Too Late to Love Me

Chapter 4

"What are you so panicked about?" Evelyn's voice drifted through the air like a falling feather, so soft it barely existed at all.

Aiden's brow furrowed deeper, a flash of genuine irritation crossing his features.

"Evelyn, I should be asking you that question." His tone carried an edge she rarely heard. "Why did you come to the company without telling me?"

He spoke as if she were the intruder. The one who had overstepped. The one who didn't know her place.

Before Evelyn could respond, the office door swung open again. Light footsteps clicked across the floor, and with them came the cloying scent of milk tea, sweet and sugary, filling the sterile air.

"Aiden! I'm back!" Iris's voice rang out bright and cheerful. "I brought you bobba tea, half sugar, no ice. Come on, you have to try it..."

Iris skipped into the room, a plastic cup held aloft like a trophy, her face radiant with the satisfaction of a mission accomplished.

But when her eyes landed on Evelyn, that smile flickered, just for an instant, before reasserting itself.

She pressed herself close to Aiden's side, lifting the cup to his lips with both hands. "Drink it now! I waited in line forever!"

Aiden turned his head slightly, a small evasion. "I don't drink this."

"Please! I bought it especially for you! Just one sip? One little sip? Please?"

Iris persisted, tugging at his sleeve with one hand while her eyes slid toward Evelyn, a glance heavy with challenge, with ownership, with the clear message that she belonged here and Evelyn did not.

Something flickered in Aiden's eyes. Hesitation, perhaps. Or resignation.

Finally, he took the cup from her hands. He raised it to his lips and forced down a small sip.

Aiden detested sweets.

Evelyn remembered this with the clarity of old pain. When they were children, she had offered him her prized candies, the ones she saved and savored, and he had always refused with a small shake of his head. After their marriage, he never touched the desserts she occasionally placed on the table. He had once told her, years ago, that sugary flavors made him nauseous.

Yet now, to placate Iris, he drank what he despised most.

So principles could be broken after all. Boundaries could be crossed. Rules could be bent.

Just never for Evelyn.

Her voice cracked when she finally spoke, trembling like thin ice. "Before, you confined me to your office. You said it looked unprofessional for me to wander. So why..." She swallowed. "Why can she sit in on your meetings? Touch your computer? Even... make you drink what you hate?"

Aiden set the cup down on his desk. His expression shifted, clouding over.

He turned to Iris, and when he spoke, his voice softened considerably. "Rissy, why don't you go downstairs for a bit? Do some shopping. Buy whatever you like."

He reached into his wallet and withdrew a black card, holding it out to her.

Iris's face fell briefly, reluctance plain in the set of her mouth. But something in his look, firm, final, made her accept it. "Fine," she said, pouting. "But come find me soon. Don't take too long."

Before she left, she cast one last glance at Evelyn. Triumphant. Dismissive. The look of someone who had already won and knew it.

The door clicked shut behind her.

Aiden turned back to Evelyn. His impatience was barely masked now, visible in the tight set of his jaw, the controlled stillness of his posture.

"Evelyn." His voice was cool. "You've crossed the line."

Crossed the line.

Evelyn stared at him. And then, despite everything, despite the pain and the humiliation and the cancer eating her alive from the inside, she laughed. A hollow, broken sound that carried no humor at all.

Tears streamed down her face as she looked at the man she had loved for twenty years.

So this was it. Showing concern for her own husband, wanting to understand why another woman had access to parts of him she had never been allowed to touch, this was overstepping in his eyes.

"Overstepping." She repeated the word slowly, tasting its bitterness. "Aiden. I told you before, if you ever met someone you truly loved, you just had to tell me. I promised I'd let you go."

She drew a deep breath, steadying herself against the wreckage inside her chest. When she spoke again, she enunciated each word with careful precision.

"Let's get a divorce." Aiden said.

The air in the room turned solid.

Aiden's pupils contracted sharply, a visible fracture in that mask of composure he wore so well. For once, something genuine broke through: shock, perhaps. Or something else she couldn't name.

He looked at her for a long, stretched moment. His expression shifted through phases she couldn't read, settling finally into something unreadable.

The silence stretched between them, dense and pressurized. So long that Evelyn began to believe he wouldn't respond at all.

Then he spoke.

"Evelyn." His voice was quiet, measured. "Even if we divorce, I'll still take care of you."

He paused. "This is also my promise to your parents."

Parents. That words struck her like arrows, sharp, precise, aimed at the last vulnerable place she had left.

Memories crashed over her without warning. The horrific car accident two years ago. The phone call that had shattered her world. Her father's smile, her mother's voice, now preserved only in photographs and the cold permanence of tombstones.

Yes. She had almost forgotten.

Aiden's professed care, the duty he performed so flawlessly, the attention he paid to her survival if not her heart, included the vows he had once made at her parents' sickbeds.

Not love. Never love.

Just promises. Obligations. Lines that must not be crossed.

Evelyn looked at her husband, this stranger she had known her entire life, and felt something inside her finally give way.