7. Amanda
— ? —
Amanda
The gates are open.
That’s the first thing I notice. Julian always kept them closed - security protocols, he called it, though I knew it was really about control. About making people wait. About reminding them who held the power.
But today, the gates stand wide open, like the house has been expecting me.
“Ready?” Roman asks.
“No.”
He puts his hand over mine on the seat. Squeezes once.
“We can still turn around.”
“No.” I open the truck door. “We can’t.”
The gravel driveway crunches under my feet.
The same gravel that cut into my feet two years ago, when I stumbled out of this house in a ruined gown and heels I couldn’t run in. The same driveway where I walked past two hundred people who watched my life end.
It’s quieter now. No valets. No photographers. Just the gray sky and the white stone mansion and the echo of everything I lost.
Roman walks beside me. Close enough that I can feel him there, far enough that it doesn’t look like protection.
It is protection. We both know it.
The front door opens before I can knock.
Julian stands in the doorway.
He looks exactly the same. Polished. Perfect. Not a hair out of place. He’s wearing a charcoal sweater that probably costs more than most people’s rent, and his eyes - those cold, empty eyes - slide over me like I’m a piece of furniture he forgot to throw away.
“Amanda.” He says my name like it bores him. “I wondered when you’d show up.”
“Miss me?”
“Hardly.” He glances at Roman, and something flickers across his face. Contempt. Old wounds. “I see you brought my brother. How predictable.”
“Can we come in?” I ask. “Or do you want the neighbors to hear this?”
Julian steps aside. An invitation that feels more like a trap.
I walk into the house I used to call home.
***
Nothing has changed.
The marble floors. The crystal chandeliers. The white orchids in their crystal vases - Julian’s signature, his obsession, his way of making everything around him cold and beautiful and controlled.
I hate that it still takes my breath away.
I hate that some part of me still remembers being happy here, in the early days, before I understood what happiness meant to a man like Julian Vance.
“Drink?” He moves toward the bar without waiting for an answer. “I assume you didn’t come all this way for small talk.”
“Where’s Vivienne?”
Julian laughs. It’s a soft, cruel sound.
“Vivienne.” He pours himself a whiskey. Doesn’t offer us one. “That’s what you want to talk about? Your sister? She’s not here, Amanda. She hasn’t been here for months.”
“I know. You kicked her out.”
“I removed a liability.” He takes a sip. “She served her purpose. And then she became... tedious.”
“She had your child.”
“She had a child.” Julian’s eyes meet mine over the rim of his glass. “Whether it’s mine remains to be seen.”
The casual cruelty of it - the ease with which he discards people - makes my stomach turn.
“You’re a monster,” I say.
“I’m a realist.” He sets down his glass.
“Now. Why are you here? To threaten me? To demand an apology? To what - reclaim your position as the wronged wife?” He laughs again.
“That ship has sailed, darling. You’re a convicted killer.
The fact that some technicality got you released doesn’t change what everyone knows. ”
“What everyone knows is a lie.”
“Truth is whatever people believe. And people believe you got behind the wheel of your car, drunk and hysterical, and killed a man. They believe it because I told them to believe it.”
He doesn’t even pretend anymore. In his own house, with no witnesses but Roman and me, he just... admits it.
“There are new witnesses,” I say. “People who saw what really happened that night. People who saw a younger woman behind the wheel of my car-”
“Witnesses can be handled.”
“The photographer’s timestamp shows me leaving in heels I could barely walk in. There’s no way I drove-”
“Evidence can be reinterpreted.”
“And your brother.” I nod toward Roman, who’s standing very still by the door. “He saw the text. Vivienne’s text, before you wiped it. ‘I think I hit someone, what do I do.’ He’ll testify.”
Something shifts in Julian’s face. The first crack in the mask.
“Roman’s word against mine.” But there’s an edge to his voice now. “Who do you think they’ll believe? The successful businessman, or the family disgrace who-”
“Who has fifteen years of documentation on your other crimes?” Roman speaks for the first time.
“The fraud case alone would take years to prosecute, but the beautiful thing about reasonable doubt, little brother, is that it only takes one crack. One reason for a jury to question your credibility. And I have a filing cabinet full of reasons.”
Julian’s composure flickers. “None of that proves anything about that night.”
“No,” Roman agrees. “But it proves you’re a liar. It proves you cover things up. And when Amanda’s appeal went through - when they looked at all the evidence you buried - your history mattered.”
Julian’s eyes narrow. “You’re bluffing.”
“Am I?”
The room goes very still.
“I have recordings,” Roman continues. “Of you discussing bribes with city officials. Of you threatening business rivals. Of you - three years ago - telling your lawyer exactly how to make Amanda look unstable in case you ever needed to get rid of her.” His smile is cold.
“You’ve been planning this for a long time, Julian.
You just didn’t plan on me keeping receipts. ”
Julian’s face goes pale.
“Those recordings are inadmissible-”
“In court, maybe. But I’m not planning to use them in court.
” Roman steps closer. “I’m planning to release them to every journalist, every business partner, every society contact who’s ever shaken your hand.
By the time I’m done, you won’t be able to buy a cup of coffee in this city without someone spitting in it. ”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
The mask finally cracks.
I watch Julian Vance - the man who destroyed my life, who framed me for murder, who watched me be convicted without a flicker of guilt - crumble.
“What do you want?” he asks.
“A confession,” I say. “On record. Signed and witnessed. Everything you did that night - the phone calls, the evidence tampering, the witnesses you bribed. All of it.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then Roman releases everything. And you spend the rest of your life watching everything you built burn to the ground.”
Julian looks at me. Really looks at me, maybe for the first time ever.
“You’ve changed,” he says quietly.
“Prison changes people.”
“No.” He shakes his head slowly. “This is something else. You’re... harder. Colder.” A ghost of a smile crosses his face. “I almost admire it.”
“I don’t want your admiration. I want your signature.”
He stares at me for a long moment.
Then he walks to his desk. Opens a drawer. Pulls out a piece of paper and a pen.
“You’ll never be able to use this legally,” he says as he writes. “My lawyers will-”
“I don’t care about legal.” I watch him sign his name at the bottom. “I care about the truth. And now I have it.”
I take the paper from his hands. Read it through. Every word.
It’s all there. Everything he did. Everything he orchestrated.
Proof.
Finally, proof.
“We’re done here,” I say.
Roman and I turn toward the door.
“Amanda.”
I stop. Don’t turn around.
“For what it’s worth,” Julian says, “you were never supposed to be collateral damage. You were supposed to be temporary. I just... miscalculated how hard you’d be to remove.”
“Temporary.” I let the word settle. Then I turn, just enough to see his face. “That’s the thing about people you treat as temporary, Julian. Eventually, they become permanent problems.”
I walk out of the mansion.
I don’t look back.
***
The truck door slams behind me.
My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking. The adrenaline that carried me through that confrontation is crashing now, leaving me hollowed out and electric and desperate.
Roman starts the engine. Pulls away from the mansion. Neither of us speaks until the gates disappear in the rearview mirror.
“You okay?” he asks finally.
“No.”
“That was-”
“Yeah.”
Silence. The trees blur past the windows. Rain starts to fall again, soft and gray and steady.
“Pull over,” I say.
Roman glances at me. “What?”
“Pull over. Now.”
He does. The truck slides to a stop on the shoulder of the road. The mansion is half a mile behind us. The world is nothing but rain and trees and the pounding of my heart.
“Amanda, what-”
I kiss him.
It’s not gentle.
Nothing about this is gentle. My hands are in his hair, his jacket, pulling him toward me across the center console. His mouth opens against mine, and he tastes like coffee and desperation and two years of waiting.
“Amanda-” He pulls back an inch. His eyes are dark, his breath ragged. “Are you sure? You said-”
“I know what I said.”
“You said not yet. You said you needed to find yourself first-”
“I’ve found enough.” I grip the front of his jacket. Pull him back to me. “I’ve found that I want this. I’ve wanted this since before the cemetery, since every time I looked at you across a room and pretended I didn’t feel-”
He kisses me.
This time, he’s the one who isn’t gentle.
His hand tangles in my short hair - my ugly prison hair that I still haven’t learned to love - and tilts my head back. He kisses me like he’s been waiting his whole life for this moment. Like he’s drowning and I’m air.
I feel everything.
The rain on the roof. The leather seats under my palms. The heat of him, the weight of him, the way his stubble scrapes against my chin when he changes the angle. I feel alive for the first time in two years.
When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing hard.
“Roman-”
“I love you.” The words spill out of him like they’ve been trapped too long. “I’ve loved you since the night before your wedding. I’ve loved you every day since. And I know - I know this is complicated, and messy, and probably the worst timing in the history of-”
“I love you too.”
He stops. Stares at me.
“What?”
“I love you.” I cup his face in my hands.
Feel the scar on his jaw - the one he got fighting for me - under my thumb.
“I don’t know when it started. I don’t know if it was the cemetery, or the visiting room, or the first time you showed up when no one else would.
But I love you, Roman. And I’m done pretending I don’t. ”
He closes his eyes. Presses his forehead to mine.
“We’re going to destroy him,” he says quietly.
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“And then we figure out the rest.”
His hand finds mine. Interlaces our fingers.
“Together?”
I squeeze his hand.
“Together.”