Two Empires, One Heart

Chapter 2

The door didn’t creak. It should have. Some part of me wanted the room to have one second of warning that I was standing in it, the way I’d had none at all.

Marcus had her pressed lightly against the edge of his desk, his hand cupping her jaw the way he used to cup mine, his forehead nearly touching hers. Wren was laughing at something he’d just said, low and easy, the laugh of a woman who has never once had to hide.

Neither of them heard the door.

I don’t remember deciding to make a sound. I only remember the container slipping in my grip, and the small, involuntary noise that left me, somewhere between a breath and a word.

They broke apart like the room had caught fire.

Wren straightened first, unhurried, smoothing her skirt, and looked at me the way you look at furniture someone moved without asking.

Marcus, at least, managed half a second of looking caught before he recovered.

“Selene.” He was already crossing toward me, already reaching, and I understood exactly what he intended before he did it, close the distance, take my face in his hands the way he’d just taken hers, kiss this into something smaller.

“Don’t.” I stepped back before his hands reached me.

“Selene, let me, “

“Don’t touch me.”

Something in his face shifted, wounded, like I was the one behaving unreasonably, like the offense here was my flinching and not what I’d just walked in on. He genuinely believed he could fix this with his hands on my jaw and his mouth against mine, the way he’d fixed every disagreement in two years, kissing me quiet instead of ever once answering me honestly.

I thought about how gentle those same hands had just been on her face, thirty seconds earlier, and whatever was left of my heartbreak went cold and precise instead.

Wren laughed. Short, sharp, entirely without warmth.

“Oh, don’t look so betrayed.” She picked up a folder from the desk, unbothered, commenting on weather. “You knew exactly what kind of man you married. You just liked the version where you were the only one who mattered.”

“We grew up together,” I said, hating how small it came out. “I thought you were, “

“Good to you?” Her smile didn’t reach anywhere near her eyes. “I was patient. There’s a difference.”

“Wren.” Marcus, low, a warning.

She ignored him entirely.

“You could have picked any man in this city,” she said, “and you picked the one I already loved first. Then you invited me to your wedding and asked me to be happy for you.” The sarcasm dropped away, leaving something raw underneath. “Do you know what that cost me? Smiling through your photos. Sitting through your toasts.”

I stared at her. Ten years of birthday calls and holiday visits rearranged themselves in front of me into something I no longer recognized.

“You could have told me.”

“Would it have mattered?” She tucked the folder under her arm, already finished with me. “You never once asked why I never brought anyone around. You were too busy disappearing into him to notice anyone else in the room.”

She left. The door clicked shut behind her, and it was just Marcus, and me, and the container going cold on the corner of his desk.

“Selene.” He reached for my elbow again, softer this time. “I know how this looks. Let me explain.”

I looked down at his hand.

“How long.”

“Selene, “

“How long, Marcus.”

He let go and sat down behind his desk instead, the way a man sits when he’s already decided this isn’t going to be a fight, because a fight requires two people who still believe there’s something left to win.

“Since university,” he said. “Before you. Before any of this.”

“She was your pa,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I needed to hear the sentence out loud, to test whether it held a different shape than it did in my head. It didn’t.

“She’s always been more than that,” he said, gently, the same voice that once told me a wife who loved her husband learned to disappear a little. “I never lied about loving you, Selene.”

“You just never told me who you loved more.”

He didn’t answer that.

I picked the container back up. Four months of getting the recipe right, sitting cold and stupid between us like an apology nobody had asked for.

“I’ll be at my father’s,” I said, surprising myself, since I hadn’t let myself think that far ahead in two full years of refusing to think of my father at all.

Something in his face finally cracked at the edges. “Selene.”

I was already at the door.

“Don’t disappear on me now,” he said, and for the first time in two years, something in his voice sounded almost like fear.

I turned back once, my hand on the frame.

“I already did,” I said. “Two years ago. You just never noticed I was gone.”

I walked out, past the men who wouldn’t meet my eyes, past the woman with the folder still held face down, past the receptionist who reached toward me and let her hand fall when she saw my face.

I made it to the elevator. I made it to the car. I did not make it past the second red light before I pulled over, put the car in park, and finally let go of everything I’d been holding since six that morning.

The container sat beside me, untouched, going cold.