Chapter 10 — What Comes Next
634 Words
Neither of them moved for a long time after that confession settled into the room. The office felt smaller than it had a few minutes earlier, the air between them charged and heavy with two decades of unfinished history suddenly, finally, given a name.
"I need time," Elena said finally, her voice unsteady. "I need — this is a lot, Damian. You're not just my husband, you're apparently the boy I used to skip stones with on a summer I forgot I ever had, and you married me half out of some plan to hurt my father for what he did to your family, and half because of feelings you never fully processed from when we were kids, and I don't know how to hold all of that in my hands at once without dropping something important."
"I understand." He said it like it cost him everything to say, like every part of him wanted to close the distance between them instead and take her in his arms and none of him felt he had the right to, not yet, maybe not ever. "Take whatever time you need. I'm not going anywhere, whatever you decide."
She stood, unsteady on her feet, and made it almost to the door before she stopped, one hand resting on the frame, and turned back to look at him one more time.
"Did you ever try to find me?" she asked. "In those twenty years. Before the buyout, before any of this elaborate arrangement. Did you ever just — try to find Elena Rossi, on your own, and say hello like a normal person?"
Something flickered across his face, old and clearly painful to touch. "Once. I was twenty-two, still building the company from almost nothing, sleeping four hours a night and telling myself it was worth it. I drove past your old house, sat outside in my car for nearly an hour thinking about knocking, and then I saw your father's car in the driveway and I couldn't make myself do it. I told myself I wasn't ready yet, that I needed to be more before I could face either of you. The truth is I was ashamed — of what my family had become in the years since we left Larkspur Street, of everything I didn't have yet compared to everything you probably still did. I told myself I'd come back when I was someone worth coming back as. It took me another ten years to become that person, or at least a version of him I could live with."
"You didn't need to be someone else, Damian. I would have remembered Danny exactly as he was."
"I know that now." His voice was barely more than a whisper, worn thin with the weight of finally saying it out loud. "It took me a very long time to believe it, and I'm still not entirely sure I do, most days."
She left him there, in the office with the locked drawer and the photograph he no longer needed to hide from her, and lay awake most of the night turning over twenty years of a friendship she'd forgotten and three weeks of a marriage that had just become something entirely different than either of them had originally planned when they signed that contract.
Somewhere around three in the morning, unable to sleep, she found herself walking back down the long hallway toward his door — not entirely sure, even as she raised her hand to knock, exactly what she meant to say when he opened it, or whether she was ready to say anything at all.
She only knew, with a certainty that surprised her, that for the first time since the wedding, she didn't want the year to end.
She wanted to know what happened after.
- Writer
