CHAPTER TWO: Let Him Wonder
1600 Words
The party is exactly as I remember — cream tablecloths, string lights, the kind of music that is trying very hard to be background noise and failing because the acoustics in St. Agnes is aggressively designed for amplification.
Crystal is there. She spots me before I've crossed the threshold and her face does the thing it always did — that instant brightness, genuine and performed in equal, unknowable measure. In my first life I could never tell them apart. Now I clock it immediately: a half-second delay in the smile that the eyes don't quite reach.
"Nova!" She is crossing the room. She is wearing a green dress. Of course she is wearing a green dress. "You're soaked — did you walk from the subway? I told you to take the car service—"
"I like the rain," I say, and I smile at her, and the smile is warm and real and says nothing of what I know, because that is how this works. That is how this has to work. "You look beautiful, Crystal."
She does. I am not pretending. Crystal Song is objectively stunning and also, I now know, quietly catastrophic, and both of these things can exist simultaneously. I have had eight years and one death to come to terms with that.
She hugs me. I hug her back. I breathe through the complicated feeling of embracing someone you once loved completely and now love the way you love a chess piece — carefully, from a distance, with your eye on the board.
"Come on," she says, taking my hand. "There are people I want you to meet."
Here we go.
She leads me through the room. I follow, smiling at the right moments, cataloguing exits and faces and the precise geography of this space because I am not, anymore, someone who walks into rooms without knowing where the doors are.
And then Crystal stops.
And there he is.
Damien Cole at twenty-eight is not quite what Damien Cole at thirty-one would become — less polished, less armored, the edges of him not yet fully sharpened into the weapon he would turn himself into over the years. He is standing with one hand in his jacket pocket and the other loosely holding the untouched sparkling water, and he is half-listening to the man beside him while his eyes sweep the room with the automatic, assessing efficiency of someone who calculates threats without thinking about it.
His eyes reach me.
In my first life, this was the moment I felt my stomach drop.
This time?
I feel it too — God help me, I feel it too, some treacherous, body-level response that apparently survived death and rebirth intact, some cellular-level memory that my heart keeps even when my head knows better. Damien Cole is still the most infuriating, architecturally perfect, emotionally catastrophic person I have ever met, and apparently knowing he will break your heart does not make the initial socket-hit of him any less destabilizing.
I do not let it show.
I let my face settle into an expression of mild, pleasant interest — the expression of a woman who has looked at many handsome men and is not particularly overwhelmed by this one — and I let Crystal complete the introduction.
"Damien, this is Nova Calloway — my best friend. Nova, Damien Cole. His family's company just partnered with the Ashfords for the Meridian development."
"Mr. Cole," I say.
In my first life, I said "Hi" like a child at a birthday party.
In this life, I extend my hand and I shake his with exactly the right pressure and I look directly into those grey eyes without flinching, and I smile the smile that says you are not the most interesting thing in this room, but I'm happy to be polite about it.
Something shifts in his expression. A fraction. An adjustment, like a man recalibrating a calculation that just produced an unexpected result.
"Ms. Calloway," he says, and his voice is exactly as I remember — low and measured and built for boardrooms — and he holds my hand for exactly one second longer than necessary before releasing it.
Good, I think. Let him wonder.
Crystal looks between us. Crystal — who has just begun, though she doesn't know I know this, the slow and careful work of planning to take what is mine — clocks something in Damien's expression and I see the micro-tightening at the corner of her mouth.
I smile at her too.
"Crystal," someone calls from across the room. "The bride needs you!"
Crystal excuses herself with a look that promises she'll be back in two minutes, and then it is just me and Damien Cole, standing at the edge of a string-lit engagement party with a distance of three feet and approximately five years of catastrophic history that only I can see between us.
He speaks first.
"You arrived in the rain."
"I arrived," I correctedly. "The rain was a coincidence."
He looks at me for a moment — that grey assessment, that recalculation. Then, barely, the corner of his mouth moves.
"Fair point," he says.
And this — this tiny, almost-nothing exchange — is different from my first life. In my first life, he said: "You're soaked," and I laughed too loudly and said "Occupational hazard of no umbrella," and he looked faintly amused and already slightly bored.
This time, he looks at me like I am something he hasn't categorized yet.
Good.
My phone buzzes in my purse. I glance at it out of habit — and then I freeze.
The notification reads: MOM — Missed Call (3)
I stare at it.
I stare at it for three seconds too long and then I look up and Damien is watching me with an expression that has shifted from assessing to something else — something quieter.
"Excuse me," I say, and my voice comes out level even though something in my chest has just cracked straight open, "I need to take this."
I am already turning away when I hear him say, quietly, to my retreating back:
"It was nice to meet you, Ms. Calloway."
I don't turn around. I'm already pressing call, already walking toward the door, already in the corridor outside where the rain has started again, softer now, and when my mother picks up on the second ring and says — in that voice, the one I haven't heard in eight years, warm and exasperated and alive — "Nova, baby, where are you, I made jollof and it's getting cold" — I press my hand over my mouth and I do not cry.
I do not cry.
I breathe. I say: "I'm coming, Mom. I'll be home in twenty minutes."
And then I stand in the corridor with my back against the stone wall for exactly thirty seconds — I count them again — and I let myself feel everything.
All of it. Every year of it. Every Tuesday I missed her. Every holiday was the wrong kind of quiet. Every time I sat in Damien's enormous, cold house and thought: this is not home, this is not home, this is not—
When I get to thirty, I straighten. I push off the wall. I look at my phone.
There is a new notification. Not from my mother this time.
It is from a news alert I apparently had set up in this timeline — a business alert for Cole Industries. The headline reads:
COLE INDUSTRIES ANNOUNCES EMERGENCY BOARD MEETING — HOSTILE ACQUISITION RUMORS SURROUND COMPANY
I look at this for one very long second.
Interesting.
In my first life, Damien never told me about this — never told me there was a threat to his company in these early months, never showed me the cracks in the empire I was about to marry into. I found out about it five years later, from a lawyer, going through divorce paperwork.
But I know about it now.
And I know something else about it that Damien doesn't know anyone knows.
I know who is behind the acquisition attempt.
I know because I heard them discussing it, eight years from now, when they thought I was just the soon-to-be-ex-wife in the room next door, too insignificant to overhear anything important.
I saved the article.
I put my phone in my purse.
I walk back toward the door — not back into the party, toward the exit, toward home, toward jollof rice and my mother's voice and a second chance I intend to use with both hands.
I push the heavy oak door open, and the October air hits me, and somewhere behind me in that string-lit church, Damien Cole is standing at a window looking out at the rain and thinking about an unexpected woman who looked at him like he wasn't the most important thing in the room.
He has no idea.
He has absolutely no idea what is coming for him.
Neither did I, once. That's what made it so easy to miss.
This time, I am the one who knows how the story ends.
And I have decided — standing in the cold October air with my mother's voice still warm in my ear and a news alert that just handed me the first domino — that the ending is going to be mine.
My phone buzzes again. Unknown number. Crestholm area code.
I stare at it.
I don't recognize this number. I didn't get this call in my first life.
The world tilts, very slightly.
This is new.
I answer.
- Writer
