Chapter 24 The Unraveling
The weekend was a prolonged exercise in manufactured courage and subsequent collapse.
Leo spent forty-eight hours rehearsing a confession.
He tried it out on his cactus (the cactus was unimpressed).
He wrote it down, a frantic, desperate scrawl, then burned the paper in his sink.
He ran the scene in his mind a hundred times, each with a different outcome, ranging from the spectacularly disastrous (Julian throwing him out of his apartment) to the wildly optimistic (Julian, after a moment of surprise, laughing and pulling him into a hug).
No scenario felt right. How could there be a right way to tell the person you loved that the beautiful life you were building together was set on a rotten foundation?
But Maya was right. And Julian, with his declaration of certainty, deserved the truth.
His words, “I’ve never felt this certain about anyone,” had become a haunting indictment, a constant, looping refrain against Leo’s conscience.
He had taken Julian’s certainty and turned it into a cruel joke.
He had to give it back, no matter if it cost him everything.
So, on Monday morning, Leo walked into the V it was the thread that, when pulled, unraveled the entire tapestry.
“Scrimshaw,” Julian repeated, his voice low and utterly devoid of emotion. He was looking directly at Leo, but his eyes were blank. The light had gone out. The walls Leo had spent weeks carefully dismantling were back up, not with brick, but with reinforced steel.
“Julian, I can explain,” Leo whispered, a useless, desperate attempt to stop the inevitable.
“You can’t find it,” Julian said, not to Leo, but to Sarah, though his gaze never left Leo’s horrified face, “because it doesn’t exist.”
Each word was a hammer blow, driving the final nail into Leo’s coffin.
Sarah blinked, completely lost. “Doesn’t exist? What do you mean? There must be some mistake—”
“There is no mistake,” Julian said, his voice like ice. He placed his coffee cup on the nearest desk with a soft, final click. Then he turned and walked away. He didn’t run. He didn’t yell. He simply turned his back on Leo and walked toward his office, each step deliberate and devastating.
The dismissal was more painful than any accusation.
Sarah watched him go, then looked back at Leo, the horrible truth finally dawning on her face. She took a step back, as if Leo had suddenly become a stranger. The entire, eerily silent office was now buzzing with whispers. Everyone was staring.
Leo stood there, pinned to the spot by a dozen pairs of eyes, but he didn’t see them. He could only see the closing glass door of Julian’s office, shutting him out. He hadn’t just been discovered. He had been erased.
In the final moment before Julian slid the blinds closed, blocking him from view, Leo saw his expression.
It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t contempt.
It was a complete and utter void, the emptiness of a person who has just realized that everything they believed to be true was a lie. It was the silence after a beautiful world has been destroyed.