Chapter 36
Chapter
Thirty-Six
KAI
Past
I wasn’t supposed to be here.
There was a man and a woman in a cold room a few miles west, who had my face and my last name, waiting for their only son to come and sign the papers that would put them in the ground.
Instead, their only son was standing in a public garden, drunk, watching another man’s wife build a snowman with his brothers and sister.
I had a dead father and mother and too many missed calls from people who wanted to know about the funeral arrangements. Yet, I was here with her.
That was the kind of son I was—a terrible one.
The garden was ringed by a black iron gate, strung end to end with bulbs that turned the falling snow to gold beneath them.
There were at least a hundred people in winter coats, strolling lazily to various street vendors for hot chocolate, bratwurst, and roasted nuts.
Everything you’d find at a traditional Christmas market.
I stood outside the iron gate, in the part of the dark the light couldn’t reach, and I drank, and I watched.
The bottle had stopped meaning anything an hour ago.
Control was the one virtue I had ever claimed.
I was the calmest man in any room. I did not snap.
I did not slip. And here I was, slumped against a dirty fence with snow in my collar, because she was on the other side, and I had never once in my life managed to be on the same side of the fence as her.
I found her without trying, like always.
My princess.
She did not know my name, and I had gone ahead and given her a pet name in private.
She didn’t even know I was alive. A lifetime ago, I’d stood at the back of a hall and watched a girl in head-to-toe blue ignore my entire speech to text someone she loved, and that had been the end of me, and in all the years between, and the encounters she never remembered, she had not once looked up and seen the man in the dark looking back.
Amelie was on her knees in the snow in a long, tan coat, her scarf coming undone, and her dark hair pulled back with ribbons. Even kneeling, even bundled, even on what I knew for a fact to be the worst week of her life, she was the warmest thing in that whole cold garden.
There were three children with her. They had never touched snow before and had come from California for Amelie’s graduation and to witness an East Coast winter.
Instead, they had walked into their parents’ graves.
And Amelie was trying with everything in her to distract them from their bleak reality.
The Christmas night market had roped off a snow pit where kids could build snowmen, and Amelie had claimed the best corner.
“Okay. Watch me. Watch.” She pressed a fistful of snow between her mittens and showed them.
“You start it small. Then you set it down, and you roll, and it just—see? It grabs everything.”
“Mine’s not round,” said one of the twins, also kneeling on the ground and trying to copy Amelie.
“It doesn’t have to be round, August. We’re making a lumpy one. Lumpy is better.”
“Mine’s not getting lumpy, Amelie,” Bella whined, holding up a fistful of shapeless snow.
I chuckled despite myself. Somehow, the kids had charmed me with their priorities. Their parents just passed away, and their biggest concern was the shape of their snow.
If only adults were as easy to distract.
The other boy—Jamie—had given up building and was attempting to eat a fistful of snow. Amelie caught his wrist without so much as looking. The little boy laughed, and the snow came down, and it looked like something out of a life I would have set half the world on fire to live inside.
Her husband, as of a few hours ago, stood apart from it.
He held a cup in his hand that he hadn’t touched, and his face had the fixed pleasantness of a man performing happiness he didn’t feel. Someone drifted over to him—one of Amelie’s friends from college—Sean something. I caught the tail end of their conversation.
“—can’t believe you guys did the courthouse thing today.”
“She’s the only woman I’d ever marry. I didn’t see the point in delaying it.” Stefan’s voice was flat. He watched Amelie and his siblings in the snow.
“I get it. It’s just, you guys are so young.”
“Yeah. But after what happened… We just wanted to be a family.”
Sean seemed somber. “Sorry again about your parents. I can’t imagine what you guys are going through. What are your plans now? Amelie told me about your new gig.”
A short, ugly little laugh. “The photography internship? Yeah. That’s not happening.” Stefan turned the cup in his hands. “My cousin’s hooking me up with an office manager position back home.”
“But she said you were excited about the internship.”
“The internship isn’t practical with three kids. The office manager position offers health insurance for five,” he said, the way another man would read out a sentence handed down from a bench. “Six months ago, I had a portfolio and a ticket out of that town. Now I’ve got a parking spot.”
“Sorry, man.” Sean nodded at Amelie. “At least you’ve got her.”
Stefan looked out at Amelie, at the tan coat down in the snow, and for one second, something crossed his face that might have been the truth. “Yeah, I’ve got her,” he said. Then it was gone, and he drank.
Over the years, I had thought of a great many ways to end this man.
I had been creative with my imagination.
But I had never wanted to end him as badly as in that moment.
Not for touching her, though God knew that was its own private hell, but for standing inside the one life I had envied and finding it small.
I had vowed to find a way to end their relationship once she graduated from college.
I’d lined up Stefan’s dream job, though he could never trace it back to me.
The job should have carried him outside the country and away from her, which had been the only and entire point of it.
Instead, he’d deferred the opportunity until she graduated from college.
It turned out that he’d planned on taking her with him.
I started scrambling to prevent that from happening, but then his parents died—our parents died—and he dragged Amelie to the courthouse.
The only reason I couldn’t stop it was because I’d been distracted by my own grief.
Across the garden, Stefan drained his cup.
His life would now be forever entwined with Amelie. She was about to assume guardianship of his siblings while he stood in the snow, mourning his ‘ticket out of that town.’
I would have given my left arm to stand where that man was standing, and he had the gall to look unhappy. I’d have laid it on the table without a flicker and called it the best deal I ever made.
He didn’t know what he had. That was the part I couldn’t forgive. He had her loyalty, the kind she handed over without ever weighing it, and he stood in the full pour of it, and he had the audacity to complain.
I rummaged through my pockets for the small bag of white powder. It wasn’t in either pocket. Frustrated, I peeled off the jacket and searched the lining until I found the mini clear packet.
I used whenever I saw her with him.
Then I used to stop myself from hunting him down.
It was a vicious cycle.
I threw the jacket on the ground and used my key to snort the white powder, which wouldn’t bring me bliss but would let me tolerate the scene unfolding before me. The euphoria rushed through my bloodstream, numbing my insides. It was just what I had needed.
“You’re going to freeze to death,” a voice said at my shoulder, dry as paper, “and I am going to be the one made to explain to a room full of lawyers why you were here in the first place.”
I didn’t startle. There was perhaps one man alive who could have come up on me unheard, and that was because Caden Maxwell moved like me. He took up a place at the railing, a deliberate arm’s length off, facing the garden and not me.
“Maxwell.”
“Your parents are in a drawer, Cavendish,” he said.
A pause, perfectly weighted. “There’s no date set for the funeral, and there are people waiting on your signal to organize the service.
They called me to see if I could track you down.
” His eyes went over the bottle, over the packet of cocaine, over the rest of me, and took it all in without batting an eye.
“I’m only here to see if you’ve lost your mind. ”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s what your assistant told me you said. Yesterday. And the day before.” He did not raise his voice; he never did. “Put the bottle down. Throw away the drugs. Then bury your parents.”
I should have. But I was incapable of seeing reason. Not because I’d just lost my parents, though that grief didn’t help. But because she fucking married him.
As I’d said, I was a terrible son. Instead of organizing my parents’ funeral, I was mourning what could’ve been with Amelie.
At the back of my mind, I’d always assumed they weren’t permanent, and if I could make her see me just once, I could change her mind.
All those plans I’d made to separate them after college were now obsolete.
Coming from a broken family, Amelie would go to any lengths to make sure her marriage lasted forever.
It was the one thing my money couldn’t buy—her heart.
Across the garden, the girl in the tan coat was trying to keep it all together, and I felt myself do the one thing I had never let myself do—I looked at her in front of another living soul. Just looked, the way I’d been all night, uncaring if he noticed.
It took Maxwell less than a second to spot her.
He missed nothing, it was the one thing he and I had ever truly shared.
I felt his attention running the line of my stare.
Felt the small, exact recalculation move through the man beside me.
And when he spoke again, there was something in his voice I had not heard before—disbelief.
“Amelie?”