November 29, 2020—Seattle, Washington—The Next Day #4
Logan’s arm gently encircled Adrian’s hips, drawing them closer as they moved through the house’s silent corridors.
The touch was a whisper of comfort, easing the tension that lingered in Adrian’s grip.
He responded with a quiet, grateful smile, a small gesture of thanks.
They entered the grand room, where Samantha’s warm invitation beckoned them to sit.
She offered Adrian a soft, reassuring grin and pointed to the plush couch, “Make yourself at home, dear.”
“Oh, do you want to start, Logan?” Robert’s voice was razor-sharp, slicing clean through the room.
“Shall we begin with your sudden departure? Or the fact that you’re filing for a divorce out of nowhere?
Or maybe we should talk about the customers and business partners calling me because you’ve been canceling your meetings?
” His words came rapidly, with questions firing off one after the other like gunfire.
“Or maybe,” he continued, stepping closer, “we should talk about why Ada Mae has been calling me to take over your responsibilities because, apparently, you were in Israel? What the hell were you doing flying half a world away without a word?”
The room held a charge, the air trembling in the pause before a storm broke.
And then, Robert turned his gaze to Adrian.
His expression didn’t change; there was no warmth, no hostility. Just indifference, like Adrian was a minor detail in the grand equation of his frustration.
“Hello, Adrian,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “How lovely to have you here.”
His voice was utterly flat, a passing remark, a polite acknowledgment before turning his full attention back to Logan, his eyes steely, demanding answers.
The room held its breath.
And Logan stood there, heart pounding, jaw clenched, realizing that this was it; the moment he had to face everything he had spent years running from.
Shoulders squared yet trembling beneath his coat of composure, like a man stepping barefoot into a fire he’d built with his own hands.
The air tasted like memory, and his father’s silence was a mountain between them.
“I need money, Dad,” Logan said, cutting straight to the point. His voice was steady, but beneath it, there was an urgency, a quiet desperation he couldn’t mask. “A lot of it. And I need it now.”
Robert didn’t react right away. Instead, he simply studied his son with an unreadable expression. “Of course you do.” His tone was dry but not cruel. “How much?” he asked as he sat down.
Logan followed his father’s lead and took the chair opposite, palms pressed to his knees, aware of Adrian taking the seat beside him.
“Five hundred grand, for starters.”
Time seemed to stop. Even the light filtering through the curtains looked frozen, suspended mid-breath.
Adrian’s head turned sharply toward Logan, his expression a stunned echo of everyone else in the room.
Samantha’s lips parted, her hand drifting instinctively to her chest. And Robert—stoic, immovable Robert—lifted a single brow like a man peering over the edge of something he didn’t want to see the bottom of.
“I’ll probably need more down the line,” Logan added.
Robert leaned back in his chair, a slow exhale escaping him like he was trying to release something that wouldn’t be let go.
His fingers dragged thoughtfully along the line of his jaw.
“You don’t just drop a number like that on me, Logan, and expect me to sign a check.
What’s going on? Are you in trouble? Gambling? Debt? What the hell did you do?”
There was a flicker of genuine concern beneath his usual strict businessman exterior.
“It’s not like that,” Logan was hurried to say. “It’s a long story.”
Robert scoffed. “Then you better start talking.”
“Adrian has leukemia,” he said, forcing the words out before his nerves could stop him. “He needs treatment.”
There was a long pause where no one seemed to know what to do with the truth now sitting between them like a third presence.
Robert finally gave a slow nod, subtle, almost imperceptible, but it was there. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and though the tone was neutral, something in Adrian’s eyes shifted; he blinked, clearly not expecting even that small acknowledgment.
“But what does that have to do with my money?” Robert finally asked.
Logan clenched his jaw, his hands curled into fists on his knees. His voice, when it came, was thick with the effort to remain composed. “I don’t have enough for the treatment.”
Robert’s lips pressed into a thin line. His father didn’t react with fire.
Instead, there was a chill to him, calm in a way that made the room feel colder, the silence between each word deliberate and controlled.
“Interesting,” Robert said, the word falling from his mouth like a dropped coin.
“And why exactly don’t you have the money, Logan?
You should have the money. I gave you and your wife a house.
I know your salary. I know your shares in the company. So where is it?”
Logan bit the inside of his cheek until the copper taste of restraint filled his mouth. He knew this was coming. The interrogation wrapped in numbers, the audit of his life delivered with boardroom precision.
“I paid some of the first investments for Sandy’s clothing line. I bought her vacations. She used my credit card for… basically everything. I also bought an apartment, by the way, so you can sell the house you gave us. And…” Logan took a deep breath. “I spent some money… finding Adrian.”
Samantha’s brows knit together in concern.
“Finding Adrian?” Robert repeated, his sharp eyes narrowing.
Logan vacillated long enough to feel himself poised at the edge of a cliff. He drew in a breath and remembered the ravine they had once crossed together, a jungle vine clenched in his fists, Adrian’s presence around him. He felt that same vertigo now, and once more he leapt.
“I’m gay.”
The room seemed to fall away from itself. Air grew thick, unmoving, the walls holding a silence so complete it almost hummed.
Samantha’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes wide, not cruel, not disgusted, just stunned by the way truth can arrive without knocking.
Robert, by contrast, barely moved. A small, nearly imperceptible twitch in his jaw, the only betrayal of shock. But Logan saw it. He saw everything.
“And Adrian is my boyfriend,” he continued, steady now, steadier than he had been in years. “I think that explains the divorce.”
His father didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe, it seemed. He just looked at his son as though trying to decipher a language he’d never cared to learn.
Then, with a calmness that scraped, Robert asked, “How the hell are you gay?”
“Robert!” Samantha snapped.
But he kept his eyes locked on Logan, like the truth might dissolve if he stared it down long enough.
“No, I’m serious.” Robert looked at Logan, his brow furrowing. “For twenty-eight years, you were straight. You were happily married. And now, suddenly, you’re gay? Out of nowhere?” He turned his gaze, sharp and cutting, to Adrian. “Is he… blackmailing you, Logan?”
“Oh my God, Dad, no!” Logan pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, trying to breathe through the sting behind his eyes.
Adrian flinched, not visibly, but inwardly; Logan could feel it like a shift in the air beside him. A wound not yet spoken.
Robert shook his head, his expression unreadable. “I don’t get it. What changed?”
Logan exhaled, something bitter clawing at his throat. “Nothing changed.” His voice was raw, cracked open like a wound. “I just… got the courage to pursue what I wanted.”
But that wasn’t enough. It was never enough.
His father sat there, assessing him, just as he assessed board meetings and mergers, calculating profits and risks. Logan clenched his fists against the rising frustration.
“When you saw Adrian at my wedding, he wasn’t just a guest.” Logan’s voice wavered but didn’t break. “He was trying to stop me. Because he knew. He knew I was lying to myself.”
Logan swallowed hard. “My marriage was a nightmare. For both of us. I didn’t love her.
I couldn’t. We spent six months sleeping in separate rooms, pretending to be something we weren’t.
Do you know what that does to a person?” He let out a breathless, humorless laugh, shaking his head.
“I was drowning, Dad. And when I finally came up for air, the only direction I knew was back to him.”
He turned and met Adrian’s eyes across the charged air of the room, and without hesitation, he reached for his hand, openly and unapologetically, a man who had at last stopped concealing the only thing that had ever made him feel real.
“I love him,” he declared, the words cracking in his throat yet spilling into the silence with the weight of a stone breaking the surface of still water, undeniable in their descent, reverberating through the room, impossible to take back, impossible to ignore, not a plea or a defense but truth, confession, surrender.
Robert didn’t speak, didn’t blink, didn’t shift a single muscle, but Logan could feel the machinery grinding behind that stillness.
It wasn’t enough. It had never been enough.
So Logan did something he never imagined he could.
He pressed Adrian’s hand to his lips, a fleeting kiss brushed upon his skin before he rose gracefully to his feet.
With fingers that barely obeyed him, he pulled his phone from his pocket and moved across the room.
He paused—just for a breath, just for a heartbeat—but in his mind, it felt like a lifetime of silence.
Then he unlocked the phone and opened the folder.
The hidden one.
The digital shrine to the sole thing that had ever given his life significance. The only companion in the past two years that had helped him regain a moment of fleeting happiness, allowing him to feel human once more.
A digital embrace from the love of his life, pixels filled with memories that would eternally be engraved in his heart.