Two Empires, One Heart

Chapter Eight

Thursday arrived faster than I wanted it to.

I stood in front of the mirror in my old bedroom, wearing a suit I hadn’t touched since before Marcus, since before I’d learned that a wife who loved her husband learned to disappear a little. It still fit. I hadn’t expected that to matter as much as it did.

“You look like Mom,” Freya said from the doorway, and something in her voice made me turn.

“Is that a good thing.”

“It’s the only thing.” She stepped in, straightening my collar with the kind of easy familiarity that still felt new between us, earned rather than assumed. “She used to say a boardroom was just a dinner table with worse manners. Walk in like you already know how the meal ends.”

We arrived at the Ashworth building twenty minutes early. I hadn’t set foot in it in over two years, and the lobby still smelled the way I remembered, paper and old wood and something faintly like my father’s cologne, even though he hadn’t run daily operations from here in years. Freya moved through it like she’d never left, nodding at faces I didn’t recognize, calling two people by name without breaking stride.

I followed her into the elevator and said nothing, running through everything I wanted to say and discarding most of it.

The boardroom on the twelfth floor had a view of the harbor that I used to think was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It looked different now, smaller somehow, the way everything from before looks smaller once you’ve survived something after it.

Marcus’s father was already seated when we walked in.

I hadn’t seen him since the wedding. He’d aged more than two years should have aged him, silver at his temples that hadn’t been there before, lines around his mouth that spoke of sleepless months rather than sleepless nights. He stood when we entered, which surprised me. Marcus never stood for anyone.

“Selene.” He said my name carefully, like he wasn’t certain what version of it he was allowed to use anymore. “You look well.”

“Mr. Calloway.”

“Please.” He gestured to the chairs across from him, his own lawyer seated silently at his side, a folder unopened in front of him. “I’d hoped we might speak plainly today. I find I have less patience for formality than I used to.”

Freya and I sat. I kept my hands folded on the table, steady, the way my mother apparently used to.

“Then let’s be plain,” Freya said, before I could speak. “You reached out about an alliance. Given everything that’s happened, I think you understand why we’d want to know exactly what you’re offering before we discuss what you’d be asking for in return.”

Something flickered across his face, respect, maybe, or simple relief at not having to dance around the point. “Fair. Calloway Holdings is prepared to offer joint development rights on our northern properties, favorable terms, well below market value, in exchange for a public statement of partnership. Nothing more complicated than that.”

“And what you’re not saying,” I said, finding my voice steadier than I expected, “is that you need our name attached to yours right now more than you need the properties themselves.”

His eyes moved to me fully for the first time since we’d sat down.

“You’ve grown sharper,” he said, and there was no insult in it, something closer to surprise. “The girl I met at your wedding wouldn’t have said that out loud.”

“The girl you met at my wedding isn’t the one sitting across from you today.”

A long silence settled over the table. His lawyer shifted almost imperceptibly. Freya said nothing, letting the moment stretch, letting him sit in it.

“You’re right,” he said finally. “My son’s actions have cost this family more than money. I won’t insult you by pretending otherwise.” He paused, and something tired moved through his expression, something that looked, for just a moment, like a father’s exhaustion rather than a businessman’s calculation. “I did not know about the other woman. I want you to understand that. Whatever else you think of me, I did not know.”

“I believe you,” I said, and found that I meant it. “I don’t think it changes much.”

“No,” he agreed quietly. “I don’t suppose it does.”

Freya slid a folder across the table, back on solid ground, business again. “We’ll review the proposal properly. No verbal commitments today. But I’ll tell you honestly, Mr. Calloway, the Ashworth name isn’t for rent to repair your son’s reputation. If we move forward, it will be because the terms genuinely benefit us. Not out of sympathy.”

“I wouldn’t expect anything less.” He looked at me once more, something unreadable in his face. “For what it’s worth, Selene, I am sorry. Not for the alliance. For what my family’s ambition cost you personally. That was never my intention when I asked him to marry you.”

I hadn’t expected an apology. I found I didn’t quite know what to do with it, so I simply nodded, and let the silence carry what I couldn’t yet say out loud.

We left twenty minutes later with the folder unsigned, the harbor still glittering outside the window behind us, smaller than I remembered, exactly the right size.

“You did well,” Freya said in the elevator, not looking at me, focused on the doors.

“I didn’t do anything. I sat there.”

“You sat there and didn’t disappear,” she said. “That’s the whole job today.”

I thought about that the entire drive home, about a boardroom I used to be too small for, and a version of myself who had, apparently, finally grown into it.