Chapter 19
Miley
The cafe was small and warm, smelling like roasted beans and fresh bread.
I arrived five minutes early and Dominic was already there, seated in a corner booth in his wheelchair, wearing a navy sweater that made him look less like a hospitalized man and more like someone’s handsome older brother at a family brunch.
He had Christopher’s jawline but a softer version of it, like the same sculptor had made both faces but used a gentler hand the second time. His eyes were the same blue.
“You came.” He smiled when he saw me.
“I almost didn’t,” I said. His text message had been brief, he had something urgent to say in person, he’d told me.
“I know. Thank you.”
I knew I shouldn’t be here, especially without Christopher’s knowledge. It felt like a betrayal, in a way. But here I was.
He’d already ordered coffee for both of us. Mine was a latte. I sat across from him, wrapped my hands around the cup, and waited because Dominic didn’t seem like the kind of man who needed prompting.
He coughed lightly, buying himself a moment.
“I didn’t ask you here to gossip about my brother or to undermine his marriage,” he said, his voice heavy. “I asked because I’m running out of time to fix things, and Christopher won’t let me near him long enough to try.”
“Running out of time?” I frowned.
His smile faded, like a tide pulling back to reveal the exhaustion underneath.
“The car accident isn’t what put me here,” he continued. “The accident injured my legs. But the thing that’s actually killing me was already there before the crash.” He paused and took a sip of coffee.
“Cancer. Diagnosed eight months before the accident. I’d been managing treatment privately.
Nobody knew. Then the crash happened and everything came out at once, and the prognosis is…
” He trailed off, then came back. “Uncertain. Some days are better. But I’m not improving the way Eleanor thinks I am, and the window for saying what I need to say is getting smaller. ”
My coffee went cold in my hands. I sat there, holding a cup I couldn’t drink.
Looking at a man who was telling me he was dying.
With the same steady composure his brother used to discuss contracts and board meetings.
The same genetic ability to deliver devastating information while looking like they were ordering lunch.
“Does Christopher know?” The question felt heavy on my tongue.
“He knows about the accident. But he doesn’t know the whole truth.” Dominic turned his cup slowly on the table. “Eleanor suspects. She’s too sharp not to. But I haven’t confirmed it.”
My phone buzzed in my bag. I pulled it out reflexively and saw Christopher’s name on the screen. My thumb hovered. I could already imagine how it would go.
Where are you? Then the follow-up. Who are you with? Then the silence that would tell me he already knew.
I declined the call, tucked the phone back in my bag, and told myself I’d deal with the consequences later. Dominic watched me do this and said nothing, but his expression told me he understood exactly whose call I’d just ignored and why.
“Christopher thinks I took everything from him,” Dominic said. “He thinks I stole every person and every opportunity he ever cared about. And he’s not wrong. I did. Most of it. It was selfish of me.” He looked at his coffee. “But the thing with Seraphina wasn’t what he believes.”
Seraphina. Was that the name Esmeralda had hinted at in the elevator?
The one woman Christopher had loved like a fool.
Hearing the name from Dominic’s mouth made a small and hot feeling flare in my chest that I was not proud of.
Jealousy. Over a woman I'd never met, and a chapter of Christopher's life that had ended years before I knew him.
“We were drunk,” Dominic said. “One night. Not an affair.” He set his cup down. “By the time I understood what had happened, Seraphina was gone and Christopher’s door was already closed. I’m not excusing it. I’m just saying it was a failure on my end. Not intentional.”
I thought about Christopher’s words in the car. Everyone who gets close to Dominic ends up choosing Dominic. He’d said it like a law of physics. Gravity. Inevitable. And now his brother was sitting across from me saying it was one night, one mistake, and the guilt had followed him every day since.
“I was cruel to him growing up,” Dominic continued.
His voice was quieter now. “I let our father’s favoritism go unchallenged.
I enjoyed privileges Christopher was denied and I never once spoke up.
Birthday parties he wasn’t invited to, I attended.
Family dinners he was excluded from, I sat at the table.
I watched my mother treat him like an intruder in his own home and I said nothing because saying something would have cost me my comfort.
” He looked at me. “I was a coward. Christopher deserved better from me. He deserved a brother, and instead he got a bystander.”
The cafe was quiet around us. The espresso machine hissed. A woman at a nearby table turned a page of her book. The world kept moving while a man at my table told me he’d failed the one person who needed him most and didn’t know how to fix it before his time ran out.
The brother who had everything was losing it all. The brother who had nothing was gaining what he never expected. And I was sitting between them, a contract wife with a cup of cold coffee, trying to figure out which direction held more heartbreak.
“I’m not asking for forgiveness,” Dominic said. “I haven’t earned it. I’m asking you to help me find a way to say this to Christopher. Before I can’t say anything at all.”
“You’re the only person who’s come to see me voluntarily since…” He hesitated. “Since Seraphina.”
There it was again. That name lingering between us, heavy with weight and history. The woman Christopher loved. The woman Dominic betrayed him with.
The jealousy returned, unwanted and irrational. Seraphina. She existed only as a wound in Christopher’s history and a name in Dominic’s confession. I was jealous of a ghost.
I sat with all of it—the gravity of what he was asking, the impossibility of bridging a gap that had been growing for years between two brothers who shared blood and pain, a grandmother who loved them both, and a history so tangled with betrayal and silence that I wasn’t sure anyone could untangle it.
Let alone me. Let alone a contract wife with thirty-something days left on a piece of paper.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “I can’t promise anything.”
Dominic nodded, like he’d expected that.
Before I stood to leave, he said one more thing. “Christopher has changed a lot since the marriage. Eleanor says so. I can see it, too, the few times I’ve seen him.” He looked at me with an expression that was gentle and entirely sincere. “Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop.”
My phone rang again as I was gathering my things. Christopher’s name on the screen.
I let it ring.
Outside, the sky had changed. The afternoon sun was gone, replaced by the low gray ceiling that Miami gets before a storm. The humidity pressed down, dense and warm, and as I walked toward the curb to find a cab, the first raindrop hit my arm.
Then another. Then three at once.
“Mrs. Vale?”
A driver in a black car was idling at the curb. One of Dominic’s men. He stepped out and opened the back door.
“Mr. Dominic asked me to make sure you got home safely.”
I hesitated. The rain was picking up. Fat drops hitting the sidewalk, the smell of wet pavement rising. I didn’t have my car. I hadn’t brought an umbrella. And the alternative was standing on a street corner in a downpour waiting for a cab that might take twenty minutes.
“Thank you,” I said, and got in.
The drive was twenty minutes through rain that got heavier with every block. I sat in the back and watched the city drift past the wet windows and thought about Dominic’s face when he talked about Christopher. The regret in it.
It felt real.
I thought about Seraphina. Even though I didn’t want to, but she was there now.
A name with a shape, a woman Christopher had desired and Dominic had betrayed him with.
One night, Dominic said. Not an affair. One drunk, reckless, catastrophic night that demolished the only relationship Christopher had ever let himself build.
I wonder what was so special about her?
The rain hammered against the car roof. The storm was getting worse.
By the time we reached Christopher’s house, it was a relentless storm.
Wind bending the palm trees sideways. Water running in streams along the curb.
Lightning in the distance, brief and white, illuminating the sky for half a second before the dark swallowed it back.
The driver pulled through the gate and I ran to the front door with my jacket over my head, making it inside looking like I’d been thrown into a pool.
I was standing in the foyer, dripping, pushing wet hair off my face, when I realized the living room light was on.
Christopher was in the armchair. Sitting. Waiting. For how long, I didn’t know. But the bourbon bottle on the side table was empty.
His eyes found mine across the room. I was soaked, my jacket plastered to my shoulders, my hair dripping onto the marble, water pooling around my shoes.
“Christopher…” His name slipped out in a whisper.
“Where did you go?” His voice was low.