Chapter 12 — Family Business
1525 Words
POV: Adrian Blackwood
Present Day — Meridian City, that same week
Victoria had a headache. She left the restaurant before the appetizers arrived, pressing two fingers to her temple and apologizing in the specific overperformed way she'd started doing lately, which meant I was sitting alone at a corner table at Larousse, nursing a scotch I didn't want, when I saw them.
Julian, at a table across the room, leaning forward like the rest of the restaurant had stopped existing.
Seraphina, across from him, laughing at something he'd said.
I don't remember deciding to watch them. I just found myself doing it, the way you find yourself pressing on a bruise to check if it still hurts. It still hurt. It hurt considerably more than I expected, watching my brother make my ex-wife laugh with the kind of ease I hadn't managed to produce in five years of trying. She'd worn her hair down. I noticed that too, uselessly, the way I noticed everything about her lately whether I wanted to or not.
She touched his arm. Just briefly, just to make a point about something, the same casual gesture people make a hundred times a day without meaning anything by it. I watched it happen and felt something in my chest go a color I didn't have a name for.
I told myself it was concern. Julian was my brother. Seraphina was — whatever Seraphina currently was to me, complicated, unresolved, legally tangled up in two children who might or might not share my blood. I told myself I had every right to wonder what my own brother was doing having dinner with her, quietly, without mentioning it to me first.
I did not believe myself for even a full second.
I paid my bill and walked over before I'd made any kind of a plan.
"Adrian." Julian looked up first, and to his credit, didn't look guilty. That was almost worse than if he had. "This is a surprise."
"Is it."
Seraphina's expression didn't change at all, which somehow landed harder than if she'd looked caught. "Adrian. Nice to see you."
"What is this."
"Dinner," Julian said. "It's generally what people do at restaurants."
"Don't."
"Don't what? Have dinner with an adult woman who's allowed to eat wherever she wants with whoever she wants?" Julian's voice stayed even, but something sharpened underneath it, years of being talked over finally finding an edge. "You have Victoria upstairs somewhere, presumably. I don't recall you asking my permission for that."
"That's different."
"Is it. Explain how."
I didn't have an answer ready, which was becoming an uncomfortable pattern around this particular family.
"Adrian." Seraphina's voice was quiet, controlled, the same voice she used in boardrooms right before she said something devastating. "You don't get to decide who I have dinner with. You gave that up a long time ago."
"I'm aware of what I gave up."
"Are you." Her eyes didn't leave mine. "Because you're currently standing over a table making a scene in front of your own brother, which doesn't strike me as the behavior of a man who's actually processed that."
A waiter hovered nearby, uncertain whether to approach or retreat. I didn't blame him for either instinct. The restaurant had gone quieter around us. I could feel people not-quite-looking, the specific attention of strangers pretending not to enjoy a scene, phones angled just slightly too casually toward our table.
"Julian." I kept my voice low, which took more effort than it should have. "A word. Outside."
"I'm in the middle of dinner."
"Julian."
He glanced at Seraphina, some silent question passing between them that I hated on principle before I even understood what it meant, and then stood, folding his napkin with deliberate calm.
"I'll be right back," he told her.
Outside, the night air did nothing to cool anything down.
"What are you doing," I said.
"Having dinner. I already told you that."
"With her."
"With Seraphina, yes. She has a name, in case you'd forgotten it in between demanding custody and getting jealous over a salad."
"I'm not jealous."
Julian actually laughed, short and humorless. "You've been staring at her like a man watching his house burn down for the last ten minutes. I'd know that look anywhere, Adrian. I grew up watching you make it at anyone who touched something you'd already decided was yours."
"She's not mine."
"No," Julian agreed. "She isn't. Which is the part I don't think you've actually accepted yet, because you threw her away yourself, and some part of you apparently assumed the rest of us would keep the seat warm indefinitely while you figured out how sorry you were."
The words landed exactly where he meant them to.
"You believed her," I said. "Five years ago. You told me so, and I didn't listen."
"No. You didn't." Something in his face shifted, old hurt surfacing under the calm. "I've spent five years wondering what would've happened if I'd pushed harder. If I'd made you actually look at the evidence instead of the story someone handed you. I don't get to fix that by staying quiet a second time, Adrian. I'm done staying quiet."
"So this is about fixing your own guilt."
"Partly." He didn't flinch from it. "It's also about a woman who deserves someone who shows up for her instead of showing up for a fight. If that ends up being me, I'm not going to apologize to you for it. You've had five years and an entire hospital's worth of chances."
"That's not fair, and you know it."
"None of this has been fair since the night you threw her out. I don't see why I owe you fairness now." He shoved his hands in his pockets, and for a moment he looked less like my calm, careful younger brother and more like a man who'd been rehearsing this exact speech for longer than tonight. "You want to know the truth? Watching you stand over that table just now was the first time in five years I've actually felt sorry for you instead of angry at you. You looked like a man who finally understood what he lost, standing there with absolutely no idea how to get any of it back."
I wanted to hit him. I hadn't wanted to hit anyone in longer than I could remember, and I stood there in front of a restaurant wanting to hit my own brother over a woman I had absolutely no legal or moral claim to, engaged, however loosely, to someone else entirely.
"Does Victoria know you're out here having this conversation?" Julian asked, quieter now. "Because from where I'm standing, you seem a lot more invested in a woman you divorced than a woman you're supposedly about to marry."
I didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer that didn't make everything worse.
"Go home, Adrian," Julian said, not unkindly. "Or better yet, go figure out what you actually want, before you cost someone else five more years finding out."
He went back inside without waiting for a response. Through the window, I watched Seraphina look up at him as he sat back down, watched something in her face soften in a way it never once did for me anymore, and understood, standing alone on that sidewalk, that I had absolutely no right to feel the way I did, and felt it anyway, with the particular helpless fury of a man watching something slip away that he was no longer sure he'd ever actually deserved to keep.
I drove home instead of going back to my own table. I didn't call Victoria to explain why I'd left without saying goodbye. I sat in my car outside my own house for twenty minutes before I could make myself go inside, running my brother's words over and over until they'd worn a groove into something I didn't want to look at directly.
You threw her away yourself. Some part of you assumed the rest of us would keep the seat warm.
He wasn't wrong. That was the worst part. I had spent five years assuming Seraphina existed somewhere out there, frozen exactly as I'd left her, waiting for me to eventually decide I was ready to be sorry. It had never once occurred to me that she might simply build a life that didn't require my permission to be happy in, or that someone else entirely might walk into it and be welcomed there in a way I no longer had any claim to.
I thought about calling Julian to apologize. I didn't, because I didn't know yet what I'd be apologizing for — for making a scene, or for the five years before it, or for standing on a sidewalk jealous of my own brother while a woman I'd wronged learned, slowly, what it felt like to be chosen by someone who'd actually shown up for her.
I poured a drink I didn't finish and went to bed without sleeping, which was becoming its own kind of habit lately, and told myself, without much conviction, that tomorrow would feel less like this.
It didn't.
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