Chapter 2
T he stars refuse me tonight.
Moonlight streams through the high windows, limning the table in pale blue as candle wax collapses into uneven pools in the silver holders.
The Irouléguy rouge I handpicked sits untouched beside Xavier’s empty glass, and the poulet basquaise has gone cold under a lid Colette kept checking until I sent her to bed an hour ago.
I’m sitting at the once-candlelit dining table in the dress I chose for my husband, staring at my phone as its glow washes over a string of unanswered messages—learning exactly how long hope can humiliate a woman before the lesson sticks.
This morning, on his way out, he kissed me like a habit and said, “Happy anniversary, amor. I’ll be home early tonight.”
I believed him because no matter how busy Xavier became, he had never missed this day. Not once.
My legs are numb now, and the silk of my dress does nothing against the cold sinking into my bones.
The digital clock flicks another minute forward.
It is past midnight.
My husband was supposed to be home hours ago, but I haven’t heard from him since he walked out this morning. Every text sits unanswered. Every call goes straight to voicemail.
I checked in with his office earlier, as I had too many times these past few months, and his executive assistant gave me the same rehearsed answer with such sanitized sympathy I almost thanked her for the humiliation.
The embarrassment was antiquated and palpable. One would think repetition would dull the sting.
It didn’t.
It bloomed in my throat. Behind my ribs. Across every inch of skin trapped inside this decadent mistake of a dress.
By now, I must be office gossip. Poor Mrs. Navarro, calling again, trying to locate her own husband through people paid to ration access to him.
I don’t begrudge them that. Not when I seem to possess a gift for returning to places that taught me better the first time.
Days ago, I did something unwise. I brought lunch to his office expecting him to smile as he once did, back when Aureon was still an unknown outfit operating out of a cramped office with unreliable heating, a skeleton staff, and barely enough square footage to contain his ambition.
Back then, I used to show up when he forgot his body wasn’t an inconvenient machine attached to his brain, and he would look at me as if I conjured daylight into the room.
Now Aureon Capital is a monolith, its name fixed to buildings and billboards, its reach spanning continents; entire departments are dedicated to managing his image, and layers of assistants stand between me and the man I married until reaching him feels like a privilege I haven’t earned.
I stood in the lobby with a paper bag from the Greek place he used to love, feeling hopeful in a way I knew would cost me before his assistant came down alone.
“Mr. Navarro is tied up at the moment, Mrs. Navarro.”
As if my husband were a parcel delayed in transit .
She offered to take the food up to him. I refused, because some small, stubborn part of me still believed he’d come down himself if he knew I was there.
He didn’t.
Twenty minutes later, my phone rang.
“Yara.” His voice came through low and distracted, stripped of the warmth I had carried into that building with me. “You can’t keep doing this.”
My fingers tightened around the bag. “Bringing you lunch?”
“Showing up without warning.” A pause. Papers rustled faintly on the other end. Someone spoke, muffled and feminine, before Xavier covered the receiver. When he returned, he sounded even farther away. “I’m busy. You know that.”
Of course I knew.
Everyone knew.
“I thought you hadn’t eaten,” I said, hating how small the words sounded.
His silence was worse than anger.
Then he sighed, and God, that sigh. That measured exhale men use when they’ve decided a woman’s hurt is another demand on an already impossible day.
It broke my heart into a thousand pieces, and I was too depleted to pick up a single one.
“I appreciate it,” he said. “But please don’t do anything like this again. Not right now.”
I walked out with my cheeks burning and my head bowed, every furtive glance adding kindling to the shame consuming me.
At least there were no cameras in Aureon’s lobby. Small mercy, considering they always seemed to find me on clinic steps, outside pharmacies, beneath awnings while I waited for cars with my sunglasses on and my heart in my throat.
Calling his office tonight shouldn’t have felt like another public undressing.
But it did.
What was I supposed to do? Sit here with cold food and colder hands while my husband vanished behind the obscene machinery of his own importance ?
I am his wife.
I shouldn’t have to beg reception for proof that he still exists outside of work. I shouldn’t have to chase him through a company with his name on the door just to find out where he is on our anniversary.
Then again, the answer has been obvious for months.
If I trace the fracture back with any honesty, it began around the start of our IUI protocol.
I knew he was exhausted by everything the process demanded of us. God knows I wasn’t the only one being gutted by it.
My husband isn’t the sort of man who bleeds where anyone can see it. When something hurts, he turns silent. Unreachable in that infuriating way of his, as if pain were a hostile takeover he could outlast by discipline alone.
So I gave him space.
Then space became distance.
Distance hardened into late nights, distracted kisses, hands that hovered at my waist without pulling me close. Weeks ago, when I could no longer pretend not to notice the way he slept beside me like a man trying not to disturb a stranger, I sat him down and asked him what was happening to us.
He said it was work.
He said everything would be fine soon.
I believed him.
Look where that got me.
Foolish of me, really, to think this day would be different. To believe we could fall in love again the way we did a lifetime ago.
We are not the people we were then. Infertility has made me a shell of myself, and Xavier is no longer the twenty-five-year-old who once crossed London in the rain because I mentioned, half-asleep and wrung out after training, that I was starving.
He had shown up outside The Ninth Bell with damp hair, a ruined coat, and a paper bag clutched to his chest like it contained state secrets.
“I couldn’t get you spanakopita,” he’d said, with the solemnity of a man presenting diamonds instead of takeout. “The Greek place was closed. But I didn’t want you going to bed hungry. ”
I stared at him, incredulous. “You came all the way here because I said I forgot to eat?”
He was supposed to be in Mayfair that night, trapped inside some investor dinner. I wasn’t supposed to see him until morning. Yet there he stood, drenched from head to toe, looking genuinely devastated that he had failed to get my favorite.
His brows drew together, confused by the question. “You were hungry.”
As if that explained everything.
Back then, it did.
He wasn’t rich enough to buy out restaurants or fly me across oceans. He was tired, broke in the way ambitious men refused to admit, and still audacious in the way he looked at me, as if the world were a solvable inconvenience.
“Yes, but—”
“I told you,” he murmured, brushing rain from my cheek with his thumb. “I will give you a life where you never have to wonder whether you are cared for. I meant it then, amor. I mean it now. Every version of me from this moment forward belongs to that promise.”
He kept the life. Somewhere along the way, he misplaced the care.
Tears trickle down my cheek, warm against skin chilled from waiting.
I lose track of time staring into nothing. The room blurs at the edges, and the silence begins to feel permanent, taking me with it.
A slow, pendular sway brings me back. Warmth beneath my cheek. The faint abrasion of wool against my skin. Bergamot and sandalwood reach me through the fog, dragging my senses into reluctant awareness.
Xavier.
My lashes flutter, but the room refuses to cohere. The ceiling drifts above me in pale, fractured pieces, and my stomach rolls with a sudden, watery warning.
I am moving.
No.
Being moved.
One of his arms is under my knees, the other locked around my back, holding me to his chest as if I weigh nothing at all. My fingers are curled into his shirt. I do not remember putting them there.
“Yara,” he whispers, low and close. “Amor, stay with me.”
He sounds too close to the man I miss.
Smells like him too.
I turn instinctively into the scent, my cheek finding the strong column of his throat.
Safety. Comfort. Home.
“Why…” I breathe around a thin sob. “Why are you only just coming home?”
His stubble grazes my forehead as he presses a kiss into my hair. “I’m sorry, baby. Something came up.”
“What could’ve mattered more than today?” Tears slip hotly down my temples, disappearing into my hair. My voice cracks around the words. “My legs went numb from waiting.”
“I know, baby. I know.” His arms tighten around me. “My cousin called from Madrid. Her father died. I had to be there.”
My heart breaks anew. “Oh.”
The word leaves me small.
I should say I’m sorry. I think I do. The shape of it moves through my mouth, but all I can feel is the heat of him around me and the awful, undignified collapse of my anger.
His cousin’s father died.
What kind of wife resents that?
My eyes burn hotter. “A phone call, Xavier. One.” My hand closes weakly into his lapel. “I am your wife. I shouldn’t have to learn where you were from your apology.”
“I know.”
“I waited, Xavier.” Drowsiness drags at the edges of my voice, thinning it to almost nothing. “I waited all night.”
“I’m sorry.” His mouth brushes my hair again, the words rougher than his voice usually allows. “I know an apology is insufficient for what I did tonight. It doesn’t undo the waiting. But for as long as you let me, I’ll prove it wasn’t empty.”
I nuzzle deeper into his neck, too weak to decide whether I believe him .
I almost wish he hadn’t said it.
Sorry is such a small word for a night that spent hours teaching me how much space one man’s absence can occupy.
But I am tired. So tired. I just want to close my eyes and drift somewhere the hurt can’t follow.
Even there, hope finds me.
I know better than to let it get comfortable in my chest, but it rises all the same, stubborn and incandescent. Tomorrow we get the result. One way or another, the waiting ends.
Maybe then, we find our light.