
They’re dead.
The words landed in the space between us. The table felt even smaller than before. I pressed my hands flat against the table and said nothing.
I looked at him, really looked, and the set of his jaw made my chest hurt.
Kai’s grave expression gave nothing away.
I found myself searching for hints in the details of his face, the faint tension at the corner of his mouth, the stillness he fell into, the tightness of his jaw.
His eyes didn’t avoid mine, nor did they search for sympathy.
If anything, they seemed to flatten the whole memory of what he’d just said, as though the admission had cost him nothing.
It made me wonder whether the recounting of their death was just another item on a long list of tasks he’d grown used to performing.
I had expected stonewalling. I had not expected this.
“Oh God, Kai, I’m so sorry. I-I don’t know what to say.”
He didn’t respond. I felt the pinprick of guilt behind my ribs and tried to form a better apology, anything to make up for the horrible things I said. But all I could do was stare at the sliver of pizza drooping sadly on my plate.
Kai’s arms were crossed at the chest, posture flawless, the fabric of his shirt pulling slightly at the shoulders. Not a single muscle betrayed the emotion beneath the surface. I was such an asshole. No wonder he never shared anything with me. I didn’t make it any easier by always pushing him away.
“Do you mind if I ask what happened to them?” I tried.
“I do mind,” was his curt response. His gaze flicked to the wall clock behind my head. “If you’re done eating, we can go.”
With my eyes down and a torment of shame spiraling inside me, I stood slowly.
Kai threw down a wad of cash instead of waiting for the check.
He strode beside me so calmly that you’d never guess he had shared something monumental at lunch.
I was acutely aware of the few inches between us, his steps making mine feel unsteady by comparison.
My heart hammered as I followed him to his car. I couldn’t detect his mood at all. Was he sad after speaking about his parents’ death? Angry? Or did he not feel things?
He started driving, and soon, I realized we had passed the city limits. The skyline shrank quietly in the side mirror. “This isn’t the way home.”
His dark eyes were on the road. “Why would we go home? I still have you for another seven and a half hours.”
I inwardly groaned. That was why he had looked at the wall clock—he was calculating how much time we had left together. After the heavy conversation, I assumed he was angry with me and wanted to go home. But if he wanted to go on a drive to cool off, who was I to deny him?
We spoke very little during the one-hour drive, watching the city unspool into open country. Kai was awfully cryptic, his mood somber. We finally exited the highway and rolled into a quiet suburb.
“Are we visiting someone?” I asked when we parked at an estate. It was near a lake, ringed with trees.
“No.” He exited the car without looking back. Kai’s stride didn’t break as he cut across the perfectly raked gravel, the soles of his shoes grinding the stones with a crisp certainty.
I lingered a second inside the car before stumbling out.
I caught up just as he was punching in the code for the door keypad.
Either the owner of this house really trusted Kai, or, more likely, he owned the property.
I had no idea why he had brought me here, but I didn’t have the guts to ask after my insensitive rant at lunch.
He let the silence stretch between us as we entered a home that could only be described as a mansion.
The architecture had an old-school feel to it, a preserved diorama of curated memories.
A sunken living room with a sun-faded Persian rug that probably cost an arm and a leg.
The grand piano looked as if it hadn’t been played in years, and the rows of leather-bound books were preserved like in a historic library where you weren’t allowed to touch the ancient artifacts.
Kai didn’t offer a tour or tell me anything about the place, but I felt the weight of burrowed bleakness, making the air heavy with more than nostalgia.
He let me wander the shelves while he hovered by the living room.
I stopped when I saw framed pictures of a young Kai at his graduation, with a couple smiling proudly at the camera.
“This is your childhood home,” I guessed.
Kai nodded, watching me take it all in with an odd expression.
“Did you inherit it?” It was a stupid question, but for once, I was grasping at straws for an opening with him.
I sighed in relief when he said, “Yes. But I barely visit. We have a housekeeper who maintains it. I told her to keep everything as is.”
“I’m glad. It’s beautiful.” I looked up at the high ceiling and the staircase.
The home was elegant and surprisingly cozy for a mansion.
Fireplaces and overstuffed couches countered the grand French doors.
Floor-to-ceiling windows gave you a glimpse of the water.
The wide lawn swept down to the manicured lake.
I tried to summon the image of a younger, playful Kai, one with knees scabbed from running over stone, who played hide-and-seek behind velvet curtains. Maybe he even threw tantrums back then or flipped the board if he lost at Monopoly.
I glanced at Kai, who was mimicking an army stance with his rigid posture and immediately burst into laughter. The image of a rowdy child collapsed as quickly as it had manifested.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“I’m trying to imagine you as a kid. I bet you were a misbehaved, wild child.”
He smirked. “The wildest.”
“Probably wore your heart on your sleeve and talked about your feelings nonstop.”
“I cried at sad movies, too.”
I laughed, my eyes watering. “I’m not surprised. You’re a total drama queen.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. It wasn’t a full smile, but it changed his face entirely, and I caught myself looking at it a beat too long. Neither of us spoke, the house filling the silence between us.
I couldn’t make sense of our random field trip.
I assumed Kai was furious with me for how I’d spoken to him at lunch.
But now, he seemed far from angry. Was it possible he was sad and needed to share bits of his past to lift his spirits?
But the dismissive way he spoke about his parents’ death made me skeptical.
The rest of the day was solemn. Kai didn’t make any grand gestures, but rather his movements were restrained and measured. He gave me a tour of the upstairs—a study, a few guest bedrooms, a small library, and ended with his old room.
He pushed open the door to his childhood bedroom.
It was smaller than I expected, preserved just like the rest of the house.
A mausoleum. The bed was made with military precision, a desk in the corner, a shelf of trophies.
I stepped inside, and Kai followed, and for a moment, the room felt half the size it probably was.
He always stood so close that sometimes it was difficult to breathe around him.
I quickly busied myself with the row of trophies on the shelf.
He also let me look through his old yearbooks and the superlatives—most likely to succeed.
There were comfortable silences between us that felt naturally domestic.
At the end of the day, he guided me to the lake.
We watched the sun dip over the water from two rocking chairs in the backyard.
Arms at his sides, jaw set, eyes fixed somewhere between the water and beyond.
I watched him from slightly behind. The last of the light was catching the side of his face, the line of his throat, and I thought it was almost unfair for any single human to possess such objectively good genes.
His hands were loose for once, not crossed or braced.
I didn’t know what to do with mine. I thought about touching his arm because I sensed he wanted comfort.
My fingers lifted slightly off my knee. Then I put them back.
There was an odd, hollow sense of a thing left undone.
So, I sat still beside him, and together we watched the sunset.
“Why did you bring me here, Kai?” I asked out of the blue.
He shrugged. “You said you knew nothing about me.” He held up his hand, gesturing at his childhood estate. Somehow, I knew the words he’d never utter—This is me.
“Oh.” I glanced back at the house he had preserved since the monumental tragedy of his parents’ death. He didn’t want to talk about it, which was understandable, so he gave me something else. Access to his childhood because I had asked about it.
The gesture was deeply touching. Someone as private as Kai didn’t let people in, especially into intimate parts of their lives. Until now, I had assumed this was a silly contract marriage, something a wealthy man was doing to amuse himself until he got bored.
For the first time, I considered that this marriage might mean something to him. I still didn’t understand why me when he could have anyone.
“Thank you for showing me your childhood home.”
“Now that I’ve told you about my childhood, I believe it’s your turn to share,” he said.
He had barely told me anything, yet I instinctively knew it was more than he had shared with anyone else. I sighed. “What do you want to know?”
It turned out that he wanted to know everything. I thought my story was fairly straightforward—I was born in Beirut, then moved to the United States when I was little—but Kai’s persistent inquiries proved otherwise.
“How many languages do you speak?” he asked, as if his private investigator hadn’t already unearthed this information. I decided to let it go and played along, given that I’d been an asshole about his parents earlier.
“English, Arabic, and French.”
“That’s a lot of languages.”
I shrugged. “Lebanon’s super diverse. My family is Christian. Our next-door neighbors were Muslim. We considered ourselves Arab, while others at our church identified as Levantine. But at the end of the day, we are all Lebanese.”
“And everyone speaks multiple languages?”
“Not everyone. Arabic is widely spoken, but the French Mandate left a big impact on Lebanon. We belonged to the Maronite Christian community, and French is ingrained in our culture.”
“Hence the name Amelie Valentine. It’s French, I assume.”
I nodded.
“Do you miss Beirut?”
My chest tightened at the question. “I miss it so much,” I replied in a small voice. “Especially the food.”
“There’s Lebanese food in California.”
I made a face. “Habibi, let’s not talk about how they butcher tabbouleh at restaurants here.”
I pressed my lips shut. Kai didn’t react, but his expression said he was pleased I had called him that.
I looked back at the water. It was the first habibi I had dropped since moving back to Darster.
It wasn’t exactly a term you threw around in sunny California in a community that was eighty percent white.
People rarely expressed interest in my Arab background, so I always put it aside.
They asked about my heritage in a vague, polite way that meant they just wanted to place me ethnically.
Kai asked as if he genuinely wanted to know the answer.
The serene moment was shattered by a shrill, insistent blare coming from my phone. I inwardly cursed, realizing it was the timer I had set on my phone. I forgot to turn it off after finding out about Kai’s parents.
Stupid.
Stupid.
Stupid.
How much more insensitive could I be today?
I fumbled to silence my phone, heat rising in my face.
When I risked a glance at Kai, the fragile openness I’d glimpsed earlier had vanished, replaced by an unreadable gaze.
He didn’t acknowledge the timer. The silence grew as he watched me, and my anxiety with it.
“I’ll drive us home,” he said finally, his voice a soft monotone. No accusation, but it wasn’t tender, either.
My face flushed. Just as Kai was starting to bare a sliver of his soul in the form of a childhood home, I had ruined it with my thoughtlessness.
I wanted to explain that I’d set the timer before I understood the magnitude of what he had lost and his choice to share with me.
I wanted to take back the moment I had set that timer in the first place.
But I had a feeling that Kai didn’t care for meaningless excuses.
The best I could offer was something he wanted—my time.
“Um. We can stay a little longer if you want.” My words sounded brittle, forced, even to me.
There was a slight shift in his expression at my unprecedented words. I had never offered to extend our time together. He knew it, too.
“You set a timer on your phone, and now you’re offering to stay longer.” He held my gaze this time, and I could see he was suspicious of my offer. Perhaps he didn’t believe me capable of showing him human decency. I couldn’t exactly fault him. I had pushed him away at every turn.
I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, ashamed of my insensitivity throughout the day. “We drove all this way.”
In the near dark, the details of his face were harder to read, and I found myself trying anyway. I half expected him to withdraw into his fortress. Instead, he rose from his chair in one easy motion, and for a second, he stood over me, backlit by the last of the evening light.
“Let’s go inside.”
I stood, my pulse racing as he stood and I followed suit, entirely unsure what I had just agreed to.