17. Watching Her Live Without Him
Seventeen
Watching Her Live Without Him
Sebastian’s POV
Grace had a photograph of it before I even knew the event had happened — a small design industry mixer, the kind of thing that would have bored me to tears a year ago and that I now found myself scrolling through Instagram at eleven at night, looking for evidence of, like a man checking a wound to see if it had stopped bleeding.
Claire was there. Marcus Reyes was there too, standing close enough beside her that the photograph read, unmistakably, as a couple, though nothing in their posture was overtly romantic — no hand at her back, no arm around her shoulders.
Just proximity. Just the easy, unguarded way she was laughing at something he’d said, her whole face open in a way I hadn’t seen directed at me in years.
I sat with that photograph longer than was good for me.
I felt jealousy — plain, unglamorous jealousy, the kind with nothing noble in it. But underneath that, something worse. Something closer to grief.
Because I recognized the woman in that photograph.
I recognized her laugh, the specific unguarded quality of it.
I had married that woman. I had watched her laugh like that at me, once, constantly, in the early years, before Cole Capital had gotten so large it required every hour I had and several I didn’t.
I hadn’t seen that laugh directed at me in longer than I could accurately account for. I’d been so consumed with providing for a life I’d stopped noticing I wasn’t actually present in that I’d forgotten presence was the entire point.
Dr. Okafor had a name for what I was doing, watching that photograph at eleven at night instead of sleeping. She called it useful pain — the kind that teaches you something, if you’re willing to sit with it instead of reaching for the nearest distraction.
I sat with it. I didn’t call Claire. I didn’t send anything — no flowers, no grand gesture, no attempt to insert myself into a moment that plainly wasn’t mine to interrupt.
I’d learned that much, at least, from the flower incident, which Grace had also, somehow, heard about, and which she’d relayed to me with the specific relish of a sister watching her brother finally get an education he badly needed.
I thought instead about Marcus Reyes — a man I’d never met, who apparently asked good questions and waited for real answers, who’d built something with my wife’s actual talent instead of quietly letting it shrink around his own priorities.
I didn’t hate him. That surprised me, thinking it through honestly.
I think some earlier version of myself — the version who’d have solved this with money, with leverage, with the ruthlessness that had built Cole Capital from nothing — might have found a way to make Marcus’s life difficult.
Might have pulled some investor thread, called in some favor, made the Perry Street project quietly, deniably harder to finish.
I didn’t do any of that. Whatever else I got wrong in those weeks, I never once tried to sabotage the one thing that was making Claire happy, even though every instinct I’d spent a career honing told me it would have been easy, and clean, and entirely within my power.
Instead I sat in my too-quiet apartment and let myself feel the full weight of what I’d lost — not as performance, just plainly, the way Claire had told me I needed to learn how to do.
It was the worst night I’d had since the divorce began.
It was also, I understood somewhere around two in the morning, the first time I’d actually let myself grieve instead of immediately reaching for a plan to fix the grief.
I thought about Marcus asking her opinion on sconces and waiting for the real answer. I thought about myself, weeks earlier, walking into her studio with a list of solutions instead of a single honest question.
Somewhere in that long, sleepless night, I understood something with a clarity that felt almost physical.
I hadn’t lost Claire to Marcus Reyes.
I’d lost her to my own inattention, years before he ever entered the picture, and Marcus was simply the first person in a long time who’d shown her what attention actually looked like when it was freely, consistently given.
If I wanted any chance of getting her back, I wasn’t going to win by competing with him.
I was going to have to become, finally, the kind of man who didn’t need to be taught what he already should have known.