Wanted All Along

Chapter Nine

The second-round interview happened the following week, and this time it wasn’t over video.

Amara flew out on a Wednesday morning, her stomach in knots the entire flight, rehearsing answers she’d already rehearsed a dozen times the night before. Kian offered to pick her up from the airport, and she’d said no, gently, wanting to walk into this particular meeting as herself and not as anyone’s guest. He’d understood without arguing, which she was starting to recognize as one of the things she liked most about him—how rarely he made her explain herself twice.

The interview took most of the afternoon, a rotation of meetings with people who would eventually be her colleagues if this went the way she hoped, each conversation a little less nerve-wracking than the last as she settled into the rhythm of talking about work she actually knew how to do well. By the time she left the building, sunlight slanting low across the glass towers, she felt something she hadn’t expected to feel this cleanly: certainty. Not about the outcome, but about the fact that she wanted it, fully and without reservation, regardless of what happened with Kian.

She was still holding onto that feeling, warm and solid in her chest, when she turned the corner toward the café where she was meeting him for dinner and saw him already there, standing outside the entrance—except he wasn’t alone.

The woman beside him was striking in an effortless, expensive way, dark hair pulled back from a face that looked like it had never once been caught off guard, dressed in something simple that clearly cost more than Amara’s entire outfit. She stood close to Kian, one hand resting lightly on his forearm as she said something that made him offer a polite, closed-off smile Amara recognized from the very beginning of their own story—the version of him that existed before he let anyone in.

Amara slowed her steps, an instinct she didn’t examine, and watched a moment longer than she probably should have. Kian’s posture was stiff, his eyes doing a quick, searching sweep of the street like a man looking for an exit, or for her.

He found her.

His whole demeanor shifted the second he did—shoulders dropping slightly, the polite smile falling away into something more genuine—and he said something to the woman that made her turn, following his gaze.

“Amara.” He crossed the distance between them quickly, closing his hand around hers in a gesture that felt deliberately, almost defiantly public. “This is Selena. Selena, Amara.”

Selena’s smile was immediate and warm, disarmingly so, the kind of smile that made Amara feel briefly foolish for the unease that had settled in her chest the moment she saw them together. “So this is Amara,” Selena said, her voice smooth, cultured, pleasant in a way that gave Amara absolutely nothing to push against. “Kian’s mentioned you. Well—Kian’s mother has mentioned you, mostly. Kian’s rather private about his personal life these days.”

“Selena works with my mother’s foundation,” Kian said, an explanation that sounded slightly too quick, too rehearsed. “We ran into each other outside.”

“We did.” Selena’s eyes moved over Amara with a warmth that somehow still managed to feel like an assessment, quick and thorough despite the pleasant expression that never wavered. “It’s lovely to finally meet you. I hope the second round went well? Kian mentioned you were interviewing today.”

“It went well, thank you.”

“Wonderful.” Selena’s smile deepened, and for just a moment, something flickered behind it that Amara couldn’t quite name—there and gone too fast to be certain of. “It’ll be nice, having you around more often. I know Kian’s mother will be pleased. She does worry about him working himself into the ground, all alone in that big apartment.” A small, light laugh, aimed at Kian rather than Amara. “Someone should really make sure he eats an actual dinner now and then.”

“I manage fine,” Kian said, an edge in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

“Of course you do.” Selena’s tone stayed easy, unbothered, already smoothing over whatever tension her comment had created. “Well. I won’t keep you both—I’m sure you have plans.” Her eyes found Amara’s again, warm and steady. “It really was lovely meeting you, Amara. I do hope we’ll see more of each other.”

She left with an easy wave, heels clicking against the pavement, and Amara watched her go with the distinct, uncomfortable sense of having just lost a round of a game she hadn’t known she was playing.

“That was a coincidence,” Kian said, once they were seated inside the café, his voice carrying a defensiveness Amara hadn’t asked for yet. “I didn’t plan that.”

“I believe you.” And she mostly did. What unsettled her wasn’t the run-in itself, but the ease of it—the effortless, practiced warmth Selena had turned on like a light switch, the small comment about him eating dinner alone that had somehow managed to sound caring while making Amara feel, briefly, like an outsider looking in on a life that had already been mapped out without her.

“She’s not what you’re imagining,” Kian said, watching her face carefully. “She’s not scheming or anything. She’s just—very good at that. Social things. My mother adores her.”

“I could tell.” Amara turned her water glass slowly on the table, choosing her next words with care. “She seems nice.”

“But?”

“But nothing. She seems nice.” Amara looked up, meeting his eyes directly. “I just noticed you got tense the second she mentioned your mother. And that you introduced her as working with your mother’s foundation before you told me anything else about her. Like that was the important part.”

Kian was quiet for a moment, something working behind his expression. “It is the important part,” he admitted finally. “It’s the only reason she’s in my life at all. My mother’s engineered exactly enough overlap between us that I run into her more than I’d like, always framed as coincidence, always easy to explain away individually.” He exhaled, frustration bleeding into his voice. “I know how it looks. I know how she comes across—easy, harmless, exactly the kind of woman my family would pick for me. I’m telling you, honestly, there’s nothing there. There’s never been anything there.”

“I believe you,” Amara said again, and meant it. “I’m just telling you what I noticed. That’s all.”

He reached across the table and took her hand, his thumb tracing slow, steadying circles against her knuckles. “I’ll handle it,” he said. “Whatever this turns into. I promise you that.”

Amara nodded, wanting to believe him completely, and mostly did. But some small, quiet part of her—the part that had learned, the hard way, to trust what she noticed over what she was told—filed away the warmth in Selena’s smile, and the flicker underneath it, for later.

The rest of dinner passed easily enough, Kian steering the conversation back to the interview, asking careful, genuine questions about how it had gone, and Amara let herself be pulled back into the good feeling from earlier in the day, the certainty that had nothing to do with him or his family or the woman who’d appeared so seamlessly outside the café. By the time they left, hands linked together as they walked back toward his apartment, the unease had softened into something more manageable, tucked into a corner of her mind rather than sitting front and center.

Still, later that night, lying awake beside him while he slept, Amara found herself replaying the encounter in careful detail—the way Selena’s compliment about dinner had somehow implied neglect, the way her warmth had never once wavered even as she delivered something that landed like a small, precise cut. It wasn’t anything Amara could point to directly. That, she suspected, was exactly the point.

She thought about texting her sister, then decided against it, not wanting to give the moment more weight than it had earned yet. Instead she turned onto her side, watching Kian’s steady breathing in the dark, and told herself that whatever this turned into, she wasn’t going to make herself small trying to avoid it. She’d done enough of that already, with someone who deserved it far less than this.

She fell asleep eventually, unresolved, the flicker behind Selena’s smile still sitting somewhere in the back of her mind, waiting.