Chapter 34
Chapter
Thirty-Four
STEFAN
It was Amelie’s birthday.
I should have already known Kai would pull out all the stops, but I was still shocked by the scale of the party.
Our backyard had been transformed. String lights crossed the whole sky.
There was a real pit smoking low at the far end, long farmhouse tables with rustic centerpieces, forty or fifty people, cake, music, and a relaxed atmosphere.
It was the exact party I had thrown for Amelie, that time she came home from college on her birthday, because it was everything she liked. A backyard barbecue with too much food, people she loved, family time, and lots of noise.
Once, I had a yard she loved. I had a house she loved. I had the exact life she’d always wanted since she was a child, and I’d spent my time apologizing for how ordinary it was and reaching past it for something that glittered.
Now, the glittering man was giving her back the ordinary. How ironic. He’d reached into my chest and taken out the one thing I’d never understood was the treasure.
Her work friends were here, too. I was introduced to the ones I’d never met—Christian, Jo, her boss, Dr. Joseph Kwon, and some other nurses I half recognized.
Amelie’s best friend, Rose, had flown in with Caden, who orbited his wife the same way Kai orbited Amelie—fierce, audacious, never more than a step away.
Everyone was happy. Everyone was here for her.
And in the middle of all of it was Amelie, in a teal dress, happy and glowing.
I’d brought birthday gifts. I’d carried them out, plus a card I’d spent an embarrassing amount of time writing and rewriting.
I just wanted to give them to her. Maybe a hug. I had barely seen her since I returned.
I started across the yard toward her.
I didn’t make it three steps before I saw the thing that had been keeping her from me.
Kai was at her side and stayed there, a fixed point she moved around, and that moved with her, his hand at the small of her back—a gesture I’d once used to steer her gently through rooms, except where mine had been habit, his was possessive.
When Christian pulled her into a hug, Kai didn’t tense, exactly, but his attention sharpened, tracked it, and eased only when Kai dragged her back and tucked her against him.
A man I didn’t know offered her a drink, and Kai materialized at her elbow with one already in his hand before the stranger finished the sentence.
He never raised his voice, never made a scene, but there was a current coming off him, a low standing charge that said mine to the entire yard without him having to say a word, and the yard, somehow, had agreed.
People angled their bodies away from Amelie.
They were the ‘it couple.’ It was the most settled fact at the party.
I was still standing there with my arms full of gifts when Lucy, Matt, and Ruby closed in on me from either side and turned me, gently but unmistakably, away from her.
“Hey, man,” Matt said, low, an arm around my shoulders. “We need to talk to you.”
“Later. I’m just about to give Amelie her birthday presents. I want to see her open them.”
Matt and Ruby traded a look over my head, the kind of look that meant you do it; no, you do it.
“Listen, babes,” Ruby started, sliding her hand into the crook of my arm.
“Probably not a great idea to do that right now. Especially in front of all these people.” She said it carefully, watching my face the way you watched someone you were about to hurt.
“They might get the wrong idea if you give her all these gifts in front of her husband.”
“I am her husband.” My voice was low to keep it from shaking.
Matt winced. He glanced at Ruby, then at Lucy, and a decision passed between the three of them. “Right, but maybe don’t lead with that today. Not with this crowd.”
Lucy stepped in, soothing. “Stef. Love. These people know Amelie’s already married to Kai. They think you’re just the ex.”
The yard tilted very slightly. “Just the ex,” I repeated.
“The amicable ex,” Ruby offered smoothly like that helped.
“You already agreed to it, and it’s important that we stick to the story. Everyone thinks you two split a while back,” Lucy reminded me, even though I hated the lie she had concocted.
Agreeing to a story in a conference room was one thing. Standing in my own backyard while it walked around wearing my life was another.
“They think you and Amelie had an amicable divorce and have been co-parenting under one roof since you have joint custody of the kids. You’re on good terms. Very modern, very civil.
Nobody’s looking sideways at it because the story’s clean.
How would it look if her ex-husband now gave her a bunch of expensive gifts in front of her current husband? It’s unseemly.”
“Did Kai ask you to keep me away from Amelie?” I couldn’t help asking. My voice had gone strange in my own ears.
“Kai didn’t say anything,” Ruby said gently, watching me.
“But people have read the article about their happily married life. And Lucy has crafted a tasteful explanation for why you and Amelie still live in the same house. The story is heartwarming. That’s why nobody is whispering about your unconventional living arrangement. ”
Lucy touched my shoulder in a consoling manner.
“The story’s believable, and it works for both you and Kai.
You’re both public figures and have to maintain your images.
If people found out that the president of the magazine is a third in someone else’s marriage—” She let it hang, and then she finished it anyway, because Lucy always finished things.
“You’d look like a pervert. And everything you built would be affected. The magazine. Your new life.”
“Just maintain some distance for today,” Matt added cautiously. “The optics won’t be great if you start playing the husband in front of everyone.”
That fucking word again. Ruby said Kai had nothing to do with it, but that word optics. Kai used it, and my friends have repeated it ever since. A word that had walked me, one reasonable step at a time, all the way out of my own life.
I looked out at the party under the string lights and then at the presents still tucked under my arm, undelivered.
My wife was laughing across the yard. Kai bent his head to say something only she could hear, and she tipped her face up to catch it, and whatever it was made her go soft, and his hand found the small of her back, and the kids ran a loud circle around the two of them and folded back in, and the whole bright sealed picture of it sat perfectly, complete, needing nothing else.
I knew that picture. I’d been inside it once. I’d stood in the warm middle of it and spent the entire time looking out the window at something I thought was better.
Now I was the one outside, watching a life that used to be mine carry on without me, and not one person, not the kids I looked after, not the woman I’d loved since I was barely a man, not a single soul, looked back at me.
They didn’t even know I was there. I was a ghost to them. So, I did what ghosts did best. I drifted.
I set the boxes down on the gift table and roamed aimlessly through the party.
Guests kept coming up to me to network or to congratulate me on the new job.
I had a lot of fans now, Lucy made sure of it.
People in this town had been following my rising fame and were curious about me, to say the least. Women showered me with attention; men wanted to know how I’d become so successful at such a young age.
The compliments rang hollow.
I saw your new billboard across from Darster Mall. Looking good.
I read the new article. Loved the pictures.
What’s the deal with you and Ruby? She is smokin’.
The superficial admiration was tiring, and the people who actually mattered—my wife, my brothers, my sister—not one of them noticed me the whole time. Suddenly exhausted, I moved along the dark edges of the party to stay out of the limelight. That was how I ended up close enough to hear them.
Kai was speaking with Caden in a low voice.
The one person at that whole party—besides Amelie and the kids—that Kai had interacted with.
They were standing apart from everyone else, near the row of tall hedges.
They didn’t see me on the other side. I only saw parts of them, though I heard them perfectly.
Caden was speaking in that flat, dry tone of his, the voice of a man who’d never once had to raise it because it had never crossed his mind that he wouldn’t be heard.
“Glad to see you finally cleaned up your act, Cavendish,” Caden was saying. He wasn’t looking at Kai. He was watching the party, watching Rose. “Watching you watch her… it was getting old.”
Kai didn’t answer right away. When he did, it was mild, almost bored. “It took as long as it took.”
“Years of patience.” Caden tipped his glass a half inch toward Amelie. “Hope it paid off.”
“It did.” His response was immediate.
Years.
Caden said years. But Kai and Amelie met over the winter when she took a job with a cruise line.
In fact, Caden owned the ship and offered her the position.
She was the nurse on the boat when Kai had hurt himself.
Months later, he happened to move to Darster and did his follow-up appointment at Amelie’s hospital.
That was the story as I understood it. They knew each other for months. Not years, like Caden insinuated.
How could you watch a woman for years when you only met months ago?
Unless the boat had never been the beginning.
Standing there in the dark, I finally understood it all.
That story he told us, about being in love with some mysterious woman from years ago, I never once looked into it.
He practically admitted to stalking a woman and learning everything about her from a distance, yet not once had I called it that.
I was too enamored by Kai and his lavish life.
I had never looked into him. Not once. The man had walked into my life with an offer in his hand that I’d wanted so badly I’d have signed anything for it.
I’d been so dazzled, so frantic to say yes before he thought better of it, that I’d never once turned the offer over to read what was written on the back.
I never read the fine print.
I knew the things he wanted us to know about him. But I didn’t know where he came from. I didn’t know who his people were, or where any of it had started, or a single thing he’d done before he’d done all this to me.
I’d thrown the door wide open for a stranger and handed him my wife and family, and I had never done the one thing any sane man does first.
I hadn’t asked who he was.
I couldn’t sleep.
I told myself it was diligence. I told myself a lot of things.
That any reasonable man would want to know.
That I was doing it for my family. That it had nothing to do with the sick green thing that turned over in me every time I saw his hand at the small of her back and heard Caden’s flat voice saying years.
I found the man through someone I had met in Dubai, discreet, expensive, no questions, exactly the sort of private investigator I needed.
I gave him Kai’s name and one instruction.
Everything. The money, the history, the parents, the whole shape of the man, all the way back to wherever it started.
Whatever was there. I needed to know who I’d let into my home because the man was notoriously private.
There was almost nothing about him available through conventional means.
It took less than two days and an obscene amount of money. He’d used every arsenal at his disposal to get me the answers.
When the file arrived, it was thicker than I’d braced for, and I made myself wait until I was at work. Some instinct I didn’t examine told me not to open it under his roof. I shut my office door for absolute privacy and opened the document with trembling hands.
The file started where I’d told him to start. At the beginning. His parents.
I read the first page.
Then I read it again, slower, because the words hadn’t gone in the first time and left me staring at the paper like a man who’d forgotten how to read.
I set the file down on the table, carefully and gently, and I sat there. I did not move for a long, long time.
Everything I thought I knew about him was the top inch of something with no bottom.
And I’d already let him all the way in.