Chapter 14 — The Ring
1424 Words
POV: Adrian Blackwood
Present Day — Victoria's apartment, three days later
I'd rehearsed this conversation four times in the car and still didn't have a version of it that didn't sound cruel. Marcus had asked, on the drive over, if I wanted him to draft something first — a formal statement, a settlement outline, the kind of paperwork that made difficult conversations easier to survive. I'd told him no. Whatever else I'd gotten wrong over the last five years, I'd decided I wasn't doing this one through a document.
I'd spent three days trying to talk myself out of coming at all. It would have been easier to let the engagement drift the way it had drifted into existence in the first place — quietly, by default, because neither of us had ever bothered to have the conversation that would have stopped it. Julian's voice kept getting in the way of that particular convenience. You seem a lot more invested in a woman you divorced than a woman you're supposedly about to marry. He wasn't wrong, and I was tired of being a man who let things happen to him instead of deciding them.
Victoria opened the door already dressed for dinner reservations I hadn't confirmed, hair done, the ring catching the hallway light the way it always seemed to catch every light in every room she stood in.
"You're early," she said. "I haven't even—"
"I'm not staying for dinner."
Something in her face flickered, there and gone so fast I almost missed it. "Alright. Come in, then. Tell me what's wrong."
I stood in her living room, a room I'd been in a hundred times and suddenly couldn't place myself inside of, and tried to find the version of this sentence that didn't sound like what it was.
"I don't think we should get married."
She didn't move for a moment. "I see."
"Victoria—"
"No, I'd like to hear the rest of it." Her voice stayed even, composed, the same practiced calm she brought to every room. "You clearly rehearsed something. Let's hear it."
"I never actually asked you to marry me." I said it as gently as the sentence allowed, which wasn't very gently at all. "You picked out the ring. I let people assume, because it was easier than having this conversation. That was wrong of me, and I'm sorry."
"You let it go on for months, Adrian. Dinners with my parents. A save-the-date my mother already sent to sixty people. And now you're standing in my living room telling me it was a misunderstanding you didn't correct because it was easier."
"I know how that sounds."
"Do you." She laughed, short and humorless. "It sounds like you kept me around for five years because it was easier than sitting alone with your guilt."
The words landed harder than I expected, mostly because some part of me suspected she wasn't entirely wrong.
"This is about her."
"This is about me finally being honest, which I should have been months ago."
"Don't insult me by pretending those are different things." For the first time, something sharp cut through her composure. "I have spent five years being the person who was actually there, Adrian. Through the divorce, through the lawsuits, through every version of you that showed up angry and left worse. And the second she reappears with a private jet and two children, suddenly I'm the inconvenient one."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?" She crossed her arms, and for just a moment I saw something in her expression I didn't have a name for yet — something colder than heartbreak, calculating in a way that didn't match the rest of the scene at all. It passed so quickly I told myself I'd imagined it. "I've given you five years, and you're standing in my living room telling me it's over because a woman who left you laughed at dinner with your brother."
"How do you know about that."
"Meridian City is smaller than you think." She said it lightly, but something underneath it wasn't light at all. "Everyone knows about the restaurant, Adrian. You made sure of that yourself."
I didn't have a defense for that one, so I didn't offer one.
"Take the ring back," I said instead. "I'll cover whatever it cost. I don't want you to feel like any of this came at your expense."
"How generous." Her laugh had an edge to it I'd never heard before, not in five years, not once. "You throw away a wife for imaginary evidence and a fiancée for a real one, and somehow you're always the one who gets to walk away feeling like the reasonable party."
"I'm not walking away feeling good about any of this."
"No," she agreed, quiet now, dangerously quiet. She slid the ring off her finger slowly, turning it once in the light before setting it on the table between us with more care than the gesture seemed to deserve. "I don't imagine you are. But you'll survive it. You always do. It's the rest of us who tend to pay for your certainty, Adrian. You should think about that, the next time you decide you know exactly what a woman deserves."
"What is that supposed to mean."
"Nothing." Her smile came back, smooth and immediate, like a door closing. "I'm heartbroken. People say strange things when they're heartbroken."
I left without saying anything else, because there wasn't anything left to say that wouldn't have made it worse. In the car outside, I sat for a long time, replaying the last thing she'd said before I closed the door, and telling myself the strange coldness I'd seen in her face was nothing more than heartbreak dressed up as anger.
I believed that for exactly as long as it took me to drive home.
Marcus called an hour later, business as usual, running through the following week's calendar in the flat, efficient voice he used for anything that wasn't personal. I found myself only half-listening, still turning over the sound of Victoria's laugh, the specific shape of it, until I finally placed what had actually unsettled me about it.
It hadn't sounded like a woman who'd just lost something.
It had sounded like a woman recalculating.
"Adrian? Are you still there?"
"I'm here."
"You haven't said a word in two minutes. I was describing the Q3 board calendar. You usually have opinions about the Q3 board calendar."
"Move the Thursday meeting," I said, mostly to have something to say. "I have somewhere to be."
I didn't, yet. I said it anyway, because it felt truer than anything else I'd managed to say all day.
I told myself Victoria's reaction was paranoia. Grief wearing a strange face, nothing more. I'd seen enough of it in boardrooms — reasonable people saying unreasonable things in the minutes after they realized they'd lost something they thought was secure. It didn't mean anything. It couldn't mean anything, because the alternative meant I'd spent five years engaged, however loosely, to someone I'd never actually understood at all, which was its own kind of humiliation I wasn't ready to sit with yet.
I was becoming remarkably good at telling myself things I no longer entirely believed.
For the first time in months, though, driving home through a city I'd built half my life inside of, I let myself think, without flinching from it, about what it might actually take to become a man Seraphina Vale could stand to be around. Not the man with the lawyers. Not the man who'd stood over a restaurant table making a scene, jealous of his own brother for succeeding where he'd failed. Some version of myself I hadn't let exist since before my father decided sentiment was a currency I couldn't afford to spend.
I thought about Julian's voice on that sidewalk. Go figure out what you actually want, before you cost someone else five more years finding out.
I didn't know yet what that version of me looked like. I didn't know if it was even still possible to build, this late, with this much wreckage already sitting behind me. I was beginning, for the first time in five years, to actually want to find out — not to win an argument, not to prove a point to a brother who'd finally found his nerve, but because some quiet, unfamiliar part of me had started to suspect that Seraphina Vale had never actually been the problem I needed solved.
I had.
- Writer
