The CEO's Regret: You made me your lie, I become your Loss
Chapter 289: Don’t call Mummy
"No." It came out faster than he intended, and he heard it, and he softened it.
"No, sweetheart. Don’t call Mummy. We’re fine. I’ll talk to Mummy later, okay? I just..." He paused. Searched for something that was true and also manageable.
"I’ve been having a hard few days. But I’m okay. And I’m going to make you dinner." He managed a version of a partial, imperfect smile, the smile of a man using the available materials.
"What do you want? Tell me, and I’ll make it." Seren considered this with the gravity she brought to all decisions.
"Pasta," she said. "With the sauce from the jar because yours is better than from scratch and you always pretend it isn’t."
Something crossed his face that was not quite a smile and not quite a sob and lived precisely in the territory between them.
"Go change your uniform," he said.
She went.
Sebastian stood in the kitchen for a moment before he moved.
He stood at the counter with his hands flat on the surface and his head down, and he breathed just breathed, the deliberate inhalation of a man who is doing the basic maintenance required to function, who is reminding his body that the minimum available motion is still motion.
He thought about Amara.
He thought about her the way he always thought about her when Seren said something that was precisely, exactly the thing Amara would have said, the echo of her in the child they raised, the way certain expressions crossed Seren’s face and he could see, for a moment, the woman he had married and failed.
He thought about what she was doing right now, in the offices of the company that had been his father’s and was now hers, in the life that had continued and expanded while he sat in a chair in a dark room at three in the afternoon.
He thought about Kalian.
He thought about the night he had called Kalian with the plan, had laid it out with the particular persuasiveness of a man who had identified exactly which pressure points to press, who had looked at his grief and his jealousy and his pride and had thought, here is a way to use these things.
He had been drunk then too, or something like drunk, the specific intoxication of a man who has lost enough to want someone else to lose something also.
And now his mother was gone. And Demian was gone, his best friend, the person who had known him longest and most honestly, gone in the particular way of people who leave because they have finally seen something they cannot unsee.
And Amara was on the television asking for privacy about a separation that the ticker was calling a divorce, and his daughter had walked home from a school bus because her father had been in a chair with a bottle since noon.
He turned on the stove.
He got the pasta.
He got the jar of sauce, the good one, the one Seren had correctly identified as superior to his attempts from scratch, and he set it on the counter, and he filled a pot with water, and he did these things with the mechanical care of someone who has decided that the only available path forward is the next small task.
The kitchen was filled with the smell of something warm.
Upstairs, he could hear Seren moving around her room, the sound of a wardrobe, the specific thump of a school shoe being removed, the cheerful, self-contained noise of a child going about her routine.
He listened to it. He let it be the thing he held onto, the sound of his daughter’s ordinary movements in the house they still shared, the evidence that something he had not entirely destroyed was still here, still present, still making sounds above his head.
He was going to be better.
He did not know when. He did not know the exact mechanism by which a man extracted himself from the hole he had been digging for years and began to do something different with his hands.
But he was going to be better.
For the sound of those footsteps and for the great love he lost.
He stirred the sauce.
—
In a different part of the city, in a room that was not a kitchen and did not smell of anything warm, Kalian saw the news at exactly the moment it crossed the ticker on his screen.
VALE EMPIRE IN TURMOIL: WIFE CONFIRMS SEPARATION.
He read it once. He set down his glass.
And he smiled slowly, with the particular, private satisfaction of a man watching something he designed perform exactly as designed, each component moving in the sequence he had specified, the whole structure arriving at the conclusion he had been building toward for longer than anyone knew to look.
He picked up his phone. He looked at the name in his contacts.
Not yet. He set the phone down.
He looked at the ticker on the screen at Amara’s face in the footage they were playing, at the careful composure of a woman confirming nothing while implying everything, and he read it the way he read everything: for the information beneath the surface, for the thing being said inside the thing being said.
He read it.
He looked at it for a long time.
And if he had been a different kind of man, a more careful man, a less certain man, a man who had not spent three decades confusing his own intelligence for wisdom, he might have noticed the thing that was slightly wrong about it.
The composure.
Not the fact of it. The quality of it. The way Amara held the camera’s eye for exactly one beat too long, not the beat of a woman fighting tears, but the beat of a woman making sure she was being seen.
He might have noticed. He did not notice. He picked up his phone. He called his contact.
"It’s moving," he said when the line connected. "Prepare the next step."
He ended the call. He looked at the screen.
And somewhere across the city, in the kitchen of the Creed mansion, a man who had helped build this mess stirred pasta sauce for his daughter and listened to her footsteps above his head, and did not know that the woman on the television was not breaking.
She was aiming.