11. Elena
— ? —
Elena
The coffee shop Camille chose is aggressively neutral.
Beige walls, beige tables, the kind of generic acoustic folk playing through the speakers that exists specifically to fill silence without creating atmosphere. It’s the Switzerland of coffee shops, designed to offend no one, which means it pleases no one either.
She’s already there when I arrive, sitting in a corner booth with her hands wrapped around a mug she’s not drinking from. I almost don’t recognize her at first. The Instagram photos showed a glowing woman with a visible baby bump and that particular smugness of early pregnancy.
The woman in front of me is gaunt. Hollow-cheeked. Her sweater hangs loose where it should cling, and there’s no bump at all, just the flat plane of a stomach that was never carrying anything except lies.
“Elena.” She doesn’t stand. Doesn’t smile. “Thanks for coming.”
I slide into the booth across from her. “You said you’d explain everything.”
“I will.” She takes a breath. “But first I need you to understand…”
“I don’t need to understand anything. I need you to tell me the truth.”
Something flickers across her face. Surprise, maybe, at the steel in my voice. I’m not the same woman who let her move into my house, who believed her tears, who asked her husband’s permission to help her own sister.
I’m not that woman anymore.
“Fine.” Camille sets down her mug. “The truth is I was never pregnant.”
“I know. I saw your medical records.”
Her eyes narrow. “How did you…”
“Doesn’t matter. Keep talking.”
“I faked the test. There are websites that sell positive pregnancy tests, you’d be surprised how easy it is.
I bought three, just in case.” She says this casually, like she’s describing a shopping trip.
“The Instagram photos were a padded insert under my clothes. Very realistic. You can order those online too.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why any of it? Why the fake pregnancy, why the kiss, why…” My voice catches. “Why destroy my marriage?”
Camille is quiet for a long moment. When she speaks again, her voice is different, smaller, rawer, stripped of the casual cruelty she wore like armor.
“Because I’ve always wanted what you had.”
“What I had? I was living in a house where my mother-in-law rearranged my furniture and my husband couldn’t look up from his phone long enough to…”
“You had Adrian.” She cuts me off. “You had the house, the money, the life. You had someone who actually wanted you, who chose you, who looked at you like…” She stops.
Swallows. “Do you know what Rick used to say to me? That I was lucky he married me. That no one else would want me. That I should be grateful.”
“That doesn’t justify…”
“I’m not saying it does.” Her voice rises.
“I’m saying I spent seven years with a man who made me feel worthless, and then I watched my sister, my perfect, talented sister, land a billionaire who looked at her like she hung the moon.
And I thought…” She laughs, bitter and broken.
“I thought if I could just make him see me. If I could just show him that I understood his world, that I could be what you weren’t… ”
“What I wasn’t?” I lean forward. “What exactly wasn’t I, Camille?”
“Present. Interested. You were always in your workshop, always distracted by your little furniture projects. You barely paid attention to him. I thought…” She shrugs. “I thought he deserved someone who actually appreciated what he had.”
“Someone like you.”
“Yes. Someone like me.”
I should feel sorry for her. Part of me, a small, distant part, recognizes the pain underneath her words. Years of Rick’s cruelty, the divorce that left her with nothing, the desperate scramble to matter to someone.
But that small, distant part is drowned out by the roar of everything she took from me.
“So you planned the kiss.”
“I planned the kiss.” She doesn’t flinch from my gaze. “I knew you were coming home early, you’d texted me about the Miller meeting. I waited until your car pulled into the driveway, then I made my move.”
“Made your move.”
“Kissed him. Held up the pregnancy test. Made sure you saw.” A terrible smile crosses her face. “I didn’t expect him to shove me so hard. I thought, I thought he’d hesitate longer. Long enough for you to see something that couldn’t be explained away.”
“He froze for one second.”
“One second was enough.” She tilts her head. “Wasn’t it? You ran. You didn’t watch the footage. You didn’t even give him a chance to explain.”
“Don’t you dare.” My voice is ice. “Don’t you dare try to make this my fault.”
“I’m just saying…”
“You’re just saying nothing.” I stand up. “You destroyed my marriage because you were jealous and broken and too cowardly to fix your own life, so you tried to steal mine instead. And now you’re sitting here pretending there’s some version of this story where I’m the villain?”
“Elena…”
“No.” I grab my coat. “We’re done. You don’t contact me again. You don’t contact Adrian. You don’t show up at my apartment or my shows or anywhere I might be. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t have a sister.”
“Elena, please…”
“Goodbye, Camille.”
I walk out without looking back.
***
Adrian calls while I’m walking home.
“How did it go?”
“She confessed. All of it, the fake pregnancy, the planned kiss, the timing.” I stop at a crosswalk, watching the signal change. “She wanted my life. Said I didn’t appreciate what I had.”
“Jesus.”
“I told her not to contact either of us again.”
“Good.” There’s a pause. “Are you okay?”
I think about the question. Am I okay? I just discovered that my sister systematically tried to destroy my marriage out of jealousy and spite. I’m standing on a street corner in December while the sky turns gray and ominous overhead.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Eventually.”
“Can I see you tonight?”
I watch the clouds gathering, dark and heavy. “Seven o’clock. My apartment.”
“I’ll be there.”
***
The storm hits at 5:47 p.m.
One minute I’m standing at my window watching the sky darken, and the next there’s a crack of thunder so loud it rattles the glass, followed by rain coming down in sheets so thick I can barely see the building across the street.
At 6:15, the power goes out.
I’m digging through my kitchen drawer for candles when I hear the knock at my door.
Adrian is standing in the hallway with a battery-powered space heater tucked under one arm, a picnic basket in the other hand, and water dripping from every inch of him.
“The whole city’s out,” he says. “I listened to the radio on the way over. They’re saying it could be hours.”
“So you brought a picnic?”
“I brought provisions.” He steps inside, shaking water from his hair. “Wine, cheese, bread, that olive tapenade you like. And candles…” He pulls a bag of tea lights from his coat pocket. “I wasn’t sure if you had any.”
“I have three. One of them is a birthday candle from two years ago.”
“Then it’s a good thing I brought twenty.”
We light candles until my apartment glows like a cave, flickering shadows dancing across the walls. Adrian sets up the space heater, it hums quietly, pushing out warmth, and spreads a blanket on the floor.
“Not the most romantic setting,” he says, pouring wine into two mismatched glasses. “But I brought wine to see my wife. I wasn’t going to let a blackout stop me.”
I sit down across from him, accepting the glass. The wine is good, better than good, and I realize with a start that it’s the same vintage we had at our wedding. He remembered.
“We need to talk,” I say. “Really talk. About everything.”
“I know.”
“Not about Camille. About before.”
He sets down his glass. “Okay.”
“I was already pulling away before the kiss happened. Did you know that?”
“I suspected.”
“I’d stopped trusting you. Not because I thought you were cheating, I didn’t, not really, but because you weren’t there. You were physically present, but you were never really with me. And I started to believe that was all I was ever going to get.”
“Elena…”
“Let me finish.” I take a breath. “When I saw her kiss you through that window, part of me wasn’t even surprised.
Part of me had been waiting for something like that to happen.
Because if you didn’t see me, didn’t value me, didn’t prioritize me, why wouldn’t you eventually find someone who made you feel something more? ”
The candlelight flickers across his face. He looks devastated.
“I did that,” he says quietly. “I made you feel that way.”
“Yes.”
“I was so focused on the company, on being successful, on not becoming my father…” He stops.
Starts again. “My father was a failure. Did I ever tell you that? He ran Vale Industries into the ground before I took over. I spent five years cleaning up his mess, proving I was different, building something he never could. And somewhere in all that proving, I forgot why I was doing it.”
“Why were you doing it?”
“So I could be someone worthy of you.” He laughs, hollow. “So I could build a life worth sharing. But then I got so lost in the building that I forgot to actually share it.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“No. It’s not.” He meets my eyes. “I’m not making excuses. I’m just telling you the truth. I was a terrible husband. I failed you in a thousand small ways that added up to something unforgivable. And by the time I realized what I’d lost, you were already gone.”
“I’m not gone.” The words surprise me. “I’m right here.”
“I know.” He reaches across the space between us, not quite touching. “And I don’t know what I did to deserve another chance, but I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to be present. I’m going to see you. I’m going to…”
“Adrian.”
“Yeah?”
“Stop talking.”
I kiss him.
***
It’s not a gentle kiss.
It’s the kind of kiss that’s been building for a month, for longer than that, if I’m honest. All those nights alone in my apartment, all those mornings waking up without him, all that wanting I refused to acknowledge because wanting felt too much like weakness.
I pour everything into this kiss. The anger and the grief and the terrible, shameful hope that maybe, maybe, we could find our way back to each other.