Wanted All Along

Chapter Ten

Maya showed up at Amara’s apartment two days after the run-in with Selena, a bottle of wine in one hand and a look on her face that meant she’d already heard the highlights and wasn’t leaving until she got the details.

“Jade called me,” Maya announced, letting herself in with the ease of someone who’d had a key for years. “Said you sounded weird on the phone. So. Weird how?”

“I don’t sound weird.”

“You sound like a woman who met her boyfriend’s future stepmother-in-law’s pick for him and is pretending it didn’t bother her.” Maya set the wine on the counter and started opening cabinets for glasses, familiar enough with the space to skip asking. “Talk.”

Amara sighed, dropping onto a stool at the counter. There was something about Maya that made pretending pointless—they’d been friends since college, long before Daniel, long before any of this, and Maya had never once let her get away with performing fine when she wasn’t. Jade loved her fiercely and worried about her the way family did, careful and protective. Maya loved her by refusing to let her hide.

“She was nice,” Amara said. “That’s the problem. She was so nice I can’t even point to what bothered me.”

“Nice how? Like genuinely nice, or nice like she’s auditioning for a part?”

“The second one. Maybe.” Amara poured the wine Maya handed her, turning the glass slowly. “She made this comment about Kian eating dinner alone, like she was worried about him, but it landed like—like I wasn’t taking care of him properly. Except I hadn’t even known there was a version of caring for him that involved dinner logistics until she brought it up.”

“That’s not nice. That’s surgical.” Maya took the seat across from her, unimpressed in the specific way she got when someone was messing with one of her people. “That’s a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing and has decided plausible deniability is more useful than being obvious about it.”

“Kian says she’s harmless. That his family just keeps engineering these run-ins and there’s nothing actually there.”

“Do you believe him?”

Amara considered the question honestly. “I believe he means it,” she said finally. “I don’t know if that’s the same as it being true. He doesn’t see what I saw. He’s too close to it—it’s his mother, his whole family. I don’t think he’s lying to me. I think he might just not be looking hard enough.”

Maya nodded slowly, swirling her wine. “That tracks with what you’ve told me about him. Guy sounds like he’s spent his whole life managing his family instead of actually seeing them clearly. Doesn’t mean he’s wrong that nothing’s happened. Just means he might not notice when something starts to.”

“Comforting.”

“I’m not here to comfort you. I’m here to make sure you’re seeing this clearly too.” Maya’s voice softened, some of the sharpness giving way to something more careful. “I like that you sound happy, Amara. Genuinely. I haven’t heard you talk about anyone the way you talk about him, not even at the start with Daniel. I just want you going into whatever this becomes with your eyes open. Not because I don’t trust him. Because I trust you less to notice a problem once you’ve already decided you love someone.”

Amara didn’t have a good response to that, mostly because it was true. She’d missed things with Daniel for two years, convinced herself around every small inconsistency because the alternative—being alone, being wrong about someone again—had felt worse than staying comfortably unaware.

“I’m not going to do that again,” she said quietly, more to herself than to Maya.

“I know. That’s why I’m telling you what I actually think, instead of just agreeing with whatever you want to hear.” Maya reached over and squeezed her hand. “Now. Tell me about the interview. The actually good part of your week.”

Amara called Jade that night, after Maya had gone home, needing the different kind of comfort her sister offered—less blunt, more grounding, the particular reassurance of someone who’d known her since childhood and loved her without needing to interrogate every detail first.

“Maya says you had a rough few days,” Jade said, settling into the familiar, easy rhythm they always fell into on the phone.

“Rough is dramatic. Complicated, maybe.”

“With Kian, or with his family?”

“Both. Neither. I don’t know yet.” Amara curled up on her couch, phone pressed to her ear the way she had a thousand times growing up, telling Jade things she hadn’t been ready to say out loud to anyone else first. “I met the woman his family wants him with. She was perfectly nice and it still felt like being sized up for a job I hadn’t applied for.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“It was.” Amara was quiet a moment. “Can I ask you something? Honestly?”

“Always.”

“Do you think I’m doing the right thing? Applying for that job, moving my whole life for someone I’ve known four months?”

Jade didn’t answer right away, which Amara appreciated—she never rushed an answer just to fill silence, not even over the phone. “I think you’re doing the thing you actually want to do,” Jade said finally, “which is different from asking whether it’s right. Nobody can promise you right, Amara. I watched you spend two years with Daniel doing everything that was supposed to be safe, and it wasn’t right either, was it?”

“No,” Amara admitted. “It really wasn’t.”

“So maybe safe was never actually the thing to aim for. Maybe the thing to aim for is honest. Are you being honest with yourself about what you want?”

Amara thought about the market with the oranges, about Kian’s hand at the small of her back, about the strange, unsettled feeling Selena had left behind that she still hadn’t fully named. “I think so,” she said. “Most of the time.”

“Then that’s enough for now.” Jade’s voice warmed, the particular softness she reserved for moments like this. “You don’t have to have it all figured out, Amara. You just have to keep choosing honestly, one decision at a time. That’s all any of us are doing.”

Amara held onto that long after they hung up, turning it over the way she’d turned over Maya’s warning earlier, two different kinds of love offering two different kinds of truth, both of them, she suspected, exactly what she needed to hear.

She thought, lying in bed later, about how different the two conversations had felt—Maya’s sharp, protective honesty, refusing to let her explain away what she’d noticed, and Jade’s quieter steadiness over the phone, less concerned with the specifics of Selena and more focused on whether Amara was still choosing for herself. She was grateful, suddenly and fully, for both of them, for having people in her life who loved her enough to tell her the truth instead of just what would make the moment easier.

She wondered, briefly, what it said about Kian’s life that he didn’t seem to have anyone playing either role for him—no one pushing back on his family’s version of things, no one asking him honestly whether he was choosing or simply managing. He’d mentioned a brother and sister exactly once, in passing, months ago, and never brought them up again. She made a note to ask about that, properly, the next time they were together. It seemed, suddenly, like an important thing to know—not just who stood against him, but who, if anyone, stood beside him.

Her phone buzzed once more before she fell asleep, Kian’s name lighting up the screen. Thinking about you. Hope today was good.

She smiled, typing back before sleep pulled her under. It was. Ask me about it properly this weekend. There’s a lot to catch you up on.

Can’t wait, he wrote back. Also—I want you to meet my brother. He’s the only one in my family I actually trust to be honest with you instead of managing you.

Amara read that twice, something warm settling in her chest, and fell asleep before she could type a reply, the phone still glowing faintly on the pillow beside her.