7. Eve
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Eve
Dean catches her before she reaches me.
He gets between us in a single step and pins her arms to her sides while she thrashes and screams, her nails clawing the air inches from my face, close enough that I can see the chipped red polish and the wild in her eyes.
“Let me GO, she RUINED everything, let me GO.”
“You ruined everything,” I say, and my voice comes out steady, which is its own small miracle given my heart is trying to climb out through my throat. “The second you walked into that church in a wedding dress.”
“He was going to leave you anyway!” She writhes against Dean’s grip, all flailing limbs and ruined mascara. “He never loved you. Not once. It was always supposed to be ME.”
“Then why did he propose to her,” Dean says, and his voice has gone cold in a way I’ve never heard from him, flat and final. “Why did he buy a house, plan a wedding, pick out china, build a whole life with her, if it was always supposed to be you?”
Kiara goes still.
Doubt flickers across her face. Just for a second, a hairline crack in all that certainty she wears like a second skin. Then the rage floods back in to fill it, because rage is easier to stand inside than doubt.
“Because he said it would look better. For the family. For the company, for the name, for his mother.” Her smile twists, proud even now, even here. “But he always came back to me. Every time. Every single time.”
The words find a place in me I thought Simon had already burned to the foundation.
Always came back to her. While I was picking china patterns and writing vows I actually meant, he was driving across town to her, and then driving back to me, and I was lighting up like a fool every time he walked in the door smelling faintly of someone else’s perfume that I told myself was the dry cleaner’s.
“I know Hilda set the two of you up,” I say. Saying it out loud makes it smaller, somehow, more like a thing that happened to me and less like a thing I should have caught.
“She introduced us. Told Simon I was everything he needed and you were everything he was supposed to want.” A laugh, brittle. “His mother loves me. She’s already planning the real wedding, the proper one, not that sad little ceremony you threw in that drafty church.”
“The ceremony you crashed in a bridal gown,” Dean says, “to slap a woman in front of a full church. Real elegant. Hilda must be proud.”
“She was in my way.” Kiara says it like it explains everything, like I was a chair in a hallway.
Something snaps inside me. The quiet thing with teeth, the one that woke up when Hilda came to my apartment for a ring, bares them again.
“I was his fiancée,” I say, and I step toward her without deciding to. “I loved him. I rearranged my whole life around him. And the two of you treated me like an obstacle. Like a problem to be managed until the timing was convenient.”
“Love.” She spits the word out. “Love is for fools and women who end up alone. This was about winning. And I won, didn’t I?
I’m the one he chose.” She straightens her wrecked blazer with shaking hands, and the gesture is so much like Hilda’s that my stomach turns.
“So he lost a job. So what. His family has money. We’ll have money. We don’t need this stupid company.”
“His family’s money is his mother’s,” Dean says, quiet and lethal, and lets her go with a small shove that puts her back against the stair rail.
“And she does not share. Simon’s been living on his salary and his mother’s money, and that money has always come with strings.
He just snapped every one of them by getting himself fired and exposed. ”
The color leaves her face all at once, the way it left Simon’s an hour ago. Like mother, like son, like mistress.
“What?”
“The family money only ever goes to a Valentine who keeps the name shining. His grandfather made sure of that.” His almost-smile has no warmth anywhere in it.
“And Simon just dragged that name through every paper in the state. He lost his inheritance, his job, and his name in this town in a single afternoon. There’s nothing left to win, Kiara.
You climbed onto a sinking ship and pulled up the ladder behind you. ”
“No. No, Hilda will fix it, she fixes everything, she’ll.”
“Hilda will cut him loose to protect the family name, the way she’s protected it her whole life.
” He says it with the certainty of a man who has watched his mother do exactly that since he was old enough to understand what he was watching.
“She loves her image more than she’s ever loved either of her sons.
Simon’s about to find that out the hard way. And so, I think, are you.”
Kiara’s composure comes apart completely. All that polished ambition dissolves into something raw and cornered.
“This is your fault,” she says to me, and her voice cracks down the middle. “This is all YOUR.”
“Wait.” My hand comes up before I understand why.
Something she said is snagging in my brain, a splinter I can’t quite get my fingers around.
“You said it was always going to be you. That you were so sure, the whole time. But you’ve only been together eight months.
He could have ended it any day he wanted. Why were you so certain you’d win?”
The pieces start sliding toward each other.
“You just called love a fool’s game. You said winning. Like you had a card the rest of us didn’t.” Another step. She backs into the rail, nowhere left to go. “What aren’t you telling me?”
For a long moment, nothing. Just the building’s ventilation humming somewhere above us and her ragged breathing and the distant chime of the elevator that took Simon away. Then her mouth twists into something that’s finally, completely given up on pretending.
“You want to know why I couldn’t wait?” she says. “Why I couldn’t be a good little secret for one more month while he worked up the nerve?”
“Tell me.”
“Because I’m pregnant. Four months along.” She laughs, and it comes out unhinged, scraping. “I’m pregnant with his baby. So you can have the job and the apartment and the pity. I have the one thing you couldn’t give him.”
The floor tilts under me.
“Pregnant,” I echo, barely a sound.
“Yes. And I was not about to let the father of my child marry someone who wasn’t me.” Her eyes are all the way wild now, the calculation gone out of them. “We’re a family. He has a responsibility. He needs to take care of his son.”
Four months. The number rattles around my head, trying to connect to something just out of reach.
“Didn’t you take a trip four months ago?” The question falls out before I’ve finished thinking it. “Simon mentioned it. Said you were visiting family in Miami. He complained about covering your desk for two weeks.”
Kiara stops dead. “Yes. What does that have to do with.”
She doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to.
The suspicion is already there, ugly and complete.
If she was in Miami four months ago, and she’s four months along now, then the math doesn’t point where she’s been pointing it.
Then maybe she came home from that trip with a problem, and went looking for a solution, and found one wearing a four-carat ring and a guilty conscience.
I can’t prove it. She’ll lie if I press her. But I watch the lie arrive on her face, watch her reach for it, and I know.
“So you crashed my wedding,” I say slowly, “because you were out of time and out of options, and a baby was the only leverage you had left.”
“I LOVE him!”
The desperation almost sells it. Almost.
“You don’t love anyone, Kiara. You don’t even love yourself. You just can’t stand the math anymore.”
“You BITCH.”
“Leave.” My voice goes flat, every drop of feeling draining out of it until there’s nothing left but the floor. “Walk out of here before I call security and tell them about the woman who took a swing at me in front of a glass wall full of witnesses on the worst day of her boyfriend’s life.”
For a long beat she doesn’t move. Her chest heaves. Her fists open and close at her sides. I watch her run the math one more time, the math she clearly cannot stop running, weighing one more swing against an arrest she can’t afford.
Self-preservation wins. It always does, with people like her. She turns, heels striking the concrete in furious little cracks, and vanishes into the stairwell. The door bangs shut behind her, and the sound rings down the empty hall and dies.
And then my knees give out.
Dean catches me before I hit the floor, lowering us both down into the alcove, his back against the wall and me half in his lap. The concrete is cold through my dress. His arms are not.
I cry without permission, without dignity, great heaving sobs that wreck the makeup I put on this morning like armor. They soak into his shirt while he holds me and strokes my hair and murmurs things I can’t quite make out over the roaring in my own head.
“She was using all of them,” I manage between sobs. “Simon. Hilda. The baby that might not even be his. Everyone’s just a piece on a board to her.”
“I know.” His voice is so gentle it makes me cry harder. “She’s a predator, Eve. She walked into your life looking for something to take. You were never the problem. You were just the thing standing closest to what she wanted.”
“I thought this was what I wanted.” It comes out broken. “The photos. Watching him lose everything. I thought it would fix something in me.”
“Does it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t.” I pull back enough to look at him, blinking through the blur. “Why doesn’t it feel like enough? He’s losing everything and I just feel hollowed out. Why isn’t it enough?”
He cups my face in both hands. His thumbs catch the tears I didn’t know were still falling.
“Because you’re not actually a vindictive person,” he says.
“You’re a person who got hurt down to the bone, and you swung back, and now you’re finding out that breaking him doesn’t put back any of what he broke in you.
Revenge fills the hole for about an hour.
Then you’re standing in the same hole, just tired. ”
The truth of it lands somewhere deep and stays there. All this plotting and burning and watching Simon’s world come down around his ears, and I still feel scooped out in all the places that count.
“Then what does fill it?” I ask. “If not this.”
He’s quiet a moment. The building hums around us, indifferent.
“Living well. Building something new instead of just tearing down something old.” His thumb moves along my cheekbone. “Finding someone who.”
He stops. His jaw works.
“Who what?”
He swallows whatever it was. Buries it somewhere I can’t reach. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here before someone finds us crying on a stairwell floor and adds it to the gossip.”
The service elevator drops us into an alley behind the building. The afternoon sun is too bright after the dim stairwell, and I squint against it, everything oversaturated and too loud, the world pressing in from every side.
“I’ll drive you home,” he says, already reaching for his keys.
“Dean.” My hand catches his arm before he can move. “What were you going to say. Up there. Finding someone who what.”
He goes still. He looks at me, really looks, and the weight of three years sits down in the space between us, every family dinner where he watched me with his brother and said nothing, every time he caught me and set me back on my feet and let go.
“Finding someone who actually sees you,” he says, and it comes out rough, scraped down to the wood.
“All of you. The mouth on you. The soft parts you hide behind the mouth. The way you laugh when you forget you’re supposed to be performing for someone.
Finding someone who would burn this whole city to the ground before he let anyone make you cry on a stairwell floor again.
” He stops. His throat works. “Finding someone like that. That’s what fills it. ”
My breath stops. The alley, the sun, the whole world narrows down to him and the devastating honesty in his eyes.
“Dean.”
“I know.” His smile is the saddest thing I have ever seen on a human face. “Wrong time. Wrong everything. Wrong brother.” He pulls his arm free, careful, like I’m something he could break if he moved too fast. “Let me take you home.”
The drive is silent. Rain starts halfway there, fat slow drops at first, then a downpour so total he has to crawl, the wipers losing the fight, lightning cracking the sky open every few seconds and turning the windshield to running glass.
He pulls up to my building and puts the car in park and reaches for the door handle.
“Thanks for everything,” I say, and it isn’t enough, it isn’t anywhere close to enough for a man who walked out on his entire family to stand in an alley and tell me the truth. “I’ll see you.”
But I’m looking at him, really looking, and I clock the white-knuckle grip he’s got on the steering wheel, the rain coming down in sheets so dense I can barely see the building’s front door from the curb.
He can’t see ten feet. There is no version of this where he gets home safe, and we both know it, and he’s going to try anyway, because that’s that breed of stubborn.
“Come upstairs,” I say, before I can talk myself out of it. “Please. You can’t drive in this. You’ll end up in the river, and then who’s going to dismantle the rest of my enemies.”
He turns to look at me. And the expression on his face, like I’ve just handed him something he stopped letting himself hope for a long time ago, tells me that everything is about to change, and that I want it to.