Wanted All Along

Chapter Eight

The email came on a Wednesday, subject line polite and businesslike, the kind of message that could have contained good news or bad news in equal measure. Amara stared at it in her inbox for a full minute before opening it, her heart doing something complicated in her chest.

Thank you for your application. We were impressed by your experience and would like to schedule a first-round interview.

She read it three times before she let herself believe it. Then she closed her laptop, sat back in her desk chair, and allowed herself exactly ninety seconds of quiet, private excitement before the next thought arrived, less welcome than the first: she still hadn’t told Kian she’d applied.

It wasn’t that she was hiding it, exactly. She told herself that several times over the following hour, drafting and deleting a text that felt too casual for something this significant and too significant for a text at all. In the end, she called him instead, catching him between meetings judging by the brief, distracted greeting before his voice sharpened into full attention.

“I applied,” she said, without preamble. “For the position. I have an interview next week.”

There was a pause on the line, brief but noticeable. “You applied,” he repeated, like he was making sure he’d heard correctly. “When?”

“Last Friday. I didn’t want to tell you until it felt real. In case nothing came of it.”

“Amara.” Something in his voice had gone soft, unguarded in a way that made her chest tighten. “That’s incredible. I mean that. Regardless of what happens with us, you’d be excellent in that role.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I’m not surprised you’d be good at it. I’m surprised you didn’t tell me the moment you decided.” A beat. “I would have wanted to know. Not to interfere. Just—to know.”

“I needed it to be mine first,” she admitted. “Before it became about us.”

He was quiet again, and when he spoke, his voice carried something careful, like he was choosing the words deliberately. “I understand that. I do. I just want you to know you don’t have to keep things from me to protect them. I’m not going to take anything away from you by knowing about it.”

Amara felt something loosen in her chest, some old, defensive posture she hadn’t fully realized she was still holding. “Noted,” she said softly, echoing the word he’d used on the island the first night they met, and heard him laugh, low and warm, on the other end of the line.

The interview was the following Thursday, conducted over video since flying out for a first round felt premature to both of them. Amara spent the morning rehearsing answers in the mirror, trying on three different outfits before settling on the first one she’d picked, and arrived at her laptop five minutes early with her hands only slightly trembling.

It went well. Better than well, if she trusted her own read of the hiring manager’s expression, a woman named Priya who asked sharp, thoughtful questions and seemed genuinely engaged rather than simply working through a checklist. By the end of the forty-five minutes, Priya was talking about next steps with a warmth that felt like a good sign, mentioning a second round with the broader team the following week.

Amara called Kian the moment it ended, still riding the adrenaline.

“I think it went well,” she said, breathless. “Really well, actually.”

“Tell me everything.” And he listened—actually listened, not the half-attention she’d grown used to from Daniel over two years, but full, present focus, asking follow-up questions that proved he’d absorbed every detail. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment. “I’m proud of you,” he said finally. “Not because of what it means for us. Because of what it took for you to get here.”

“You’re going soft on me, Kian.”

“Don’t tell anyone.” A small, private laugh. “I have a reputation to maintain.”

That reputation came up again a few days later, in a conversation that started casually and ended somewhere Amara hadn’t expected. They were on the phone, Kian walking somewhere judging by the ambient street noise, when he mentioned, almost offhand, that his parents were hosting a dinner the following month.

“They do this thing every few months,” he said. “Family, a few business associates, people they think I should know better. It’s mostly tedious.”

“Sounds fun.”

“It’s really not.” A pause, longer than the comment warranted. “My mother’s been asking about you. Not directly. She has a way of asking around things instead of about them.”

Amara felt something shift, a small unease she couldn’t immediately name. “What does that mean?”

“It means she knows I’ve been flying somewhere most weekends, and she has opinions about where that time could be better spent.” His voice had gone carefully neutral, the tone she recognized now as the one he used when he was managing something rather than simply saying it. “My family has certain expectations. About who I spend my time with. What that person’s background looks like. It’s old-fashioned, and it’s exhausting, and I’ve spent most of my adult life either fighting it or avoiding it entirely.”

“Which one are you doing now?”

“I don’t know yet.” He said it honestly, which she appreciated even as it unsettled her. “I haven’t told them much about you. Not because I’m ashamed, Amara, I want to be clear about that. I just haven’t figured out how to bring you into that part of my life without it becoming a whole production. My mother’s already introduced me to someone she considers a better fit for that dinner circuit. A family friend. Selena.”

The name landed strangely, a small, cold weight Amara hadn’t expected. “A better fit,” she repeated.

“Her words, not mine.” Something sharpened in his voice, defensive on her behalf. “I’m telling you this because I don’t want you finding out some other way and wondering why I didn’t mention it. Nothing’s happened. Nothing’s going to happen. I just wanted you to know the shape of what I’m dealing with, on my end, while you’re dealing with interviews on yours.”

Amara sat with that for a long moment, turning it over. It wasn’t jealousy, exactly, that she felt—not yet. It was something closer to recognition, the uncomfortable awareness that his world came with its own version of the smallness she’d spent so long trying to escape, just wearing more expensive clothes.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said finally. “I’d rather know the whole shape of things too.”

“Good.” His voice softened again, some of the tension easing out of it. “Because I meant what I said before. About figuring out something better. I intend to. Even if my family takes some convincing.”

Amara hung up a while later with a strange, unsettled feeling she couldn’t quite shake, one that had nothing to do with the interview she was still waiting to hear back on, and everything to do with a name she’d have plenty more reason to think about before this was over.

She sat on her couch a long time after the call ended, the apartment quiet around her, and found herself thinking not about Selena directly, but about the shape of the life Kian was describing—dinners with expectations attached, a family that measured worth in ways she’d never had to think about before, a “better fit” that apparently existed independent of whether he actually wanted her there. It was a different kind of pressure than anything Daniel had ever put on her, but it was pressure all the same, the particular exhaustion of being weighed against a version of yourself someone else had already decided was insufficient.

She thought about texting Kian something reassuring, some line meant to smooth over the unease she could tell he’d been bracing for when he brought it up. Instead, she set the phone down and let herself sit with the discomfort honestly, the way she was trying to sit with everything honestly now instead of editing it into something more convenient.

Her phone buzzed once more before she went to bed, a final message from him that night.

For what it’s worth—I’ve never once thought Selena was a better fit for anything. My family thinks in spreadsheets. I don’t intend to let them build one about my life.

Amara read it twice, some of the unease easing, though not all of it. She had a feeling, reading it, that this particular spreadsheet wasn’t finished being built yet, and that she was about to become one of its more inconvenient variables.