Chapter 38
Chapter
Thirty-Eight
AMELIE
My palm was on fire.
My hand held the shape of Stefan’s face, and the terrible part was that it felt like the first honest thing I’d said to him since he returned.
It looks like snow. Did Mommy send this for me—
Bella saw snow exactly once, right after we buried her parents, and I told her that her mother had sent it down because she missed her.
I invented it on the worst night of her little life so she’d have one soft thing to hold on to.
And today, my own white lie took her by the hand and led her straight to a bag of cocaine in the grass.
“Am. I-I—” he stuttered.
“You what?” I snapped.
“Oh, God. I didn’t mean to… I’d never hurt Bella. You know I would never.”
“You would never,” I said. The words tasted like acid. “Yet you did.”
Of course, Stefan hadn’t done it on purpose. His bad decisions merely followed him around and landed on everyone in his vicinity.
It would have been easier if he had done it on purpose. But this, the carelessness from a man who supposedly loved us, there was no fighting that. There was only putting distance between it and the kids.
“I fucked up.” His voice cracked in the middle of it. “Monumentally. There’s no version of this where I get to explain but let me. Please. I’d just found out Kai’s parents killed mine. I wasn’t myself.”
I’d heard Stefan make the accusation but was sidetracked by Kai’s injuries. The emotional weight from this afternoon felt heavy on my shoulders. I loved Stefan’s parents like they were my own, but this sounded insane.
“How is that possible?” I asked, barely steadying my voice.
“His parents were in the other car when my parents died. Kai claims it was a coincidence, but I know he’s lying.”
He was still high. He didn’t know I could see it, pupils blown wide, his jaw grinding on nothing, the fine tremor in his fingers he kept flexing away. And he believed all the insane things he was spouting.
“You said his parents were driving the other car when the crash happened,” I said carefully. “I remember that day, along with the terrible weather. The roads had iced over. Of course, it was an accident.”
“If that’s true, why did he hide it from us?”
“I’m sure he had his reasons.”
Whatever questions I had about that crash, I’d ask Kai about them myself.
Because if I had to guess who a reliable narrator was between the two, my money would be on the guy who saved Bella, not the man who nearly caused her ruin.
If Kai said that it was an accident, then I trusted him.
But I didn’t trust Stefan. I would never again make the mistake of trusting him.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he continued. “And it was making me fucking crazy. That’s why I used, just so I could confront him. I know—I know how that sounds. I don’t want to make excuses. I’ll never touch that stuff again. I’ll change, Am. Things will be different from now on.”
Things will be different from now on.
He’d made that promise before, along with many others he never kept.
I’ll be there Saturday.
I’ll make it up to you.
It won’t happen again.
I used to be optimistic that it’d be different the next time. The moment I saw him with Ruby in Beirut, I knew it’d never be different. Stefan wasn’t the same man I once loved, and I needed to stop pretending otherwise.
Somewhere along the way, I had stopped grieving the broken promises and started grieving the boy who used to keep them.
The boy who took the bus for months just so I could have a ring.
I would have forgiven that boy for anything.
But that boy wasn’t the one standing in front of me.
This man hadn’t even noticed that I’d stopped wearing his ring weeks ago.
I stood still.
He kept glancing at my hands, waiting for them to move. I talked with my hands. I paced when I fought. He was watching for the wife he knew, and I understood, distantly, that my stillness was frightening him.
I was sorry for that. Genuinely, quietly sorry.
Just not sorry enough to perform a fight we had already lost. I couldn’t give him the reaction he wanted because arguments were for relationships that were still alive.
That still had a chance. Looking at him now, I didn’t recognize the boy I had once loved.
I had no idea when he had become this, a person who’d bring drugs around his little sister.
He couldn’t be near the kids, at least not without supervision. The decision arrived quietly but with absolution. It wasn’t punishment. It was protection. It turned out a heart could break for someone and still stand guard against him. Mine was doing both.
“Say something. Please,” he pleaded.
We were at the glass door, him on the outside, me in the kitchen, the door track between us like a border on a map. He didn’t cross it. Some part of him already understood he was on the outs now.
“He’s dangerous.” Stefan dropped his voice like the house was listening, desperate to turn me against Kai. “I had a PI investigate him. The girl he told us about at that dinner, the one that got away. It was you. He’s been stalking you for years, Am. Since college.”
He delivered it like a detonation and stood back to watch the building come down. He was too late.
“I know,” I said quietly.
“You know?” His voice was flat.
“Kai told me.”
I had no idea what compelled me to lie. For some reason, it felt like a betrayal if I kept letting Stefan think the worst of Kai. Or perhaps it was because I had spent my whole life waiting to be somebody’s first choice, and Kai had chosen me before I ever knew his name.
Since Rose let slip that Kai had been in love with me for years and had sponsored my college scholarship after my family went bankrupt, I had been trying to process my emotions.
The information should have sent me running.
But that wasn’t what was going through my mind.
There was something seriously messed up with my brain because all I felt was relief.
I could finally breathe a sigh of relief about not having to compete with the one that got away anymore.
Except relief was too small a word, and I had known it for weeks.
Somewhere between Beirut and this kitchen, I had fallen in love with Kai Cavendish.
Not the bartered, grateful affection I had braced myself to settle for.
The real thing. I wasn’t the girl who’d been spared from competing with the woman he loved.
I was the woman he loved. And I loved him back.
Perhaps Stefan realized how I felt even before I did.
“Then why are you—” He shook his head like the facts were furniture he kept walking into. “He’s your stalker, Am. You’re not safe with him.”
“Funny, because the only person I don’t feel safe around is you.”
Minutes ago, I’d knelt in front of a seven-year-old and checked her tongue for remnants of cocaine that Stefan had brought into this house. Safe had left this house the moment he entered it. If it wasn’t for Kai, who knew what could have happened today? The only person I felt safe around was Kai.
“Am, listen to yourself. He’s got you so turned around that you can’t tell what’s real anymore. What he’s doing—”
“Don’t.” It came out quiet. “Don’t tell me what I have with him isn’t real. Not when it was you who sold me to him.”
Stefan froze, as if I had hit the bull’s-eye. We’d never phrased it that way, but that was the blunt reality. He convinced me to marry Kai, claiming it was best for us when it was really for himself.
He hung his head. “You’re right. I was blind with greed, and I persuaded you to marry a fucked-up person.
” He stepped into the doorway, palms open.
“I’m so sorry, Am. I’ll fix it. I’ll give everything back to him.
All of it. The magazine, the accounts, this house.
I’ll sign everything back to him tomorrow, and then you’ll know that I don’t give a shit about any of this if it means putting you in harm’s way. ”
The saddest part was that he meant it. It was comical.
Stefan wanted a better life, so he convinced me to marry Kai.
Now that he no longer wanted to pay the price of this arrangement, he wanted me to leave Kai.
Just like that. And I was supposed to indulge his every whim.
Sleep with a stranger when he wanted to be rich and then leave the man—the man I was in love with—because Stefan decided he was ready to be in a loving, committed marriage again.
“But you’ve already put me in harm’s way.
You left me with him, a person you knew nothing about, while you lived out your best life.
” Though, let’s be honest, the only danger Kai had ever posed me was how much I’d stopped wanting to be rescued from him.
“Not only me, but you also put the kids in harm’s way.
I hope you find your way back, Stefan. I want that for you, even now.
But until you do, you can’t be around them anymore.
I won’t budge on that, and you shouldn’t want me to. ”
“Please, Am. I’m sorry. I lost my mind. Let’s just leave, okay? You and me and the kids. I’ll get my old job back, and I won’t do drugs again. I’ll work three jobs if that’s what it takes. You wanted us to have a normal life. Leave him, and we can still have that.”
There it was. The offer, arriving like a rescue boat after I’d already drowned. The entitlement that he could barter me away or keep me when he pleased was the reason I didn’t feel safe with Stefan. I’d wake up every day not knowing what the day held, and not in a good way.
“I’m never going to leave him.” It came out gently because it wasn’t a weapon. It was just the truth. Loving Kai was the one thing in this whole arrangement nobody had negotiated for. It was mine. I had given it freely, and I wasn’t taking it back.
“Am—”