Chapter 10
Chapter 10
Julian gripped the divorce certificate, knuckles white.
He looked at what was left of the house he had built for her — chosen every tile, every fixture, every corner — and watched the fire reduce it all to ash. Along with three years of lies he'd told himself.
He moved into a hotel suite and didn't come out for three days.
Empty bottles on the floor. Overflowing ashtrays. The curtains drawn at all hours, day and night indistinguishable. He lay on the sofa with his tie half-undone, stubble coming in, eyes swollen and glazed, the alcohol numbing his nerves without touching the image of a woman in a sapphire dress that kept returning.
Eventually, the doorbell sounded.
He didn't move.
Then from the corridor, Scarlett's voice, thick with reproach: "Julian… it's me…"
He closed his eyes. Then, slowly, levered himself upright and walked to the door.
It wasn't fully open before she was inside, arms wrapping around his waist, face buried against his chest, shoulders shaking.
"You've been ignoring me for days…" she wept. "Is it because of her? Are you heartbroken over her?"
Julian's body went rigid. He didn't push Scarlett away. He didn't pull her closer.
He just stood there and let her cry, while his mind kept showing him the photograph in that certificate — Lily's calm, distant smile.
Scarlett looked up, her hand moving to cup his drawn face. "She's better off gone… now we can finally be together properly. Forget about her. I'm staying."
"She can't just leave like that…" Julian's voice came out wrong — scraped, hollow. "After everything. Ten years. She burns the house and just — goes—"
Alcohol loosened the grip he kept on certain thoughts, and they drifted to the surface now: the slow changes in Lily these past months. The quiet. The absence of resistance. The way she'd stopped fighting him.
He'd thought it meant she'd given in. Or was working an angle. But it hadn't been either.
She'd been preparing.
Scarlett sensed the shift in him and tightened her arms. "That house was just a house. We can build something new."
She rose on her toes and murmured against his ear: "Think about it, Julian — she's the one who changed. She became cold, she stopped trying. She even exposed my photos. She gave up on your marriage. That's on her."
"You're right…" Julian reached for his glass and drank. The bourbon burned. "She's not who she used to be. She's different now…"
He needed that to be true.
Needed to tell himself that Lily had transformed into someone unrecognisable — that she'd been the one to break something first. Otherwise, there was no story that made this bearable. No frame in which he wasn't just a man who had destroyed the person who loved him most, for no reason he could justify in daylight.
"Exactly," Scarlett said softly, curling against his side. "Nothing like the girl you fell for. Not like me. I'll always be here. As long as you need me."
Julian closed his eyes and held her.
He told himself this was the right choice. Scarlett was young, she was uncomplicated, she loved him without the weight of history pressing down on everything.
That was what he needed now.
He told himself that, and tried very hard to believe it.
The new house was on a hillside — wide views, opulent finishes, the kind of place that photographs beautifully.
It was also very quiet. And very cold.
Julian was an early riser. For years, Lily had always been up before him — breakfast ready by the time he came downstairs. Warm milk. Soft-boiled eggs, the yolk perfect every time. Toasted bread with blueberry jam on the days she felt like it.
He rubbed his throbbing temple and walked into the kitchen.
Scarlett was there in a silk slip dress, phone in one hand, scrolling through a food delivery app.
"Morning!" She looked up, bright and easy. "I was just ordering breakfast. They have caviar and foie gras — perfect, right? Should be here in thirty."
Julian looked at the empty countertop. Not even a kettle.
Scarlett caught his gaze and pouted. "I don't really cook. And honestly, with the money you have? You shouldn't need to either."
The delivery arrived in those gleaming little boxes — everything photographable and nothing warm.
Julian picked up a spoon. Tasted the caviar.
His stomach turned.
He thought of Lily's rice porridge. She'd always made it for him when his stomach was off — skimmed perfectly, every trace of astringency gone, just the clean taste of it.
"Let me do your tie." Scarlett set down her fork and came around behind him, fingers fumbling with the silk.
She tugged too tight. He could feel it in his windpipe.
He pulled the knot loose with two fingers, thinking of Lily's hands — quick, sure, always exactly right. A Windsor knot, every time. Comfortable the second it settled.
After an evening of client dinners, Julian came home with his stomach in knots. He'd been drinking for business for years, and the damage had accumulated. On bad nights, Lily would have a glass of remedy tea waiting — something herbal that always worked. If he'd had too much, she'd sit up all night pressing a warm cloth to his forehead while he was ill.
Scarlett met him at the door in something cut low, already reaching for him. "Tonight—"
"My stomach's bad." He stepped away from her hand.
A brief hesitation. "I'll get you some water?"
He heard her moving around the kitchen, crockery rattling, a crash, her yelp of surprise: "Oh no, I spilled it—"
He pressed his hand to his forehead, temples throbbing.
He went and boiled the kettle himself, found the antacids through trial and error in three different cupboards, and swallowed them with water that was slightly too hot.
The medicine took a long time to work. He lay on the sofa in the dark, damp with cold sweat, thinking about the small wicker basket Lily had kept on the bathroom shelf — paracetamol, antacids, cold relief tablets, all labelled, with a Post-it note on the inside lid that listed what each one was for.
He didn't even know where Scarlett kept the plasters.
"Julian?" Scarlett appeared in the doorway, hovering. "Should I call a doctor or something?"
"No." He closed his eyes.
She stood there for a moment longer, then retreated.
He spent the night on the bathroom floor.
The next morning she knocked on the door, exasperated: "Julian, I need to use it, come on…"
He splashed cold water on his face. Stared at his own reflection — a stranger's eyes, a stranger's exhaustion.
He stayed there a while, willing the images to stop.
But they didn't. Lily tying his tie. Lily in her apron. Lily curled on the sofa in the lamplight, still awake, waiting.
For the first time, standing in that bathroom, he understood it with complete clarity:
Some things, once changed, are changed forever.