Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
STEFAN
Matt found me sitting on the hotel balcony with a coffee and the fragility of someone who had slept three hours and was pretending otherwise. He had his phone out, and the expression he wore was one of delivering unwanted news.
“What?” I asked, alarmed.
He handed me the phone. “You’re not going to like this.”
Kai had sent an email to all the execs, including Matt. I hadn’t gotten around to opening my email yet. We returned to Dubai yesterday and did another round of the Gulf nightlife. I was still recovering.
“I recommend extending the trip for additional footage and auditions,” I read aloud from the email. “This is bullshit.”
We already extended this trip at Kai’s suggestion to gather enough material for two issues. We added Singapore and Malaysia. Now, he was suggesting we get ahead of the third issue. Was it his life’s mission to never let me return home?
I refused to take Kai’s ‘strongly recommended advice’ under consideration.
Amelie’s birthday was coming up, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world, especially with our recent setbacks.
She still refused to discuss what happened in Beirut and only responded when I asked questions about the children.
I gave her space, but enough was enough.
Even if I had moved mountains to be there with my wife, I’d find a way to wrap up and take my crew home.
The two-week trip had already turned into several weeks. Long enough to miss the small things I took for granted. The specific weight of Amelie’s head on my chest. The twins fighting over a piece of toast like it was the last one on earth. Bella’s wild spirit.
“Sorry, man,” Matt said tightly. “I know you miss your girl.”
“I’m not extending the trip,” I said sourly, positive that Kai would try to talk me into staying again. “My wife’s birthday is coming up. I can’t miss it.”
“You have something planned for Amelie’s birthday?”
I glanced at Matt. “I’ll throw her a party when I get back.”
“That’s great.”
“Yeah. It’ll be a good time. I’ll invite her coworkers. You guys should come, too, and everyone else from the magazine.”
Matt watched me for a moment. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
I frowned. “Why not?”
He shook his head. “I just meant, how do you plan on introducing her to everyone else?” He kept his voice carefully neutral, which was its own form of commentary. “You can’t exactly tell people she’s your wife now that Amelie and Kai have gone public.”
I nearly dropped the phone in my hand. “Gone public? What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t seen it.”
He grabbed the phone from my hand, toyed with it for a moment, and then showed me the screen.
It was an article. A society piece from a Darster publication, the kind of glossy, aspirational local press that covered Kai the way tabloids covered celebrities, with breathless reverence and very little scrutiny. The headline stopped me dead.
The Prince of Darster and His Wife: Inside Kai Cavendish’s Private Life.
There were photographs. Kai and Amelie were at what I presumed was their beachfront wedding ceremony.
I had never seen these pictures. Kai was immaculate as always, holding Amelie’s hand.
Dark hair, gold earrings, her head tilted slightly toward him in that way she had when she was listening to something properly.
The caption read: Kai and Amelie Cavendish on their wedding day.
Who had leaked the story? Their ceremony was supposed to be private. Did the photographer sell the pictures to the Darster publication?
“When was this published?” I asked, my throat suddenly parched.
“A few weeks ago,” Matt said.
I set the phone down on the balcony table.
“You all right?” Matt asked. “Sorry, man. I assumed you knew.”
“I’m fine,” I said, swallowing. “People were going to find out eventually. They’re married, too.”
“Mm.” Matt retrieved his phone.
“What?”
“That’s what we have been meaning to discuss with you.”
I eyed him suspiciously. “We?”
Matt seemed a bit reluctant to speak. “Me, Ruby, Marcus, Will. Most of all, Lucy.”
Lucy was Ruby’s publicist, and upon her recommendation, I’d hired her as my own. Ever since, my name’s been popping up in various magazines as an up-and-coming talent to watch.
“None of us has pressed you about your marriage because, you know, who are we to judge? To each his own.” He paused. “But maybe it isn’t such a great idea to publicize your marriage to everyone else in the magazine.”
“Why not?”
Matt rubbed the back of his neck with his right hand. “You’re my boy, and while we’ve got your back, other people at the magazine might not be so cool with our president’s… unconventional marriage.”
It seemed like he wanted to be anywhere but here. If I had to guess, my group of friends had been thinking it for a while, and he had drawn the short straw to talk to me about it. Perhaps it was because we went to high school together.
“It’s not the best look. Everyone in Darster already knows that Kai and Amelie are married. She is his wife. Where does that leave you?” He asked it simply, without cruelty. That almost made it worse.
She is his wife.
It dawned on me that with their marriage going public, I could no longer introduce Amelie as my wife.
My name was nowhere in that article because why would it be?
It portrayed Amelie as Kai’s loving wife, leaving me with no title.
At best, I was her boyfriend, the male version of a mistress, a sidepiece.
“I didn’t expect a four-page spread days after you left the country,” Matt was saying. “But you must’ve known this was coming.”
“What do you mean?” I asked with more hostility than I meant.
“It’s just, e-er, y-you know—”
“Don’t stutter. Just tell me what the fuck you meant.”
Matt’s head reeled back. He held up two hands. “Dude, chill. I get you’re upset that other people will now see Amelie as Kai’s wife, but you must’ve known this was coming. You kind of signed up for it.”
“What the fuck?”
“You gave up being Amelie’s husband to become the magazine’s president.”
I went cold. I couldn’t even argue with him because I had done exactly that. Kai made me the president of his magazine as a reward for letting him become my wife’s legal husband. I’d been so busy admiring the price that I never looked at what it cost.
He stared at me, his gaze imperceptible. “My bad. I-I didn’t mean it like that. Maybe it’s best if you have a minute to process all of this. I’ll leave you alone.”
Matt practically ran inside.
I sat with the coffee going cold and the Mediterranean doing its vast, indifferent thing below the balcony.
People were bound to find out. That was true. There was nothing I could do about it. Kai and Amelie were legally married, and the world would eventually know that, and there was no version of this arrangement in which I remained the acknowledged husband in any public sense.
That was what I had agreed to.
And yet.
The publication date sat in my mind. Right after I left. Not before. Not during the time we were living together in that house.
The timing sure was odd.
I couldn’t get the article out of my head.
Kai Cavendish and his wife, Amelie.
Matt’s voice: You gave up being Amelie’s husband to become the magazine’s president. The flat, neutrality of it.
I packed up and told everyone we were flying home the next day. By the time the plane landed, I had practiced the apology so many times that the words were starting to mesh in an odd manner.
The car took the long way through town. I saw myself before I understood what was happening. My face on a bus bench outside the farmers market, three-quarter profile, under a headline that said Darster’s Rising Star.
My publicist’s doing. Lucy had emailed me mock-ups, and I’d approved them from a hotel bed without really looking.
I had hired her at Ruby and Kai’s urging.
They said I desperately needed to fix my image so people at the magazine and our investors would take me seriously, rather than accuse me of nepotism for how I got the job.
Lucy had proposed to market me as The New Prince of Darster because she said I had the ‘marketable face’ for such a title, whatever that meant.
At the time, I’d laughed because who’d see me as a prince? I didn’t have the breeding. Seeing my face plastered around town, I couldn’t argue that her tactic was working. It seemed like everyone was buying it, and Kai was no longer the only man in this town whose name was going up on things.
There was another one on the digital board by the marina, rotating between a watch ad and me. I should have felt ecstatic. A few months ago, I would have. Instead, I filed away my rising fame and practiced the apology in my head for the hundredth time.
I’d bought half of Istanbul and Dubai for Amelie and the children.
The trunk was full of proof. A hand-knotted rug I’d watched a man finish over three days, because Amelie loved things you could see the hours in.
A scarf in the exact blue she always preferred.
Bracelets, earrings, necklaces, with all shapes of rubies and diamonds.
Boxes of sweets for the twins from a shop that a vendor swore was the best in the old city, rose water, and pistachio.
A new hat for Bella that I had to fight another man over.
I’d spent the whole flight arranging the speech in my head. The part where I took full responsibility. The part where I called myself a coward before she could. The part where she forgave me.
I kept imagining my homecoming. The door opening. The kids spilling out. Amelie behind them with her arms crossed, still angry, but eventually giving in because we could weather any storm together.
When I let myself in, the house was quiet in a way that didn’t match the picture in my head. I had texted Amelie as soon as I’d landed. I assumed everyone would be here, waiting for me.
“Hello?” My voice went out across the marble and came back smaller. “I’m home.”
Nothing. The grand entry of the house sat there, gleaming and unbothered, the way it always did, like a hotel lobby waiting for guests who lived elsewhere. I set the bags down by the stairs and went looking.
My side was the way I’d left it. That should have been a comfort.
Instead, it had the staged, untouched feeling of a model home, the throw pillows in their assigned positions, the surfaces clean of the small evidence of a person.
I climbed to our room. The bed was made with hospital corners, which no one in this family had ever once managed on their own.
I opened the closet out of habit to hang my jacket and stopped.
Amelie’s side of the closet was empty.
Not messy empty, the way it got when she was packing in a hurry and left half her wardrobe on the floor in protest. Empty empty.
The rod was bare. Correction: the shelf I had stuffed with new shoes and purses for her remained untouched.
Most of those items were still in their original packaging.
But her personal things that we brought from the old house had been swept clean.
For a second, my mind supplied the reasonable explanations before the fear could land. She was having things cleaned. She’d rearranged while I was gone. People rearranged.
I went down the hall to the kids’ rooms. Stripped too. Beds bare, the closets gaping, the small archaeological layers of three childhoods—Bella’s contraband candy stash, August’s sorted-by-color everything, Jamie’s Nintendo—gone.
I stood in the doorway of Bella’s empty room and felt something cold move through me that I refused, for the moment, to name.
They were somewhere. People didn’t just vanish. And there was one part of the house I hadn’t checked, because I’d never once checked it since we moved into this house.
Kai’s side.
When we’d moved in, the arrangement had drawn its own quiet borders, and one of them was that his wing was his.
He never told me not to venture inside. I merely respected his unspoken wish for privacy.
A man like that needed somewhere the rest of us weren’t and giving him privacy was the least I could do, given everything.
But today, I was far too jarred by the empty welcome. I crossed the large living room and pushed open the door to his side, and for the first time, walked into the place I presumed my wife and siblings had moved into while I was halfway across the world.
I stopped in the hallway as if I’d walked into the wrong house. Because it looked suspiciously like our old home.
What the hell?
I had a fixed idea of what Kai’s side of the house looked like—cold money, glass and steel, the kind of austere wealth that made you feel like a fingerprint on someone’s window—and I preferred the idea to whatever the reality turned out to be.
There was the sofa with the stains, the one Amelie had thrown a blanket over and refused to replace because we couldn’t afford to, and then, later, because it had a story.
There was the frayed armchair she liked.
The chipped blue bowl she inherited from my late mother.
The cabinet with the pencil marks climbing it with Bella’s height.
My hand traced the marks and Amelie’s beautiful handwriting.
The walls were warm, the throws colorful.
Where my side smelled like nothing, like the inside of a new car, this smelled like cinnamon and cookies and old books.
There were photos. Dozens of them, in mismatched frames the way she always hung them, refusing my campaign for a single matched set.
The kids at the amusement park with Kai and Amelie.
Amelie laughing on a beach with Kai. Amelie and Bella asleep in a pile.
None of me. I noticed it the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue, before you decide to keep prodding it.
I stood in the middle of it, turning slowly, and the question came up so absurd I almost laughed.
Why?
The man owned planes. He owned malls. Most of the buildings in this town.
He’d spent, casually, on a single dinner more than I used to make in a year, and he hadn’t blinked.
He could’ve built anything over here. He could’ve stocked his side with art that cost more than the GDP of small nations.
And instead, he’d built this. He’d taken my mediocre, mended, drowning-in-debt old life—the life I’d spent every day trying to claw my way out of, the life I’d been ashamed to let him see across that restaurant table—and he’d reproduced it down to the stains.
It made no sense. You didn’t counterfeit a thing you could buy a thousand times over. You didn’t, with all the money in the world, build a careful little museum of someone else’s ordinary and unremarkable home.
I didn’t get to mull this over. Because at the end of the hall, I heard her.