Chapter 13 #2
A sudden, suffocating wave of heat rushed up my neck. My heart slammed against my ribs with a frantic, erratic rhythm, loud enough that I thought Rachel might hear it over the noise of the lobby.
It was impossible. The logic simply did not align.
Malcolm Klein, the ruthless, perfectionist developer who ruled the Seattle skyline from a glass tower, would not be wearing a faded sweatshirt in a drafty community theater.
He didn’t do grunt work. He didn’t subject himself to manual labor for zero credit, and he certainly didn’t sweep floors in the freezing rain.
He commanded armies of contractors to do that for him.
But I knew that handwriting. I knew it as intimately as I knew the lines of my own palms.
A fierce, protective anger flared in my chest, cutting through my exhaustion.
If Malcolm was using his power and his arrogance to infiltrate my theater—the one safe haven I had left—I was going to lose my mind.
I had looked him in the eyes and demanded a divorce.
I had explicitly told him he didn’t get to redraft our fracture with an engineering note.
If he thought he could just slide into the background of my life and treat my broken heart like a structural deficit he could casually repair with some community service, he was severely underestimating my fury.
“Where is he right now?” I asked, my voice tight and strained.
Rachel blinked, surprised by my sudden shift in tone. “Oh, I think he headed back toward the scene shop about ten minutes ago to help shift some of the heavy flats before the afternoon rehearsal.”
“Thank you,” I muttered, spinning on my heel and marching away from the table.
I pushed through the lobby doors, my boots hitting the hallway linoleum with a fast, determined rhythm.
I navigated the familiar, winding labyrinth of the backstage corridors, my anger building with every step.
I was ready for a fight. I was ready to scream at him, to demand that he leave his billionaire playbook downtown and get off my property.
I reached the heavy wooden double doors of the scene shop, grabbed the iron handles, and shoved them open, fully expecting to see my husband standing under the harsh fluorescent lights.
The massive room was completely empty.
The silence inside the shop was absolute, save for the low, distant hum of the building’s ventilation fans.
The air was thick and heavy, saturated with the nostalgic, pungent smells of freshly cut pine, dried wood glue, and the sharp chemical tang of scenic paint.
Strands of yellow sawdust hung perfectly suspended in the angled shafts of morning light filtering down from the high clerestory windows, drifting slowly over the empty workbenches.
Every tool in the room was meticulously organized, hung back on the pegboards with a strict, familiar discipline.
I stood in the center of the concrete floor, my chest heaving as I scanned the shadows, waiting for him to step out from behind a stack of lumber. But I was alone. I had just missed him.
Directly across from the main loading doors, a massive wooden flat had been shifted completely out of the actors’ entrance path.
It was a sixteen-foot-tall set piece, heavily caked in textured plaster and painted to look like an old brick alleyway.
Moving it usually required three groaning college students sliding a rolling jack under the base while screaming directions at each other.
Now, the enormous, heavy wall rested perfectly square against the back storage racks.
Its wooden supports were aligned with a flawless accuracy that left exactly half an inch of clearance for the backstage door to swing open.
The dust was still actively settling around the base of the timber frame, tiny golden motes swirling in the disturbed air.
He had moved it by himself, less than a minute ago.
I walked slowly toward the back of the shop, the anger in my chest beginning to falter, replaced by a strange, creeping unease.
My boots crunched softly against the scattered wood shavings on the floor.
Near the large radial saw, an old, overturned wooden milk crate sat acting as a makeshift side table.
Resting directly on top of the crate was the only evidence that anyone had been in the room at all.
A pair of work gloves.
I stopped at the crate, staring down at them. They weren’t expensive leather driving gloves. They were cheap, split-cowhide utility gloves, the kind you buy in bulk at a hardware store. The rough yellow leather was heavily caked in dark machine grease and embedded with pine dust.
My hand was shaking as I reached out and picked them up.
They were heavy, molded completely to the shape of a large pair of hands that had spent hours gripping coarse hemp ropes and hauling unforgiving weight.
I turned the stiff, ruined leather over in my palms. As I brought them closer to examine the bloodstains, a sudden, violent shock traveled straight down my spine, arresting the breath in my lungs.
Beneath the harsh smells of grease, cedar shavings, and metallic blood, the leather carried a very faint, deeply embedded trace of expensive sandalwood.
It was his scent.
It was the exact, familiar aroma that had lingered on the pillows of our bed for five years.
It was the scent I had spent half a decade burying my face into when the world felt too heavy.
It was the smell of the man who used to hold me in the quiet, dark hours before dawn, back when we shared a tiny, drafty apartment, long before the ambition swallowed him whole and turned him into a stranger.
My knees gave out. I stumbled forward, my hip catching the edge of a workbench to keep from hitting the concrete floor. I clutched the clipboard and the dirty gloves tight against my chest, closing my eyes as a heavy, unexplainable wave washed over my entire nervous system.
It wasn’t anger anymore. It was a profound, suffocating sense of safety.
It was a heavy, physical feeling of being watched over, of being protected from the shadows.
For a terrifying, suspended second, the cold walls of the drafty scene shop seemed to melt away, replaced by the ghost of the man who used to stand between me and the rest of the world.
The pain of that sudden safety was excruciating.
It cut straight through my defensive fury, exposing the raw, bleeding depth of the love I still held for him.
That was the ultimate cruelty of heartbreak; the love didn’t just evaporate because the trust was broken.
Knowing that he was here, knowing that the billionaire developer had stripped away his pride to ruin his hands in the dark corners of my theater just to keep my stage from shaking, made the betrayal feel incredibly complex.
He was trying to do the heavy lifting. He was trying to keep my world intact without asking for a single word of forgiveness.
I opened my eyes, a single, hot tear spilling over my lashes and cutting a clean line through the dust on my cheek. I shook my head violently, forcing myself to stand up straight.
“No,” I whispered into the empty shop, my voice cracking in the stillness. “It’s just the exhaustion. You’re hallucinating.”
I deliberately dropped the grease-stained gloves back onto the wooden crate.
I had to rationalize it away. I told myself that the crippling stress of tech week, the fear of the safety inspection, and my own severe sleep deprivation were playing cruel psychological tricks on my grieving mind.
There was no logical reason for Malcolm to be here.
He belonged to the Seattle skyline. I belonged to the dust of this stage.
I turned my back on the empty workshop, wiping my face with the back of my sleeve as I marched toward the stage doors. I forced my mind to focus entirely on the afternoon set changes, using the rigid discipline of the theater to rebuild the walls around my heart.