Chapter 35
Chapter
Thirty-Five
AMELIE
The check was folded in my back pocket.
I’d written it that morning with Kai’s checkbook.
It was my checkbook, too, I supposed, since he’d added my name to every account he owned and reminded me a dozen times to use them.
I checked the number twice. It wasn’t a repayment.
It was a thank-you, years overdue, for everything Rose had covered for me throughout college.
A few months ago, I would’ve never dreamt of using Kai’s money to pay back my friend.
But now, what was mine was his, and his was mine.
We had truly become one, and it no longer felt odd to repay Rose with our funds.
Through the kitchen window, I watched our lively backyard.
Smoke rose off the grill in thin gray ribbons.
Caden stood over the coals, and Kai stood beside him, sleeves rolled.
Two of the scariest men I had ever met, presiding over hamburgers.
It was eerily domestic. The kids orbited them, Bella supervising the grilling efforts, and the twins locked in a silent custody battle over the tongs.
Stefan had made himself scarce since my birthday party, and I hadn’t followed up.
I was still haunted by Kai’s face after he caught us in bed.
That broken look made my heart shut down automatically where Stefan was around.
Not that it mattered. Stefan had his friends, and it was all that seemed to matter to him.
I didn’t know what that meant for our marriage or the future.
All I knew was that I couldn’t bear to hurt Kai again, and that meant putting distance between Stefan and me.
I shoved the thoughts of my precarious future out of my mind. Today was about soaking up the remaining time I had left with my best friend, and I wanted to focus on that.
Rose and Caden stuck around after my birthday so we could catch up.
In the last few days, I had performed the story for Rose as taught by Kai’s publicist and his lawyers.
Stefan was my amicable ex-husband. We bought a house with adjoining wings for the children’s sake.
Co-parenting. The word tasted like a press release every time I said it, mostly because it was one.
Rose hadn’t pushed me about the holes in my story.
Who’d believe I was happily married to one man at the beginning of the year, only to be perfectly happy with an entirely different person by the end of it?
She just loved me too much to grill me if I wasn’t ready to share my truth, and I was grateful for the grace.
“Okay, out with it.” Rose sat at the kitchen island with her oat milk latte. “You’ve been fidgeting since I sat down.”
Marriage had steadied her. The girl who used to rehearse ordering coffee and couldn’t speak in public unless intoxicated could now call out nonsense on the first offense.
“I wanted to give you something before you left.” I pulled the check out and slid it across the island, face down.
She looked at the check. “Why are you giving me this?”
“It’s for college,” I told her.
Her eyebrows climbed. “Amelie.”
“Don’t fight me on this. Just put it in your purse and deposit it when you are home.
” My scholarship had covered the cost of my books, room and board, and tuition.
Rose had covered everything else. Morning coffees.
Dinners. Drinks. Even clothes at times. “This is everything you covered for years. Plus interest.”
“You don’t owe me interest. You also don’t owe me anything—”
“Yes, I do. You did so much for me. Please just let me pay you back.”
Rose slid the check back across the marble with one finger, gentle and unbudging. “Am. You don’t owe me anything because Kai already paid us.”
“What?”
“He deposited money into Caden’s account.” She said it lightly. “For all the college stuff. He even returned the money Caden had sent you and Stefan for your wedding.”
The wedding gift from Caden. The check that had covered Stefan’s parents’ funeral when we couldn’t. Kai had reached years into my past and quietly erased all my debt.
I frowned. “How did he even know that I owed you money?” For a horrible moment, I wondered if Rose had been resentful all this time and mentioned it to Kai.
Did she feel used? That humiliating phone call with Caden and Rose, when I’d called to ask for money, still kept me up at night.
I’d never wanted money to become an issue between us.
Rose clocked my mortified expression and held up her palms. “I didn’t say anything to Kai, I swear. He just knew about it and sent us the money.”
“Why would Kai repay the stuff from college when I never even said anything about it?”
She shrugged, unbothered. “Probably the same reason he sponsored the scholarship. He’s always loved you. You know that.”
The refrigerator hummed. Outside, Bella shrieked at something.
“What scholarship?”
“Your college scholarship, silly.”
When I didn’t move, Rose set down her mug.
“When Caden told me that Kai built an entire scholarship foundation just for you… my God, I’ve never heard of anything more romantic.” She smiled at the memory, as if this were a story we told together at parties.
She thought this was information I already knew, not something I was hearing for the first time.
“I can’t believe he has been in love with you since you were in college. Caden was sure it would never amount to much. He didn’t think you and Stefan would ever split up.”
She kept talking. I stopped being able to hear her.
A dinner assembled itself in my mind from months ago. Candlelight. Champagne. Kai telling the story of a girl he’d loved for years.
There’s something to the power of observation. Soon, I knew her like the back of my hand.
She got married.
She isn’t that kind of woman, and I wouldn’t have loved her if she were.
I had been jealous of that girl. And for the last several weeks, I had hated her a little, too. The one that got away. I’d measured myself against her in mirrors. I’d lain awake next to Kai, wondering what she had that I didn’t, whether he would trade if given the chance.
The one that got away had never gotten away at all. She’d been standing in his kitchen this whole time, holding a checkbook with his name on it. Wearing his ring. Hating herself by accident.
It was me. It had always been me.
And beneath that realization was another thought: if he had been the one behind my scholarship, years before I ever learned his name, then how long, exactly, had he been watching me?
“I’m sorry about your divorce, but I’m glad you and Stefan are on good terms,” Rose was saying.
“And I’m really happy that things worked out with Kai.
Watching the two of you these past few days has been straight out of a movie.
” She pressed a hand flat to her chest. “By the way, when did he tell you that he was the one who sponsored your scholarship? I’m dying to know the whole story. ”
Because Rose had been enamored by my love story, and because I was in disbelief, it didn’t dawn on either of us that the patio door had been open for some time and that two people had overheard what Rose had accidentally revealed.
Kai was carrying a platter, Caden behind him with the long grilling fork. Kai looked at me the way he always did, first, before anything else in the room, and whatever was on my face told him that I’d figured it all out.
Caden realized it, too. He never told his wife the extent of my knowledge about Kai. He looked at me for a second. Then at Kai. And finally at his wife.
“Rose.” Caden’s keys were already in his hand, though I never saw him take them out. “We should get going.”
“But our flight’s not for another five hours.”
“We should get ahead of traffic.”
“But we were in the middle of—”
“The traffic,” Caden said pleasantly, which from him was a filibuster.
Kai set the platter down with the exaggerated care of a man buying time. “Amelie.”
“The kids are still outside.” My voice came out level. Somewhere in my mind, I was screaming, but here in the kitchen, I sounded like a woman in control of her emotions. I didn’t want to lose control in front of Caden and Rose. “Can you please watch them while I walk Rose out?”
He searched my face. I watched him look for anger and not find it—because I had no idea what I felt right now—and I watched the it unsettle him more than shouting would have. He was fluent in my temper. He had no dictionary for my calm.
“Of course,” he said, finally.
Outside, Rose hugged me on the driveway, and I held on a beat too long.
“New York for New Year’s,” she said into my hair. “Both of you, no excuses. I already told Kai. Poppy’s doing her vow renewal, and she wants you there.”
Poppy was Rose’s cousin and a friend of mine by proxy. She couldn’t care less if I attended her vow renewal, but I still agreed. “New Year’s.”
We chatted for a few minutes, Rose blissfully unaware of the atomic bomb she had dropped. After she finally climbed into the car, Caden rounded the hood to the driver’s side. Just as I was lifting my hand to wave, he stopped, palm resting on the door.
“Go easy on him,” he told me.
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Whatever you’re about to do with what Rose told you.” There was no apology in it, and no request, either. “Just go easy on him.”
In all the time I had known Caden, he had never advocated for another man’s cause.
A laugh escaped me, short and disbelieving. “Go easy on him? No one in the history of the world has ever suggested that Kai Cavendish needs someone to go easy on him.”
His gaze went past me to the house, and his voice shifted so slightly I might have imagined it. “He was drowning before you. Because of you. He’s finally himself again after years of self-destructive behavior. So, go easy on him.”
The cold that went through me had nothing to do with the ocean breeze. Kai and self-destructive behavior didn’t go together. “Are we talking about the same Kai Cavendish? Tall, dark hair, insanely levelheaded.”
“There were a few years in the middle where he wasn’t so levelheaded. He lost himself.” He opened the car door. “He was nearly finished by the time you finally noticed him.”
Finally noticed him?
“You brought him back to life, and you’re the only person who can do that for him. Remember that.”
He slid behind the wheel before I could ask more questions. The engine turned over. Rose blew me a kiss through the glass, radiant and oblivious, and the car eased down the drive, and I stood there with my arm still half raised.
What the actual fuck just happened?
I stayed in the driveway long after the taillights turned out of sight, trying to lay the man Caden described over the man I knew, and the edges wouldn’t meet anywhere. Kai folded newspapers into perfect thirds. Kai was calm, a man who had never in my presence been late, loud, or careless.
Kai did not drown.
But Caden made Kai sound self-destructive, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I wrapped my arms around myself against the cold and found myself asking the question Caden hadn’t answered.
What happened to you?