CHAPTER 12- ALWAYS WORK
1367 Words
Celeste glanced between us. For the first time since she'd arrived, she looked like she wanted to be somewhere else.
"I should go upstairs," she said quietly.
"Good idea," I said.
She looked at Dominic once — just once, a look I couldn't fully read, then walked toward the guest room. I waited until I heard her door click shut before I turned back to my husband.
The silence between us had weight. He loosened his tie, slow and deliberate, like he was buying himself a few seconds. "Amara—"
I held up my phone. "The dinner."
His jaw tightened. "I know."
"You knew about it." I kept my voice level, which cost me more than it should have. "And you cancelled twenty minutes before we were supposed to leave."
"Something important came up."
I laughed — a short, hollow sound that surprised even me, because there was nothing funny about it. "Something important always comes up, Dominic."
"That's not it Amara." He said.
"No?" I crossed my arms, a small, instinctive gesture, like bracing for impact. "Tell me the last time you kept a promise to me."
He opened his mouth, then closed it. The silence that followed was its own answer, and we both knew it.
"I work for this family," he said finally, his voice carrying that flat, reasonable tone that had started to make my skin tighten.
"There it is," I said quietly.
"What?"
"The speech. The one where I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting basic attention from my own husband."
His jaw clenched. "That's not what I'm doing."
"Every time I tell you I'm lonely, you tell me you're working." My voice stayed even, though it took everything I had to keep it there.
"Every time I say I'm hurting, you remind me how much pressure you're under. Every time I say our marriage is falling apart, you act like I'm the one attacking you."
He looked away.
That, more than the cancelled dinner, more than anything he could have said, was what hollowed me out. Because it meant he knew. Somewhere underneath all of it, he knew. He just didn't want to be the one to stand in front of it.
"I'm doing the best I can," he said, quiet and final, like a door being shut.
Six months ago those words would have softened something in me. I would have reached for his hand. I would have told him I knew, that I understood, that we'd figure it out together.
Now they just sounded like an excuse wearing the skin of sincerity.
"Are you?" The words came out before I could decide whether to say them. "Because you seem to be working very hard at being a CEO. I'm just not sure you're trying very hard at being a husband and a father."
Something moved across his face. something sharp and real that I hadn't seen in a long time. For one second I thought he might say it. Whatever the true thing was. Whatever was actually underneath all this distance and silence and managed distance.
He shook his head. "I can't do this tonight Amara, I'm tired." He walked away.
And the conversation ended exactly the way they all ended now — me standing in the middle of a room we both occupied, alone.
I was already awake when Luca stirred the next morning.
I'd been lying in the dark for a while, that particular kind of exhaustion sitting on my chest — and that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with carrying things I couldn’t put down and hand to anyone else.
I lifted my baby and held him close and let myself have a few minutes of just being his mother. No wife. No suspect. No woman with a name in a flagged file somewhere.
Just this.
Then I heard voices downstairs. Both of them. I took a breath and went down.
Dominic was at the island with documents spread around him. Celeste was beside him, not across from him, beside him, close enough to share the screen, close enough that when she leaned over to point at something their heads nearly touched.
Neither looked up immediately, and something about that, the ease of it, the way the scene had its own settled rhythm that I was walking into rather than part of, pressed against something sore.
"Morning," Dominic said, not looking up.
"Morning."
Celeste looked up and smiled. "You look tired."
"Most parents do."
"True." She sipped her coffee, tilting her head in that way she had — thoughtful, considered, like everything she said had been weighed before it left her mouth.
"Although I imagine the stress is worse when there are other issues involved." She said.
I set my mug down carefully. "What issues?"
"Oh." Her eyes went wide, the surprise was flawless, completely rehearsed. "I didn't mean anything serious."
"Then what did you mean?"
A flicker behind her eyes. Quick, almost invisible. Then the smile again, softer now, slightly apologetic. "I just meant relationship stress."
The kitchen went very still.
I turned to Dominic.
He was suddenly, completely absorbed in the documents in front of him. Not reading them. Just looking at them with the focused intensity of a man who desperately needed to be somewhere other than this conversation.
The realization arrived quietly, the way the worst ones always do, not as a shock but as a confirmation of something you already knew and had been hoping not to.
There was only one way Celeste could know we were having problems. Only one way she could know about the dinner, the argument, any of it.
Dominic had told her. My own husband told another woman about the state of our marriage before I had the chance to say a word.
"Dominic." My voice came out very flat.
"What?"
"Can we talk."
Not a question. He heard the difference. His shoulders stiffened almost imperceptibly.
"Not now."
"Now!”
He looked up. His eyes met mine and held.
Celeste stood quietly, reading the room. "I'll leave you two alone."
The second we heard her footsteps on the stairs, I looked straight at him.
"What did you tell her?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Don't." My voice stayed low, but there was something underneath it now, something that had been building for a long time and was very close to the surface.
"Don't make me explain the question Dominic."
"Amara—"
"Did you tell her about us?"
He hesitated. "We've talked," he said.
The words landed like something physical — dull and specific, right in the center of my chest.
"You've talked. Talked about what exactly"
"It wasn't like that."
"Then what was it like?" I kept my voice steady through sheer will. "She's your business partner. She's been here less than two weeks. And she knows we're fighting?"
"You're overreacting."
I went very still.
Not because the words surprised me. Because they landed in the exact same place they always did, the place was already bruised from every other time he said them.
"Am I?" I said.
"Yes." No pause. No consideration. Immediate, automatic, complete.
And that — more than the cancelled dinner, more than Celeste's comment, more than any specific thing he'd done — was the moment something finally stopped in me.
Not dramatically. Not with tears or a raised voice. Just stopped. A quiet, internal giving up on waiting for him to try.
I stood up.
Neither of us spoke for a moment. The kitchen hummed around us, indifferent.
Then I looked at him, in a way I'd been avoiding, because looking directly at something means accepting what you see.
"The worst part isn't what she says to me, Dominic."
He frowned slightly. "What?"
"The worst part," I said carefully, "is what you don't."
Something crossed his face then. Something that might have been regret if I'd seen it a year ago, when there was still time for regret to mean anything.
I didn't wait to find out.
I turned and walked out of the kitchen, and this time, for the first time in longer than I could count, I was the one who left first.
- Writer
