The Contract Between Us

Chapter2

Aurelia

I woke up already knowing something was wrong before I opened my eyes. My cheek throbbed where his hand had landed, a low, steady ache that matched my heartbeat, and my phone was buzzing against the nightstand over and over. I reached for it before I was fully awake, before I'd had a single second of not knowing.

There were missed calls stacked on the screen, and my name was trending. The clip had been posted overnight, and it included the part that hurt most: Rex, calm and unbothered, telling the guards he didn't know who I was and that I might be mentally unstable. Thousands of strangers had watched it, and most of them believed him. I sat on the edge of the bed with the blanket around my waist and scrolled through comment after comment calling me delusional, obsessed, a crazy woman who had walked into a restaurant and claimed a stranger as her fiancé. Some people had already found my name, my studio, and old photos of me, and they were passing all of it around.

I understood, sitting there, that it didn't matter that Rex was the one lying. No one was going to ask for proof of an engagement they had watched him deny. My engagement was over, my name had become a joke, and the business I had spent years building depended on people trusting the woman behind it. My thumb kept moving even as my chest tightened with every word. Part of me needed to see all of it, to prove that it had really happened and that I hadn't imagined the sound of his hand against my face.

None of it felt real. It seemed distant and much too close at the same time, as if I were reading about a stranger while living in her body. My hands had stopped shaking and gone numb, and holding the phone felt like holding something that belonged to someone else.

I didn't hear my bedroom door open.

"Put the phone down."

Nadia's voice was quiet but firm, the tone she only used when she meant it. She stood in the doorway in yesterday's clothes, her hair tied up in the messy knot she wore when she had given up on looking presentable. She hadn't slept either. She must have seen the video the same way everyone else had, and I watched her brace herself before she crossed the room and sat down beside me.

"Aurelia, please give me the phone."

"I just need to see..."

"You don't need to see anything." She took it out of my hand, gently but without room for argument, and set it face down on the nightstand. "There is nothing on there that will help you right now."

I nodded, but I still wanted to keep reading. I wanted to confirm the humiliation was as total as it felt, as if reading enough of it would eventually show me the worst of it and let me stop. I hadn't found that point yet.

Nadia pulled me against her without asking, and I let my head fall on her shoulder as I had through a hundred smaller heartbreaks, except that this one felt bigger than anything before it. I could feel her heartbeat under my cheek, steady when mine wasn't, and I held onto that.

Her own phone buzzed on the bed between us, face up this time, and I saw the screen before she could turn it over. It was a screenshot of my studio's page tagged under the clip, with a caption asking whether anyone would still trust their wedding gown to a designer who couldn't hold her own engagement together.

"Don't," Nadia said, but I had already taken the phone from her.

One comment, three replies deep, joked that now everyone knew why my prices were so high, because clearly I needed the money more than I needed dignity. I stared at that one the longest. It took the one thing I had built myself entirely and turned it into a punchline without even trying.

"Aurelia." Nadia took the phone back, more gently this time. "Look at me."

I couldn't. I looked at my hands folded in my lap and thought about the studio, the fabric bolts stacked against the wall, the half-finished gown on the mannequin I had been so proud of two days ago. I thought about the wedding dress hanging in a garment bag in my closet that I would never wear. None of it stayed in my mind for long, and I didn't have the strength to hold onto it.

Nadia didn't tell me it would be okay. She sat with me while it wasn't, her hand moving slowly across my back, and eventually the tears came, quiet and steady. She didn't tell me to stop, and she didn't hand me tissues or try to make it smaller than it was. She just stayed.

I don't know how long we sat there before I spoke, my voice smaller than I meant it to be. "I can't go outside."

Nadia didn't argue. She tightened her arm around me and nodded, as if she had already known I would say it and had already decided she wasn't going anywhere either. I pulled the blanket over both of us and closed my eyes, and underneath the exhaustion I understood that I wasn't planning to get up today. Maybe not tomorrow either.