Chapter 15
“Y ou’re not going to leave again, right?”
The question comes so quietly I almost miss it.
I turn my head on the pillow and find Althea watching me through the half-dark.
The bedside lamp is off now, the room washed in moonlight and the faint amber glow spilling in from the courtyard.
She is lying on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, the other curled into the sleeve of my shirt as though she does not quite trust me to still be here by morning.
Her face is scrubbed clean of the paint from earlier, but her eyes are still swollen from crying.
A hard ache cinches tight around my ribs.
“I just got back,” I say.
“That isn’t an answer.”
I let out a slow breath and tip my face toward the shadowed ceiling for a moment before looking at her again. “No. I’m not going anywhere tonight.”
Her fingers tighten around my sleeve .
“Tonight,” she repeats.
I force a smile I do not feel. “What, are you worried about me now, gremlin?”
Her mouth does that small, unhappy thing it has done since she was little and trying not to cry in front of me. It used to work better when she was a child. It still does damage now.
“I just...” She looks down at the blanket between us, smoothing an invisible wrinkle. “I don’t want to wake up and find out you’re gone again.”
Guilt scrapes at my insides. I hadn’t realized my coming back would unsettle her this much. We had seen each other over the years, but I suppose there is a difference between visiting and returning to the place both of us still call home.
My throat burns. I do what I have always done when something hurts too much to face head-on.
I reach over and flick her forehead.
“What was that for?” she grumbles, rubbing the spot, a pout tugging at her mouth.
“You were being dramatic.”
She shrugs. “I learned from the best.”
A tired laugh slips out of me. “Then you should be better at it.”
She smiles at that, but only a little. The shadows in her face do not fully lift, so I reach for her again and start tickling her before she can see too much in mine.
Althea lets out an outraged shriek and twists away, shoving at my shoulder, which spurs me on further.
Within seconds, we are tangled in sheets and limbs, half wrestling, half trying to smother each other, laughing so hard it stops sounding like laughter and starts sounding like relief.
By the time she snorts, I lose whatever dignity I have left and collapse beside her, breathless.
Warmth moves through me in slow, disorienting waves, loosening something I had not realized was clenched so tight—an almost painful reminder of what happiness feels like when I am not bracing against it.
Eventually, the laughter dies.
The room quiets by degrees, the silence settling around us until I begin to think she has finally fallen asleep .
“Did he tell you?”
The wind rattles the glass, the sound sharpening my confusion.
I turn to her. “Did who tell me what?”
Time crawls. The hush thickens.
Moonlight skims her face, catching the slope of her cheek and the faint sheen still clinging to her lashes, but it yields nothing.
Her eyes lift to mine, as though she has only just realized she said it aloud. “Nothing.”
“Althea.”
“It’s nothing, Yara.” Her voice is softer now, blunted by sleep or the performance of it. She turns onto her back and throws an arm over her eyes. “Forget I said anything.”
I lie there another minute, staring at the shape of her in the dark.
Althea has never been good at pretending something is wrong when it isn’t. The problem is that she has always been very good at pretending nothing is wrong when it is.
The old instinct rises immediately—the one that wants to pry, press, and wear her down until the truth gives.
But the day has already held too many tears, too many swallowed questions.
I came home carrying enough for the whole house.
She is too frayed, and I am too tired to start a conversation that will not stay contained once it begins.
I let it go for now.
Within minutes, her breathing evens out.
Two hours later, I am still awake.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to shake the unease needling at the base of my spine.
Thunder rumbles somewhere beyond the windows, and every so often the wind sets the glass rattling. Moonlight slips through the clouds in thin silver bands, laying pale strips across the room.
Beside me, Althea is dead asleep and somehow getting more violent about it by the minute.
At some point in the night, she has thrown half her body over mine, as though brute force is the only thing preventing my disappearance.
One leg over my thighs. One arm across my ribs.
Her hand dangerously close to my throat.
It is honestly impressive that she has not crushed my windpipe yet.
Carefully, I untangle her from me. Moving her leg off me takes an unfortunate amount of effort because she fights it even in sleep. She makes an annoyed sound, rolls onto her stomach, and drags half the sheet with her.
Once I am free, I switch on the bedside lamp, then lean over and nudge her mouth closed before she soaks the pillow clean through.
My head feels light when I sit up, my body wrung out from the day.
I spent most of it catching up with yiayia and Althea, keeping myself busy so I would not think.
Yiayia’s wedding preparations. Fabric swatches and dress sketches.
A guest list amended three separate times.
Althea’s upcoming art event. Even the things that did not need immediate attention, I found a way to make them urgent. They let me.
Through all of it, I steered every conversation away from Xavier.
No one pushed. I knew they wanted to.
Being with them only deepened the ache already pressing at my chest. Sitting in this house again, hearing their voices rise and fall into each other the way they always do, made it impossible not to feel how much I had missed while pretending I was too busy, too far, too grown for homesickness.
I look at Althea now, sprawled across half the mattress, all elbows and tangled hair, and something in me softens.
She is so grown now, and yet still so much like the girl who used to climb into my bed during storms.We haven’t slept beside each other in years—not since that visit to London before my injury, when she turned up looking so distraught and so stubbornly silent that I had felt useless beside it.
All I could do was hold her until she fell asleep.
I push a strand of hair off her face. She shifts, turns more fully toward the other side of the bed, and mutters something incomprehensible into the pillow.
I wonder what she is not saying. Hiding things is one trait both of us inherited from Baba. He would rather bleed in private than admit something hurts. I used to think Althea had outgrown that habit.
Now I am not so sure.
I reach for my phone and switch it on .
I turned it off earlier after yet another message from Xavier came in while yiayia and Althea were asking what I thought of different lace options for the wedding dresses. It had been easier that way. Cowardly, maybe. Necessary, definitely.
The screen floods with notifications the moment the signal returns.
Texts. Missed calls. Voicemails.
All from Xavier.
There are so many that, for one absurd second, all I can do is stare. More than a hundred.
He must know by now that I am gone.
The last voicemail came in ten minutes ago. I check the time at the top of the screen.
3:07 a.m.
What is he doing awake at this hour?
Not your concern.
I am about to clear the notifications when another message comes in, this one from the same anonymous thread that has been needling me for days.
My stomach tightens.
There is never a proper number attached to it. No name. No contact card. Nothing to block. All I have been able to do is delete the messages and file them as ordinary sludge that finds its way into every phone eventually.
This time, there is no text.
Only images.
I sit there with my thumb hovering over the screen, every instinct in me recoiling. Ignore it. Delete it. Go back to pretending none of this exists.
Instead, I open it.
More than twenty photos load at once.
My pulse turns brutal, pounding hard enough to rival the thunder gathering beyond the windows. At first, my mind refuses to understand what I am seeing.
Xavier.
With a woman.
My fingers keep moving, dragging the screen upward while something cold works its way through me. Every photo is dated. Old, but not old enough to feel irrelevant.
The first visible timestamp is from today.
Just hours ago. At his office.
I stare harder, as though I can force the woman at his side into someone else.
It doesn’t work.
The coat. The blonde hair. The posture I know too well now, elegant even in a grainy still.
Isabel.
It should not sting anymore.
It still fucking does.
While I was crying myself empty and choking on humiliation, he was with her .
I rake a hand through my hair and force myself to keep looking.
The angles are distant, almost certainly pulled from security cameras or a long lens, but there is nothing casual about any of them.
The late hour. The way his hand settles on her like it belongs there.
The way she leans into him in the same car we made love in.
He did not come after me because he was with her.
And later that same night, he stood in front of me with tears in his eyes, asking for forgiveness as though remorse could undo any of it.
I swipe to the next image, and the air leaves my lungs so abruptly my breath stutters.
In this one, they are coming out of a hospital.
Her hand is pressed to her stomach. His is wrapped around her shoulders.
The blood drains from my face so fast I almost feel it happen.