17. Soleil #2
This isn't who you are. This isn't who I married. You're so afraid of losing control that you're becoming someone our children won't recognize.
Come back to me. Please. Before it's too late.
Underneath the letter, a photograph. Hugh and my mother.
Young — before Rhys, before me. He was laughing.
Not the composed warmth I knew, not the measured smile that made rooms feel chosen.
A real laugh, open, unguarded, his head thrown back, his arm around a woman whose dark curls were blowing across her face.
A man who hadn't yet built the machine. A man who looked like the person my mother was writing to — the one she was begging to come back.
My mother's death didn't create Hugh's cruelty.
It removed the only person who could check it.
The control, the empire, the suffocating grip on his children's lives — all of it was a man who lost the woman who kept him human and decided he would never lose anything again.
He built a machine out of grief. The same thing Nolan did.
The same wound, the same response, the same destruction radiating outward from a loss neither man knew how to survive.
I sat on the floor. The files spread around me. My mother's letter in one hand. The photograph of a young man laughing in the other. The study was dark except for the lamp on Hugh's desk, the light falling across the scattered pages in a warm circle that made the evidence look almost gentle.
The tears came quietly. Not the crying from the stage, not the tears that fell on my gold dress while Nolan told me about his sister.
This was different. This was the crying you do alone in a room, doing something you can't take back.
Because I knew what I was holding. I knew what happened if I photographed these pages.
I turned my father into a case file. The man who kissed my forehead every Friday at brunch.
The man who stood when I entered a room.
The man who said there's my girl and meant it every single time.
I loved him. Even now, kneeling on the floor of his study in front of the proof of what he was, I loved him. And that was exactly why it had to be me.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Picked up my phone. Photographed every page. Every NDA. Every settlement. Every signature. My mother's letter. The photograph.
I put everything back. Closed the safe. Replaced the panel. Left the study exactly as I found it.
Down the corridor. Past the photographs. Past the living room where Hugh's voice was still on the phone — warm, measured, in control. I didn't look in.
Rhys was on the front steps. Sitting. His elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. He looked up when the door opened. I looked down at him. Neither of us spoke. I sat beside him. Our shoulders touched.
"Was it bad?"
"Yes."
He put his head back in his hands. I put my hand on his back. Two children sitting on the steps of the house their father built. The night was dark and the house behind us was full of ghosts and the only honest thing either of us had was each other.
I stood. Squeezed his shoulder.
"I'm going to do something about this. I need you with me when the time comes."
He nodded. Didn't look up. But he nodded.
I drove. Didn't go home. Didn't go to the gallery.
Didn't go to him — though the pull was so strong it sat in my chest like a fist. My body wanted to be wherever he was because for months that was where safety lived.
I drove until the city thinned and parked on a quiet street and sat in my car and looked at the photographs on my phone.
I called Margaux.
She picked up on the first ring. 1:00 a.m., and she picked up on the first ring.
"I need you tomorrow." My voice was raw. "I found something."
She didn't ask what. "I'll be there. Whatever it is."
The line went quiet. I leaned my head against the steering wheel. Closed my eyes. Tomorrow I'd be brave. Tonight I was just a woman who loved two men and lost them both in the same evening.
I drove home. Pulled up to my building. Got out of the car.
Nolan was there.
Standing outside my door. The navy suit wrinkled, the tie gone, his collar open.
He looked like he hadn't moved since the gala — like he'd come straight here and waited.
His face was stripped of every mask he'd ever worn.
No control. No system. Just a man standing on a sidewalk who had nowhere else to go.
I walked past him.
"Soleil — "
"You're the last person I want to talk to."
"Just let me — "
"Let you what?" I spun around. The gold dress swung against my ankles.
My keys dug into my fist. "Explain? Apologize?
Tell me again how it stopped being the plan?
I've heard it, Nolan. I stood in a dark room and listened to every word and none of it changes the fact that you lied to me every single day. "
"I know." He stepped closer. His voice was rough, raw, stripped of the short controlled sentences I'd grown used to. The words were coming out wrong, tangled, tripping over each other. "I know what I did. I know what I am. But you — Soleil, you are the only real thing — "
"Don't." I jabbed my finger at his chest. "Don't tell me I'm real. You don't get to decide what's real. You lost that right when you photographed my father's files from the office I walked you past."
He flinched. The first time I'd ever seen Nolan flinch.
"I trusted you." My voice cracked. I hated that it cracked.
I wanted the steel from the ballroom, the woman who said shut up to three hundred people.
But she was gone and what was left was just me, standing in the cold in a gold dress with mascara tracks on my face.
"I showed you paintings I've never shown anyone.
I brought you to my family. I sat in your kitchen in your shirt and made you coffee and you drank it every time even though it was terrible and I thought — I thought that meant — "
My throat closed. I pressed my fist against my mouth.
He closed the distance. One step. Two. Close enough that I could smell him — the soap, the starch of the navy shirt that was supposed to be for tonight, for dancing, for the promise I made him this morning in his kitchen. Tonight. We were supposed to have tonight.
"I'm sorry." His voice broke on the second word. "I'm sorry. I don't have anything else. I don't have a strategy or a speech or a — I'm just sorry. And I love you. And I know that doesn't fix it but it's the only true thing I have left."
I looked at his face. The jaw I'd traced with my thumb a hundred times. The eyes that held things the rest of his face had learned to hide. The mouth that kissed me at my front door the first night.
He kissed me. Or I kissed him. It didn't matter who moved first because we both moved and the collision was furious, desperate, tasting like tears and champagne and the wreckage of everything we built.
His hands were in my hair. My fists were in his jacket — the navy jacket, the color I gave him.
His mouth was hot and shaking against mine and I kissed him back with everything, with the grief and the rage and the love I couldn't kill no matter how hard I tried.
The kiss was not forgiveness. It was mourning. Two people grieving something that was still alive and already dead.
I pulled away. Looked at him. My lips swollen, my eyes wet. He was breathing hard. His hands were still in my hair. His forehead pressed against mine.
I didn't say a word. I stepped back. Turned. Walked inside. Closed the door.
I leaned against the other side and pressed my fingers to my mouth and tasted him and hated that it still felt like the truest thing I'd ever known.