Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Bea angled her phone toward him. “They make it sound like you closed it in a boardroom.”
Rafael leaned against the headboard, hair damp from the shower. Her bedside lamp cast dim light that caught the bruise on his cheek, the cut by his eye. “That’s the official story.”
“No mention of…extracurricular diplomacy.”
He looked at her, eyes green and knowing. “It’s enough that we know my extracurriculars deliver results.”
The fight had given him his contract.
The night in his arms had given her revelation. All that strength, and somehow it made her bloom where she thought she’d shatter. What she used to resist, she now welcomed—more than that, craved. He’d left her shaking, thoughtless, fluent only in yes.
Bea pulled her pink checkered sheet higher, tucking her legs beneath it, pretending she wasn’t replaying him above her in the dark. “Anurak left with a limp.”
“Hospital cleared him before we flew out.”
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t get checked there,” she said, settling into the pillows. “You could’ve fractured something.”
“The doctor came to the hotel. That was enough,” he said.
“But you didn’t get scans done,” she argued. “It’s not the same.”
“It’s better.”
Bea leaned toward him, one knee brushing his thigh. “You’re serious.”
The silence stretched long enough to mean something.
“I don’t do hospitals.”
“Since when does the man who bleeds recreationally dodge hospitals?”
“Since Valeria.”
Her head tilted. “Who’s Valeria?”
“My sister.”
She hadn’t expected that. Of all the answers he could’ve given, that one. And yet his voice carried no sorrow, only distant remembering.
The air in the room shifted. Outside, summer rain began to tap against the glass.
“She’s the one in that photo with you—on your wall?”
Rafael nodded. “She had leukemia.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, reaching her arm around his chest. “Can you…tell me about her?”
“She was tiny. Bossy. Fun. Lived in a sparkly pink dress for months.” He shook his head. “Most of what I remember starts after she got sick.”
“What happened?”
“We spent a year living between construction sites and oncology wards,” he said. “I’d bring her toy trucks. She’d line them on her windowsill, tell the nurses she was supervising our builds.”
“When did she go?” Bea asked, blinking fast.
“She was five, I was eight.” He paused, took a deep breath. “Since then we bring doctors to us, or go to private clinics. Nowhere with corridors that echo.”
Bea pressed closer, eyes burning. She pictured a hospital bed that dwarfed a small girl, a boy standing beside it, learning too early that some things, once lost, never came back.
“Theia—” Her voice caught. “How did she cope?”
“Mama didn’t speak for a month. The house was quiet for a while.” His palm brushed up and down her upper arm, as if comforting her. “After that, we did the only thing we knew—build.”
“Was that why ‘Constructions’ became ‘Ventures’?” she asked, remembering the timeline from the case study at St. Ives.
“Mmm,” Rafael murmured. “Her hospital file said ‘Griffin, Valeria.’ The spine had just the initials. My father kept the sticker.” He paused, voice roughening. “Said if he couldn’t save her life, he’d build something that outlived all of ours.”
An image rose in her mind: a skyscraper that dominated the Northgate skyline. Its emblem, a lion’s body with an eagle’s head and wings.
Above it, two letters gleamed. “GV,” she whispered, throat tight.
Not just Griffin Ventures. Griffin, Valeria.
A monument disguised as empire. A little girl’s name lifted beyond grief’s reach, built so a father could hold onto his daughter forever.
“You were so young.” Bea set her palm over his heart, feeling its steady rhythm.
He covered her hand in his. “That was mercy, in a way. Kids don’t stay sad forever.”
“But it stayed with you.”
“Taught me you don’t get endless chances with what you love. So you don’t leave room to regret what you left undone.”
“That’s you,” she said quietly. “Always doing what needs to be done today, not leaving it for tomorrow.”
She understood more deeply now—not just his vigilance for what he loved, but the urgency beneath it.
Rafael kissed her temple, shifting closer until their legs tangled under the sheets. “And you’re the girl who carries what isn’t hers, so the people she loves don’t have to.”
“Do you think so?” she asked, looking at the fresh scabs on his knuckles.
“I’ve seen it,” he said simply.
Her cheek stayed pressed to his shoulder. “I remember asking my parents once if I’d ever get a baby brother, and my mom pulled over the car and cried.” Her voice thinned. “I tried to make up the difference. You know them; they never asked me to. It was me.”
Rafael caught her chin between his fingers, lifting until her eyes met his. “You were a little girl trying to make a house feel full.”
“I had to,” she said, mouth curving.
He held her gaze for a long moment. “That’s how we fit. I build the rooms; you fill them.”
In that easy line, she glimpsed it: a life made of spaces that would never know emptiness.
RAFAEL
“You just missed her,” his assistant, Mark, said as he strode down the hall, a file tucked under one arm.
“You couldn’t have stalled her a few minutes?” Rafael asked, keys burning a hole in his pocket.
Mark shrugged. “Tried. She moves fast when she’s on a mission.”
Rafael pushed open his office door and stopped. A cardboard takeaway box sat square in the center of his desk, steam fogging the lid. The faint smell of chilli and garlic filled the air, and his stomach rumbled in response.
He set down the file, tugged his phone from his pocket. The screen lit up as he went to unlock it.
LITTLE BEA: Brought you lunch. Left it on your desk.
RAFAEL: Thanks. Come back and be dessert.
LITTLE BEA: I’ve got a meeting.
RAFAEL: So do I, but I’d be willing to move it.
LITTLE BEA: That works because you’re the boss.
RAFAEL: Want me to request an early day for you from Maris?
LITTLE BEA: Don’t even think about it.
RAFAEL: Fine. Tomorrow’s mine, though. I’ll pick you up.
LITTLE BEA: Still not going to tell me where we’re going?
RAFAEL: Nope.
LITTLE BEA: What if I’m inappropriately dressed?
RAFAEL: Please. Make it very inappropriate.
LITTLE BEA: lol. Seriously, not even a dress code hint?
RAFAEL: Wear something you can walk in. And something I’ll want to take off.
LITTLE BEA: That’s literally everything I own
RAFAEL: Exactly.
It started with Claire’s hair still damp and her voice wedged between a yawn and a complaint.
“Now that you work full time, I have to wake up at ungodly hours just to have a proper catchup with you,” she grumbled. Her mug said BUILDING THINGS (AND EMOTIONAL WALLS). She lifted it like a manifesto. “This long-distance thing isn’t working for me.”
The sun had barely started to rise in Toronto. In Northgate, it was almost midnight. Her room was dim except for the lamp on her desk, suitcase half open at her feet, clothes that had been in various stages of I’ll deal with that later finally getting attention after Thailand.
“How about we revisit that conversation where you move here?” Bea called, raising her voice so the mic could chase her across the room.
“What would I do with my pretty engineer man, though?” Claire’s voice crackled through the speakers.
“That’s true. Would he move?”
“Negative. Marco would never leave Toronto,” Claire said. “His one flaw is that he thinks travel is boring. What man under thirty in his right mind thinks travel is boring?”
“The one who thinks a weekend building a garden shed is quality time,” Bea answered, shoving a drawer shut with her hip.
“Anyway,” Claire sighed. “Tell me about Bangkok, Beya Slaya. Surely you have a sneaky video you can share?”
“Nope. They confiscated everyone’s phones. Couldn’t have the result become internet fodder.”
Claire huffed. “Lame. I’m curious what it looks like when a bunch of billionaires fight. Is it the same as when normal guys fight? Do people throw hundred-dollar bills at them instead of ones?”
“I think you’re thinking about strippers.” Bea laughed. “Anyway, I couldn’t tell you. I was too busy not fainting.”
“Was it hot chaos?”
“Objectively? Yes.” Bea dropped a pair of folded shorts on the bed. “Subjectively? I was one heartbeat from cardiac arrest.”
“Did you like Thailand?” Claire had moved on to the hair-brushing part of her morning routine.
“I loved it. It was frenetic, but in the coolest way. The people were beautiful, and the food was even better. Rafael brought me to this tiny cart to have mango sticky rice. Claire Bear, people would sell organs for that.”
“Your boyfriend’s rich. Buy the cart.”
Bea laughed, sitting down cross-legged in front of her laptop, knees bumping the desk. She took a deep breath. “I said it, too. I told him I loved him.”
The mascara wand stilled. “At the mango stand?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, but what’s in this mango? Organs and love confessions?” Claire’s eyes were wide. “You’ve been with him what, two months?”
“Nine weeks,” Bea corrected, twisting the intricately carved naga serpent bracelet Rafael had bought her in the market. “Do you think I said it too soon?”
Claire tilted her head, calculating. “You’ve always believed sex is for love, right?”
“Right.”
“And you had sex with Rafael basically straight away, right?” One side of Claire’s mouth tipped upward.
Bea grew fidgety. “Uh-huh.”
“Well I’d say that means—”
She clapped both hands over her ears. “Don’t.”
“What?” Claire’s voice sing-songed through the speakers. “It’s the logical conclusion that you—”
“Shhh!”
It didn’t matter that Claire hadn’t said it. She heard it anyway: you loved him from the start.
She didn’t know if it was true. Or maybe she did.
She could admit, at least, that the feeling had existed in her as far back as when she’d seen Nico’s ‘Certificate of Godfather’ hanging on his wall.
An ache in her chest that persisted, and grew, until it stopped being a feeling and became a certainty.