The CEO's Regret: You made me your lie, I become your Loss
Chapter 291: Thursday night
Julian held her the way he had been wanting to hold her since the hallway, since the moment he had blown her that kiss and walked out the front door of the Pedro mansion and gotten into a car and driven away from her, which had been the correct thing to do and had felt, every mile of it, like the wrong thing.
He held her with the full and unguarded weight of everything the day had required them not to show each other, and she held him back with the same weight, and for a long moment neither of them said anything because the holding was already saying it.
The water moved below them.
The city was behind them, doing its city things, running its tickers, constructing its narratives. Out here, it was only the sound of the sea and the particular quality of the air and the two of them at the railing, present to each other in the way they had not been permitted to be present all day.
He pulled back enough to look at her face.
He kissed her.
Not the stage kiss from the hallway, not the deposit against what was about to be spent. The real kind.
The kind that had nothing to do with Kalian or the performance or the spy in the house or the ticker at the bottom of the screen.
The kind that was simply true, simply them, simply the fact of two people who had found each other and had decided, repeatedly and under increasing pressure, to keep finding each other.
She made a small sound against his mouth. He pulled her closer.
When they separated, he kept his forehead against hers for a moment, his hands on her face, the sea moving below them.
"I know we’re only pretending," he said.
His voice was quiet. Private. The voice he used in no other context.
"But watching it unfold today," He stopped. Found the words.
"It scared me, Amara. Which I did not expect." He looked at her. "Seeing your face on those screens. Hearing them say what they were saying. Knowing that somewhere Kalian was watching it and believing it." He shook his head slightly.
"I know it’s not real. I know exactly what we’re doing and why. But there was a moment today when I sat at my desk, and I thought..."
He stopped again.
She waited.
"I thought about what it would actually mean," he said.
"If it were true. If this were actually..." He could not finish the sentence, because the sentence went somewhere he refused to follow it, somewhere that lived in the territory of a world he would not construct in his own mind even hypothetically.
"I love you so much, Amara." The words came simply, without architecture.
"I cannot imagine. I genuinely cannot locate, in any version of reality available to me, what my life looks like without you and our babies in it as a family."
She looked at him. Her eyes were bright.
She reached up and covered his hands with hers, his hands that were still holding her face, and she held them there.
"Then stop imagining it," she said. Softly.
"Because it’s not real. And it’s not going to be real." She turned her face slightly to press her lips against his palm.
"We are going to get our daughter back. And we are going to take Kalian apart with his own voice on a recording." She looked at him.
"And then we are going to go home. All of us. Together."
He looked at her.
Something in his chest that had been tight since the hallway released, slowly, the way things release when they find the right key.
He smiled.
She smiled back the real one, the one that was not available for performances or boardrooms or hallways with ears, and for a moment they were simply two people at a seaside on a Thursday evening, which was the most ordinary thing in the world and also the most important thing he had.
"I don’t want to go back to pretending," she said. "Even for another day. Even knowing why."
"I know." He tucked her closer into him, her back against his chest, both of them facing the water. "Soon."
"How soon?"
He thought about Marcus. About the nurse and the footage editor in their separate, comfortable, off-book locations. About the recording on Amara’s laptop. About Kalian’s men, who did not know Julian’s men were behind them.
"Soon enough," he said. She leaned back into him.
The water moved. The city ran its tickets behind them.
Neither of them saw, in the dark of the coastal path, thirty meters back behind the salt-worn railing and the low scrub that grew along the cliff edge, the figure who had been there since before Amara had arrived.
Still. Patient. Phone raised. The shutter made no sound. It did not need to.
Yvette sat in the car for a long time after she lowered the phone.
The screen had gone dark, but the image had not it stayed on the inside of her eyes with the particular persistence of things seen at the wrong moment, at the moment you least wanted to see them and most needed to understand them.
Julian’s hands on Amara’s face. Amara is leaning into him. The sea behind them and the way they stood against it, like something that had been true for a very long time and intended to remain true regardless of what the tickers said or what the cameras captured, was designed to suggest.
She had known.
Some part of her had known from the moment she walked into the Pedro mansion and looked at Julian’s face, not at her, at Amara, and understood, in the way that women understand certain things about men who love passionately, that whatever Julian Vale felt for his wife was not the kind of thing that separated.
The news had said divorce.
The cameras had shown Amara’s face, carefully composed, almost-but-not-quite breaking.
And Yvette had wanted to believe it, had felt, underneath the wanting, the complicated texture of someone who knows they are wanting the wrong thing and cannot entirely stop.