CHAPTER 10: THE DISTANCE THAT QUIETED HIM
1717 Words
Monday, 10 August 2026
North London Fashion Studio — 7:20 A.M. (BST)
Killian Belare’ began the week as though nothing had followed him home from Sarawak.
The studio lights were already burning when he arrived. Assistants moved between garment rails, steaming wool coats and pinning labels to shoes. A photographer tested the white cyclorama while a production coordinator repeated the morning schedule into a headset.
Killian stood on the fitting platform in black trousers and an unfinished charcoal overcoat while two tailors adjusted the back seam.
“Left shoulder,” one of them said.
He lowered it by half an inch.
“Better.”
He had slept for five uninterrupted hours.
Not enough to satisfy James Sil, but more than he had managed in Kuching. The pressure beneath his sternum had weakened. The phantom tightness around his wrist had not returned. Even the dreams had faded into fragments too shapeless to survive daylight.
From the outside, he looked recovered.
Inside, he knew better.
Nothing had been cured.
Something had merely gone quiet.
A technician tested the campaign soundtrack. Low percussion filled the studio, followed by the sound of running water.
Killian’s gaze lifted.
For one second, the fitting room disappeared beneath rain. A red thread tightened around fingers he could not see.
“Mr. Belare’?”
The tailor was watching him.
“You moved.”
Killian returned his arms to position. “Continue.”
The side door opened.
Mara Ellison entered carrying a camel coat over one arm. The campaign’s editorial consultant had once spent eleven months as the only woman the press could call Killian’s girlfriend without being corrected.
She stopped beside the platform.
“You still arrive before everyone else.”
“You are late.”
“I am seven minutes early.”
“Then everyone else is later.”
Her smile held the ease of old familiarity.
“You look rested.”
“I am.”
“That was almost convincing.”
She adjusted the edge of his lapel before the tailor could stop her. Once, the gesture had been ordinary.
“Dinner this week?” she asked. “No photographers. No industry people.”
“I won’t be free.”
“Not even one evening?”
“No.”
Mara studied him, then nodded towards the coffee station.
“Coffee on set, then.”
“That I can manage.”
“Still scheduling friendship like a call sheet.”
“It prevents confusion.”
“It always did.”
When the photographer called him onto the cyclorama, Killian reached the first mark without looking down.
The campaign wanted a man untouched by winter.
“Less perfect,” the photographer said after several frames. “Give me something human.”
Killian lowered his chin.
The certainty left his eyes without making them weak. What remained looked like a man who had reached the cold and decided not to ask anyone for warmth.
The shutter stopped.
Mara studied the monitor.
“Keep that one.”
No one in the studio understood how little of it had been performed.
Only James, standing beyond the lights with the day’s schedule in his hand, recognised how efficiently Killian had turned exhaustion into something the world could purchase.
Killian’s Dressing Room — 9:05 A.M. (BST)
James placed a tablet beside the mirror.
“Interview at ten. Fragrance approval at ten thirty. Dr. Brick at eleven thirty. Costume fitting after lunch.”
“Move the fitting.”
“It already moved once.”
“Move it again.”
James scrolled down.
“Management also wants a private dinner on the seventeenth, a filmed birthday message and a charity appearance.”
“No.”
“All three?”
“Yes.”
“Seventeen August remains blocked, then.”
A brief pressure moved beneath Killian’s sternum.
He looked towards the mirror.
“Keep it empty.”
James noticed the pause but continued.
“Friday’s preliminary documentary meeting was handled by management and legal while you were finishing the reshoot schedule. Production sent the revised candidate package this morning.”
“What documentary?”
“Project KIZUNA. The hotel collaboration in London.”
Killian remembered the name only vaguely from the schedule James had repeated in Sarawak.
“They want a recognisable face beside a loom.”
“That was also my first impression.”
“And your second?”
“The rights structure is unusually strict.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you should read it before refusing.”
Killian reached for his coat.
“After Dr. Brick.”
James handed him the tablet.
“You are developing a dangerous respect for sequence.”
Harley Street — 11:30 A.M. (BST)
Dr. Alistair Brick listened without interrupting.
The consultation room remained exactly as Killian remembered it: quiet walls, controlled light and no object arranged to invite unnecessary disclosure.
Dr. Brick reviewed the notes.
“Pressure beneath the sternum. Heat along the spine. Sleep disturbance. Dreams involving water, thread and an unidentified woman.”
“Yes.”
“Any symptoms since returning to London?”
“Weaker.”
“Gone?”
“No.”
“What triggers them?”
“Water sounds. Certain images. A date.”
Dr. Brick looked up. “Which date?”
“Seventeen August 2009.”
“Why?”
“I found a museum photograph taken that day.”
“And you believe you appear in it?”
“I believe the reflection resembles me.”
“That is a different answer.”
“It is the accurate one.”
Dr. Brick made a note.
“You also mentioned a woman in Kuching.”
“I saw her at Five Foot Way.”
“Did you speak?”
“No.”
“Touch?”
“No.”
“Do you know her name?”
Killian’s answer came without hesitation.
“No.”
He knew the name that had left his mouth after the dream. He simply refused to place it inside a clinical record before he understood why it belonged there.
Dr. Brick watched him long enough to make the lie visible without challenging it directly.
“Does the woman in your dreams resemble the woman you saw?”
“I never saw either face clearly.”
“Then what connects them?”
“A sense of recognition.”
“Recognition of what?”
“Loss.”
The word entered the room more honestly than he intended.
Killian continued before Dr. Brick could ask.
“In the dreams, I failed to reach her. Or protect her. The details change. The grief does not.”
“And you believe the connection exists outside your own mind?”
“I don’t know.”
“That is useful.”
“How?”
“It is the first answer today that does not pretend certainty.”
Dr. Brick closed the notebook.
“I want neurological imaging, blood work, a sleep study and a written dream record. I also want your complete medical history.”
“You already have it.”
“I have what you chose to provide.”
Killian’s jaw tightened.
“Loss of consciousness, serious accidents, hospital admissions. All of it.”
White hospital light flashed behind Killian’s eyes.
Rain moved against a window.
Then nothing.
“There is no admission relevant to this.”
“Relevance is my decision.”
Killian stood.
Dr. Brick remained seated.
“The sleep study is Friday. Your Milan fitting has been moved.”
“You spoke to James.”
“James speaks to anyone who prevents you from behaving like a machine.”
“He exaggerates.”
“So do patients who believe functioning is evidence of health.”
Outside Harley Street — 1:05 P.M. (BST)
Akmal opened the rear door as Killian approached the car.
James was already inside with the Project KIZUNA package open on his tablet.
“No celebrity photograph,” Killian said after taking the opposite seat.
“That was deliberate.”
The first pages listed governance rather than publicity.
Community representatives.
Named weavers.
Cultural and editorial review.
No reconstructed ritual.
No anonymous artisan footage.
No unauthorised use of protected motifs.
“The community and JARA retain review and stop-work rights,” James said. “The weavers speak for their own work.”
Killian scrolled through the document.
“And the international guest?”
“Still subject to formal review. You are a candidate, not a confirmed participant.”
“Who else?”
“Restricted.”
Killian opened the consultant section.
The name appeared without a portrait.
Creative and Cultural Consultant: Valerie Jara.
The pressure beneath his sternum returned.
Not pain.
Recognition without evidence.
James watched him.
“You know her?”
Killian kept his eyes on the screen.
“I know the name.”
A professional biography followed. Founder of JARA. Creative force behind VAL J. Community-first licensing. No personal photograph, only images of hands measuring thread, a woman seated with her back to the camera and a silhouette beyond a studio partition.
“Send me the rights schedule,” Killian said. “The review structure and the biographies of everyone holding representation or stop-work authority.”
“That is not a refusal.”
“It is not an acceptance.”
James leaned back.
“Progress.”
Killian closed the tablet.
He had not accepted.
He had only stopped saying no.
Killian’s London Penthouse — 11:42 P.M. (BST)
The city lay black and silver beyond the windows.
Campaign approvals occupied one end of the dining table. Project KIZUNA occupied the other.
Killian read the rights schedule twice.
The community could remove unapproved material. The weavers retained attribution and payment. Valerie’s role did not allow her to speak over them; it required her to protect the structure in which they spoke for themselves.
He opened the JARA portfolio.
No face appeared.
Only work.
Thread drying beneath morning light. A hand checking tension. A loom recorded close enough for the sound to fill the room.
Killian played the audio once.
Then again.
Then a third time.
Nothing spoke beneath the loom.
No hidden voice entered the rhythm. No vision crossed the windows. No proof emerged from repetition.
Only patient work.
On the screen, Valerie Jara’s name remained beside the consultant role.
London had quieted whatever followed him from Sarawak.
But Valerie Jara’s name had crossed the distance—
and found him again.
- Writer
