She Rejected Him First

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Celeste was on her second cup of tea when the mail notification came through.

She looked at her phone from across the kitchen counter, not reaching for it immediately, the way she had trained herself to do in the last few hours. She had been doing that, putting small distances between herself and her impulses, giving herself the few seconds of space that kept her from reacting to things before she had processed them properly.

She picked up the phone.

It was from the mail forwarding service the program used. Automated, clean, the kind of message that was three lines and expected nothing back.

*Dear Ms. Smith, you have received two packages and one parcel addressed to your alias at the program's receiving address. Per your updated forwarding request dated this morning, all items will be redirected to your registered residential address. Estimated delivery: within the day. Please ensure someone is available to receive.*

She set the phone back down.

The forwarding request she had filed that morning, the one that redirected everything from the program's address to the apartment under her real name, had processed faster than she expected. She had not thought much about it when she submitted it. It was administrative. Practical. One of the small logistical adjustments that came with the larger decision she had made.

She had not thought about what would be in those packages.

She thought about it now.

Two packages and a parcel. The program occasionally sent documentation in physical form, but they had her alias email for most things and rarely used the postal service for anything urgent. Which meant the packages were personal. Which meant someone had sent them.

She pulled her knees up onto the kitchen chair and wrapped both hands around her mug.

They had sent gifts.

She had woken up yesterday morning, her actual birthday, and spent the day in the apartment arranging her things and waiting for her lawyer's call and making herself not look at her phone, and the whole time she had been carrying the quiet, furious knowledge that nobody from her family had called. Not Lucian. Not Odette. Not Prince. The only message she had received was Amber's, which had been sent with the specific precision of someone who knew exactly how much it would land and exactly when to send it.

She had not let herself cry. She had been too angry for that, and then she had been too tired, and by the time the anger and the exhaustion had both settled she had been left with something quieter and more permanent that she did not have a clean name for.

And now there were packages.

She pressed her lips together and looked out the window at the Millbrook skyline, the late afternoon light cutting across the buildings in long diagonals, everything still and ordinary and unhelpful.

They had not called because they thought she was still in the other timezone. She understood that now, turning it over slowly in her mind the way you turned over an object you had initially misidentified to see it properly. The program's location ran a full twenty-four hours behind. If today was the twenty-eighth for them, yesterday was still the twenty-seventh on her end, which meant her birthday, in their calculation, had been today. They had planned around that. They had sent gifts through the mail timed to arrive on what they believed was the correct day, and they had called this morning, and Odette had asked about the ribbon on her wrapping and Prince had asked about his drawing on the box.

They had remembered. They had planned. They had just miscalculated by a timezone, and she had spent an entire day carrying the weight of a conclusion she had reached without all of the information.

This did not fix anything.

A timezone error explained the birthday. It did not explain five years. It did not explain Amber living in her house for a month while she was away. It did not explain the photograph, or the video, or the particular ease with which her children had folded themselves around another woman while their mother was absent and nobody had seemed to think that was something worth mentioning.

The gifts arrived at half past four.

Two packages from the children, just as she had pictured from the phone call. Odette's was wrapped in layers of delicate tissue paper in pale gold, tied with a satin ribbon that had clearly been redone multiple times until the bow sat exactly right. Prince's was a sturdy box with a drawing across the top in black marker, geometric shapes arranged in a pattern that was either deeply intentional or beautifully accidental, with a small note taped to the side that read, *this is art, not mess, Odette is wrong.*

She opened them both at the kitchen table.

Odette had sent a bracelet, thin and silver with a small moon charm on it, and a card written in her careful, slightly formal handwriting that said, *Mum, I picked this because the lady at the shop said it was called a moonlight bracelet and I thought that was your name. I hope you like it. Come home soon. Love, Odette.*

Prince had sent a photograph in a frame he had painted himself, the edges uneven and enthusiastic, in a blue that was slightly too bright. The photograph was the four of them from two years ago, a trip they had taken to the coast, and in it Celeste was laughing at something off camera and Prince had his arms around her waist and was laughing too, his face half buried in her side.

She held it for a long time.

Then there was Lucian's parcel. Larger than the other two, unmarked except for her alias in his handwriting on the front.

She opened it.

Inside was a set of three things, each wrapped individually. The first was a first edition of a novel she had mentioned once, in passing, in a conversation she had half forgotten, saying she had always meant to find a copy but never had. The second was a small bottle of a perfume that had been discontinued three years ago, one she had worn when they first married and had not been able to replace since. The third was a document wallet, leather, with her initials embossed on the front in gold, and inside it a certificate of completion for a specialist course she had been trying to access for two years that had a perpetual waiting list.

He had gotten her off the waiting list. She did not know how. She suspected she did not want to know how.