CHAPTER 13 — THE PLACE WHERE HE STOPS PRETENDING #2
Cael stirred the eggs harder than necessary, then eased off, as if his own fist had betrayed him.
“Bram grew up coming in and out of this apartment.
After Celia's death, I locked the office for a few months, but that didn't mean much.
He knew where the keys were, knew her habit of marking boxes with blue, knew I avoided touching the notebooks.
When he got older, he came back here a few times while I was in surgery.
I told myself he wanted to remember his mother without talking to me.
Maybe he did. Maybe that wasn't the only thing he was looking for.”
The answer didn't excuse Bram. It didn't diminish Cael either.
It just added another layer to the table—a sad, domestic layer, made of a resentful teenager entering a dead office while his father saved patients elsewhere.
I set the toast on the counter and ran my fingers along the edge of my bag, trying not to feel sorry for Bram because pity, with him, became an open door for manipulation.
Even so, a part of me ached for the child who might have been abandoned among papers no one explained.
The adult he'd hurt didn't owe that child forgiveness, but she could recognize that monstrosity is rarely born fully formed.
“He met me through my easiest side to exploit.” The words came out unplanned, and Cael stopped stirring the pan.
I kept my eyes on the counter, because maybe it was safer to speak to the wood than to the man who had raised Bram and now carried the guilt as if it were genetic.
“He found my need to prove myself, my anger when people called me exaggerated, my fear of being seen as too intense. In the beginning, he said those things made me interesting. Later, when I started disagreeing with him, the same things became a problem.”
Cael didn't respond with a ready-made answer, and that might have been the most decent thing he could do.
He turned off the heat, served the eggs on a small plate with toast, and set it in front of me along with a glass of water.
Only then did he rest his hands on the counter across from me, keeping his distance, leaving the food between us as a concrete form of care that didn't require me to accept touch.
“Bram learned from me that silence could look like strength. Maybe he learned from Whitlock that turning someone into a case was more efficient than admitting fear. None of that gives you back the time he took. None of that lessens what he chose to do.” His voice was low, contained, with an honesty that wasn't trying to come out clean.
“If I start using his wounds to ask you to be understanding, stop me before I become useful to the wrong version.”
I looked at him then, and the urge to touch his face came so unexpectedly that I had to grip the fork.
There was a kind of adult pain in hearing a father refuse to excuse his son without ceasing to suffer for him.
Bram would have offered me guilt wrapped in tenderness.
Cael offered responsibility with empty hands.
The difference hit me harder than I expected.
“You know that makes everything harder, don't you?” I stabbed the eggs with my fork but still didn't eat.
“It would be simpler if you were arrogant, blind, protective of your family name, and predictable. I could file you away with Bram, Odette, Whitlock, and every man who thinks my life fits in an edited version.”
“And now?” He didn't move closer, but the question landed as if he had taken a step, filling the kitchen with a calm that didn't ease the tension—if anything, it made my answer feel more important than I wanted to admit.
“Now you keep giving me food, copies, context, and space to say no.
It's a terrible tactic.” I brought the first forkful to my mouth and discovered, against my will, that it was good.
Simple, hot, salt just right, nothing with a strong smell.
My body was grateful before my brain caught up. “This is annoyingly edible.”
“I'll try not to let the compliment change my personality.” The corner of his mouth quirked up, and this time the almost-smile lingered long enough to warm the kitchen.
We ate at the island instead of the formal table, because formality felt like another room where we'd be forced to speak too carefully.
Cael made tea for me and coffee for himself, but left his cup almost untouched while we reviewed what we knew in low voices: old L.A.
, H-7, the box with the blue mark, Bram at two seventeen, the consulting token, Odette blocking internal counsel, the deleted leave request, the preserved observation from the evaluative chain.
Each point was a piece. Together, they still didn't form the complete picture, but they were starting to keep their version from taking over the whole frame.
At some point, the conversation lost the rhythm of interrogation and slipped into something more dangerous.
Cael spoke of Celia not as a saint or a ghost, but as a woman who forgot her keys, hated long conferences, scrawled offensive comments about colleagues' methodology in book margins, and laughed when he tried to cook anything more ambitious than eggs.
I told him about a version of myself before Bram, a Lucia who thought it was possible to be loved without shrinking herself down, and I didn't realize I'd said that until Cael went too quiet.
“He made you believe that being whole was too much.” It wasn't a question. Wasn't a diagnosis either. It was an observation spoken carefully, as if he knew that naming a wound didn't give him the right to touch it.
“He didn't do it alone.” I ran my thumb along the rim of the mug, watching the steam rise and vanish before it reached my face.
“Bram just found a room that was already set up.
Professors, bosses, advisors, patients sometimes.
There's always someone willing to say a woman would be excellent if she came in a smaller dose. Bram had enough charm to turn that into intimacy.”
The kitchen darkened when the city lights shifted behind the rain.
Cael was on the other side of the island, too close to be safe, too far not to be an invitation.
I saw his shirt open at the collar, the shadow of stubble along his jaw, his hand wrapped around the mug, and my body—which should have been satisfied by last night and the closet—decided that emotional intimacy was just another way of taking off clothes.
“Lucia.” My name, in that voice, already had too many places in my body.
He didn't move. Maybe that's why the tension built.
“I don't want you to take Celia's place in this apartment, in this story, or in any guilt I haven't resolved yet. I need to say that before the silence starts asking for something I have no right to ask for.”
The sentence hit me where I didn't know I was vulnerable.
I had thought about it, yes. Not as jealousy, because Celia wasn't a rival.
Dead women don't compete; insecure living women invent competitions to fit themselves into their fear.
Still, being in that apartment, eating in her kitchen, reading her notebooks, carrying Cael's baby while her old marker showed up in my exam—all of it cast a strange shadow, as if I could be mistaken for a continuation of a woman who hadn't even had the chance to finish her own accusation.
“I don't want to take her place.” My voice came out steady, pure pride holding it together.
“And I don't want to be the living woman used to make up for the one the hospital erased.
If you touch me because you're trying to go back in time, I'll know, and I'll probably hurt you with some phrase Sera would call clinically necessary.”
Cael set the mug on the counter and came around the island, slowly, giving me enough time to step back.
I didn't step back. His body stopped in front of mine, not touching, but close enough for me to feel the heat, to catch the smell of coffee, clean skin, and rain on his clothes.
The desire that had stayed quiet while we ate and talked about the dead lifted its head with a dangerous calm.
“I touched you before I knew Celia would become part of this.
I touched you because you looked at me in a hotel bar like I wasn't a title, a last name, or grief dressed up in a suit.” His hand rose to the counter beside my hip, not trapping me, just claiming space.
“Yesterday, I touched you because you chose.
Today, in the closet, because we both chose the place badly and the desire too well.
Now, if I touch you, it'll be because you're here, not because someone was here before.”
My chest felt too small for the amount of air I tried to pull in.
There were phrases too pretty that would have made me suspicious.
That one wasn't pretty. It was specific, imperfect, full of consequences, and a little damning.
That's why I believed it more than I should have.
I touched his shirt at the waist, not pulling yet, just feeling the fabric under my fingers.
“Do you always do this?” My voice came out hoarse, irritated at its own vulnerability. “Deliver a decent answer when I've already prepared an excellent fight?”
“No.” He looked at my mouth, and the entire kitchen seemed to lose function. “With you, I've been improvising above my usual capacity.”
I should have laughed. Maybe I did something close to it before pulling him by the shirt and kissing him.
The kiss didn't start like the one in the closet—didn't have the urgency of immediate danger or the anger of a door about to open.
It started slower, and that's exactly why it felt deeper.
Cael met my mouth with a kind of hungry care, one hand rising to my face, the other still on the counter, as if keeping part of himself anchored until he was sure I wasn't using desire to escape sadness.