Too Late to Love

The Return

Kylan

The car rounded the back side of the house. My eyes stayed fixed on the same spot that had once driven me away. Flashbacks came in broken pieces, sharp enough to make something inside my chest twist, but I pushed those thoughts away. Now was not the time. As the car stopped near the wide, imposing gates of the mansion, I realised the place looked nothing like the one I remembered or the one I had expected to see.

The fountain no longer sang with water. Its basin sat dry, leaves drifting across cracked stone that had begun to split further beneath the weight of neglect. The garden beds had thinned and grown wild, their once careful edges now blurred beneath weeds and forgotten care. The white marble of the house looked gothic, like a palace that had forgotten how to be kind. It no longer looked like a home. It looked like something that had swallowed its own warmth and left only stone and silence behind.

The front gates stood wide open. Cars lined the drive in uneven rows. Noise spilled from the doors, voices and movement that sounded too loud for a house of mourning. Reporters and media gathered at the entrance, taking notes of who had come and what words they had said before vanishing inside. A number of guards were trying to push the media back, making enough space for people to walk inside.

I sat in the passenger seat while Dario kept his hands steady on the wheel. Ten years. The number lived in my chest like a wound that had never closed. I had left this land when I still carried the shape of a boy who believed promises could be kept. I returned to it as a man who had learned that some silences grow heavier than any spoken word.

Guilt rose inside me, thick and familiar. I hated myself for what I had done. I hated the years I had stayed away. I hated the promises I had spoken and then abandoned. And I hated that I had returned.

I had told her once that she would always smile. I had told her once that I would take away her pain. I had told her that nothing would harm her while I still lived. I had told her I would give her a life that did not place the weight of the world on her shoulders. Those words had lived inside me like vows.

Vows I had made when I was a boy.

Vows I had broken like they had meant nothing.

I had stayed away for a decade and only returned when there was something to claim. The proof of my selfishness sat in the back seat. Lena Torres, my secretary and lawyer, the woman who ordered the clean parts of my life while the rest of me belonged somewhere else. I was here because power left open becomes dangerous in other hands. I was not here because she needed me. In fact, I had never been here when she needed me.

Not when she lost him.

Not when she was alone.

Not when she had no one left to carry even a fraction of what she was carrying.

Every part of me wanted to tell Dario to turn the car around. Leave. Never look at this place again. Never meet the eyes that had once believed in me. The thought was simple and clean. I could still run. I could still disappear the same way I had disappeared before. I knew I was not ready to face her. I knew I did not deserve to face her. Yet I remained in the seat, staring at the cold marble, because I was still the man who put his own reasons first.

I had run once because I was a coward.

Ten years later, I was still trying to find reasons to run again.

I opened the door and stepped out. The air smelled of cut flowers and old stone. Dario and Lena followed as I walked toward the open doors, each step heavier than the last. At the main entrance, the guards shoving away the reporters froze when they saw me, as though a ghost had walked back into their home. Reporters turned their cameras on me and started throwing questions, the main one being, "Who are you?" I ignored them as I climbed the stairs and moved further inside. The closer I came, the clearer the voices from inside became. People had gathered to pay their last respects, or perhaps only to be seen in the headlines that would follow. I moved among them without speaking. Fragments of conversation drifted past me.

I kept walking until the main hall opened in front of me. White flowers covered every surface. The coffin sat at the far end on a raised platform, open for the world to see. I stopped a short distance away and looked at the man inside.

The body in the coffin belonged to a man the entire country had known by name and feared by reputation. He had been the most ruthless businessman this nation had seen in decades, a man whose decisions could close factories or open empires with a single signed page. Ministers had avoided sitting too close to him in the same room, not out of respect but out of the quiet understanding that his presence carried weight that could crush a career without effort. He had walked through boardrooms as if they belonged to him by birthright, and in many ways they had. His companies stretched across industries that lesser men only dreamed of touching. Shipping. Manufacturing. Real estate that shaped entire skylines. He had built and broken and rebuilt again, always with the same cold precision, always with the same unshakable belief that the world would bend because he demanded it. People had called him the king of the business world, and the title had fit him the way a blade fits its sheath.

He had been striking. Handsome in a way that photographs never quite captured. Tall. Broad. The kind of man whose face belonged on the cover of magazines that celebrated power. Even in death, the body retained that force. The big, bulky, muscular frame looked almost too solid for the polished wood that held it. For a moment, it seemed he might simply get up. It looked almost staged, like a dummy placed there for a clothing brand, or an actor waiting for someone to call cut. Even the thought that this could be an elaborate prank, one that would end with someone laughing felt more believable than the truth. He did not look like a man who had finished living.

Patrick Prescott.

CEO of Prescott Empire.

My brother.

The name brought no softness inside me now.

Honestly, it never had.

Near the head of the coffin, a woman sat with her back to the room. Dark hair. Black dress. Her shoulders curved forward slightly, as if the weight of the day had settled there. Mara sat beside her, older now, one hand resting on the younger woman’s shoulder, speaking in a low voice meant only for her.

In the corner stood Ray. Still watchful. The driver, bodyguard, and Best Friend who had remained loyal to Patrick for years. His eyes stayed on the coffin, yet I felt him notice me.

Dario stepped forward and handed me the bouquet we had brought. Both he and Lena moved toward the coffin to place their own flowers among the others. The movement made the lady alert.

Just as I was about to step forward, the lady sitting near the head of the coffin turned her head.

And our eyes met for a moment.

There was confusion at first, as if she could not place me, as if the years had turned my face into something she needed time to remember.

Then the frown disappeared. The confusion cleared. Realisation settled into her expression like a slow, merciless tide. Her eyes were watery. Her hair lay flat against her head. Her skin looked pale, paler than I had ever seen it, as if blood itself had left her body and forgotten to return. She looked tired in a way that went deeper than a single day of mourning. And her eyes.

Her eyes were questioning.

Accusing.

They looked at me as if they wanted answers I had spent ten years refusing to give.

Those eyes made me freeze.

I took in her form without meaning to. She was thinner. The black dress hung on her in a way that spoke of weight lost and nights that had never offered rest. When my gaze landed on her neck, I took a step back. Something inside me locked.

I did not want to look at her.

Not now.

Not like this.

Not with grief written across her face.

I did not want to offer the bouquet. Not even for the sake of the people watching. Not even for the performance of grief that everyone else seemed willing to give and expected me to do the same.

She was crying.

Even while he lay there, he had still made her cry.

He was gone, but somehow he was still there, engraved into her life, into her mind,and onto her body.

I did not want to be here. Not when I was not here all those years she needed me. Not when she lost her only parent. Not when I became orphaned myself. But I was here like a selfish f*****g bastard. Even when I did not want to face her then, nor did I want to do so now. I did not want to stand in this room and pretend my presence meant anything good. I wanted this thing to end. I wanted the voices to stop and the flowers to stop and the eyes to stop asking questions I could not answer.

I turned slightly toward the nearest group of people, trying to disappear among the black suits and quiet conversations, trying to hide from the blue eyes that seemed to see every year I had stolen from her by my absence.

Lena and Dario placed their flowers.

I did not.

I stayed exactly where I was, fixed in place, waiting for the funeral to end, waiting for the moment when I would have to do more than stand here with ten years of silence and self-hatred pressing against my ribs.

As if my actions had created confusion in the eyes of the people around us, a woman stepped closer and said the words, and for the first time in years, I wished I were deaf.

At least then I would not have to hear this.

"She's Patrick's widow."

The words settled into me like cold water.

Not a girl.

Not a woman.

Not a wife.

She was now a widow.

The title hung in the air, final and sharp.

Patrick's widow.

Those two words shouldn't have meant anything to me.

Instead, they felt like a punishment.

Because once, The girl whose smile I had promised to protect.

The friend I had sworn I would never leave alone.

Was now sitting beside her husband's coffin, wearing black, carrying a grief I had not been there to witness.

Regret deepened until it became difficult to breathe. I could not even give her a shoulder to lean on. I could not stand beside her as someone who had the right to offer comfort. I had given up that right the day I left and never returned.

I hated myself for the emptiness of my hands.

I hated returning when I wasn't needed here anymore.

But most of all, I hated that she had learned how to survive without me.

Because I had once promised her she would never have to.

____

Unnati Wordsmith