Chapter 4

At first, I just couldn't sleep.

I'd lie there in the dark turning things over — replaying conversations, reassembling sequences, looking for the moment I'd gotten it wrong. The judgment I'd passed felt enormous, irreversible. I needed to be sure I hadn't made an error. That I hadn't convicted an innocent man.

So I went back through everything.

Every text thread. Every late cancellation with its clean, reasonable explanation. Every time his name had appeared on my screen in the middle of the night marked business and I had believed it because believing it was easier than the alternative.

The further back I went, the worse it got.

By the third night I wasn't looking for exculpatory evidence anymore. I was just looking. The way you press a bruise to confirm it still hurts.

I started to hate him.

Six years. Six years of making myself smaller, more reasonable, less demanding — of swallowing the things that bothered me because I understood his world required a certain kind of woman beside him, and I had wanted to be that woman badly enough to sand down every rough edge I had. Six years, and he'd ended it in under four seconds on a phone call without once asking why my voice sounded like something had been taken out of it.

He'd cut the line and gone back to his shower.

At four in the morning on the fifth day I deleted every account, every thread, every contact variant I had for him. Then I went through the apartment with a trash bag — methodical, almost clinical — pulling his things from drawers and shelves and the back of the closet where his spare suits hung in their dry-cleaning bags. A second jacket. A backup piece he'd left in my nightstand. The Porto family cufflinks he'd set on my bathroom counter and never retrieved.

I dropped the bag down the trash chute at the end of the hall and stood there listening to it fall.

I thought I'd feel something release.

Instead I just felt the specific aftermath of killing something you've been trying to kill for a long time — the discovery that the blood was partly yours.

I went back to work.

The Porto organization's legitimate holdings included three property development firms, a shipping consultancy, and a private equity vehicle that existed primarily to move money between the other things. I managed contracts for the development arm. I was good at it. I showed up on time and answered emails and sat through budget reviews without visibly unraveling.

Only I knew about the hollow place. The section of chest wall that had been load-bearing for six years and was now just — gone. You don't notice what something's holding up until it isn't there anymore.

The all-hands meeting was on a Thursday.

Caelian was there because Caelian was always there — at the front of every room he entered, occupying it the way the Porto Don occupied every room, with that particular gravity that made the air reorganize itself around him. He looked exactly as he always looked. Composed. Unhurried. Faintly, almost imperceptibly satisfied with how things were arranged.

If losing me had cost him anything, his face had not received the memo.

Sienna was across the conference table. At one point she looked up at him over the rim of her water glass — quick, private, the specific frequency of two people communicating without speaking — and the color in her cheeks shifted by a degree that only someone watching for it would catch.

I was watching for it.

I stopped sleeping entirely.

Caelian didn't use social media — he considered it a liability, a position I'd always privately found both paranoid and correct. Sienna did. I became fluent in her. I learned her posting patterns, her caption habits, the specific vocabulary she used when she was performing contentment versus when something had actually pleased her. I cross-referenced timestamps. I noted locations.

I was aware, on some functional level, that this was not a healthy use of my evenings.

I kept doing it.

I stopped eating at some point. Not intentionally. Food just stopped being something I remembered to want. Coffee replaced most of it. My suits started fitting differently.

On day twenty-nine I passed out at my desk.

The hospital was private — the kind the Porto organization maintained accounts with for exactly the situations their people got themselves into. I came around in a room that smelled of antiseptic and fresh flowers and found an IV in my arm and a nurse who had the careful neutrality of someone paid well for discretion.

Low blood sugar, she said. Dehydration. When did I last eat a full meal.

I didn't answer that.

I heard him before I saw him — the particular quality of footfall that meant someone who moved through spaces with absolute authority, who had never once had to announce himself because rooms had always already known he was coming.

Caelian settled into the chair beside the bed without asking if it was all right. He was in his good charcoal suit, no tie, looking like a man who had stepped out of something important to handle something minor. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees.

On his right hand, the matching band to the one I'd dropped in my bathroom trash two weeks ago turned slowly between his fingers. Once. Twice.

He looked at me for a long moment.

"You've lost weight, Leah."

Three words. Said with the particular intimacy of a man who had spent years learning the exact geometry of someone and could therefore identify every change.

I looked at the IV line running into the back of my hand. At the way the afternoon light came through the window blinds in thin even strips. At everything in the room that wasn't his face.

The thing I'd been compressing for twenty-nine days moved up through my chest without asking permission.

"I'm sorry," I said.

My voice was ruined. I hadn't intended to say it. I hadn't known I was going to say it until it was already in the air between us, sitting there like something I couldn't take back.

Caelian Porto looked at me.

And smiled — slow, quiet, the smile of a man who had placed a bet a long time ago and just watched it pay out exactly as calculated.

He reached over and set the ring on the blanket beside my hand.

He didn't say I told you so. He didn't need to.

That was how we got back together. Not with an apology from him. Not with an explanation, or an accounting, or anything resembling a reckoning.

Just me in a hospital bed saying sorry, and him smiling like he'd known all along I would.