Chapter Seven: The Dinner table truth
923 Words
The small restaurant was nothing like the glittering venues Damian usually frequented.
It sat quietly on a tucked-away street corner, with ivy crawling up its old brick walls and golden light spilling from its windows. Inside, it smelled of rosemary, fresh bread, and something nostalgic—like memory baked into every corner.
Selena picked the place.
Damian didn’t object.
They were seated near a window, candlelight flickering between them. The waitress greeted Selena like an old friend, and that alone made Damian feel like he was stepping into her world now—not dragging her into his.
“I used to come here during university,” Selena said, placing her napkin on her lap. “It was cheap back then. Still is. But now it’s... comfort.”
Damian nodded, smiling slightly. “I like it. Feels like a place that remembers you.”
“It does,” she said softly, then added with a small grin, “unlike some people.”
He winced. “Fair.”
The waitress brought over two glasses of wine and their menus, and they fell into a silence that wasn’t awkward—but full. Heavy. Tense in the way two people feel when the past is sitting at the table too.
“You look more human here,” Selena said after a moment.
“Is that a compliment or an insult?”
“Both,” she replied, sipping her wine. “I mean, I’m used to seeing you in suits that cost more than this entire restaurant.”
“I have simpler clothes. Somewhere. I think.”
She laughed. It was soft, caught off guard, and it pulled at something deep in him.
They ordered—pasta for her, grilled salmon for him—and the conversation gradually shifted to safer ground. Old stories from the village. People they knew. Teachers who never thought they'd amount to anything.
But beneath it all, the real conversation was waiting.
And Selena brought it to the surface first.
“You know,” she said as she pushed her plate aside, “I always imagined seeing you again. In my head, I said all the things I was too scared to say when we were young.”
“Such as?”
“Such as... ‘I thought you loved me enough to take me with you.’” Her voice didn’t break, but it trembled with honesty. “And I hated myself for not being enough to make you stay.”
Damian’s breath caught.
“I was wrong,” he said, voice low. “I didn’t leave because you weren’t enough, Selena. I left because I was too broken to believe I deserved you.”
She looked at him, her gaze unreadable.
“I became obsessed with building something,” he continued. “Anything to prove I wasn’t just some poor boy from a forgotten village. And in doing that, I forgot what made me human.”
“You still are,” she said quietly. “You just hid it behind walls.”
He swallowed. “Let me break them down.”
Selena didn’t answer immediately. She turned her head to the window, watching the rain streak the glass.
“There’s something else I should tell you,” she said finally. “About me.”
He stiffened. “What is it?”
“I didn’t just survive all these years, Damian. I built something too. Not an empire like yours, but a life. I became a woman who doesn’t beg to be remembered.”
His chest tightened. “I never expected you to wait for me.”
“I didn’t. I stopped waiting the day I realized I didn’t need your memory to define me.”
Their eyes met again. It wasn’t bitterness in hers—it was strength.
Damian leaned forward. “Then let me earn my place in the life you’ve built. I don’t want to rewrite the past. I want to write the future—with you.”
Selena inhaled slowly, her fingers curling around the stem of her glass.
“You always were a good talker,” she said. “But I don’t need words, Damian. I need proof.”
“You’ll have it,” he promised.
She didn’t say yes.
But she didn’t say no either.
Later that night, Damian returned home to silence.
His penthouse, sleek and towering above the city, was everything a man could want—except warm. The lights hummed softly. A glass of untouched whiskey still sat on the kitchen counter from the night before.
He slipped off his blazer and walked toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, gazing out at the city he’d conquered.
But even with all his success, the space echoed with loneliness.
For years, he'd convinced himself he needed no one. That the ache inside him was the price of power. But tonight… tonight he felt it more sharply than ever.
Her laughter from the restaurant still played in his head.
So did her silence.
He opened the drawer in his desk and pulled out an old photo—creased from years of being folded and refolded. A girl with wild curls, a crooked smile, and eyes that saw straight through him.
Selena.
He set it down beside his whiskey and leaned back in his chair.
There was so much he hadn’t told her. So much he hadn’t even allowed himself to feel.
But something had shifted tonight.
And for the first time in years, he wasn’t running from the past.
He was walking toward it.
One step at a time.
- Writer
