Chapter 13
Chapter 13
One week later.
The hospital smelled of antiseptic and institutional stillness.
Julian had been admitted after his body gave out — too much alcohol on a stomach that was already damaged, combined with a kind of interior collapse that the doctors politely called emotional exhaustion. Fever, bleeding, unresponsive for hours.
In the fever's delirium, he dreamed.
Lily was sitting beside him. She was pressing a warm, damp cloth to his forehead, the way she used to, and she was saying something soft and exasperated — you drank too much again, you idiot — in that tone she'd reserved just for him.
He grabbed her hand with both of his and held on. Tears ran sideways into his hairline. "Lily… you came back… I knew you would…"
He came back to himself.
He was holding Scarlett's wrist.
Her expression flickered — something dark and quick — and then she smoothed it into concern. "It's me, Julian. You're running a fever. You got confused."
He let go.
He stared at the ceiling with the expression of a man who'd reached into a pocket and found it empty.
Scarlett kept her voice gentle, leaning in: "You need to let her go. She's living her best life with Marcus Calloway now. She doesn't care whether you're alive or dead." A pause. "Actually…" She reached for her phone. "There's something I should probably tell you."
She found a photograph. Blurry. Grainy. Two figures in a coffee shop — it could have been Lily, it was hard to be certain.
"I had someone look into it. This was taken six months ago. Before the divorce was even finalised. She'd already been meeting with Calloway." She let the implication settle. "She didn't leave because you hurt her. She left because she had a better option lined up. She was using you the whole time."
Julian knew the photograph was likely fabricated.
He knew Scarlett was lying.
And still the image planted itself in his mind and he couldn't pull it free. If Lily had been meeting Calloway months ago — if she'd already made her choice before she walked out — then what had his anguish been for? What had all of it been for?
He lay in the hospital and felt a particular kind of pain that has nothing to do with wounds.
At midnight, against the doctor's objections, he removed his IV line and walked out.
He drove to the address he'd obtained through people who owed him favours — her new apartment building. He sat in the car across the street and looked up at a lit window, second floor.
Wondering what she was doing in that warm light.
Reading, maybe. Or having tea. Or—
He cut the thought off.
It wasn't long before a familiar car pulled up.
Lily stepped out. Marcus followed a moment later. They stood on the pavement in low conversation, moonlight on her face, and she was smiling — relaxed, unhurried. A smile Julian realised he hadn't seen in years.
Then Marcus bent and pressed his lips to her forehead. A quiet goodnight.
She didn't pull away. She tilted her face up slightly, accepting it, easy and natural.
Julian's heart stopped.
He was gripping the steering wheel until his hands were bone-white. There was a taste of iron at the back of his throat.
He thought of the last time he'd kissed Lily — in her hospital room, after she'd been revived from the sleeping pills. He'd been impatient. He'd been tired of managing her pain. Whatever he'd given her then had been a performance of comfort.
He shoved open the car door and crossed the street before he'd made any conscious decision to move.
He stopped several metres from them.
They both turned. Lily's expression cooled.
Julian felt like a man standing in a doorway where he no longer has any right to stand. He said the only thing he could, his voice stripped to nothing: "I just wanted to see you. That's all."
Marcus moved one step forward, placing himself between them. His voice was even and absolute: "Mr. Sterling. If you approach my fiancée again, I'll be involving lawyers."
Fiancée.
The word hit him like a car hitting a wall.
She'd accepted a proposal.
He stood in the cold for a long moment.
Then, at last, he understood something he'd been refusing to understand: she wasn't being cruel. She wasn't punishing him. She had every right in the world — every legal, human, moral right — to say yes to a man who looked at her without contempt.
He was the one who had walked away first.
He had simply done it while still collecting her.
He stumbled back. He looked at her cool, averted profile.
And then, finally, he understood: some things, once lost, do not come back.
He turned and walked to his car in the dark. Got in, drove, didn't know where.
The city was very bright and none of it had anything to do with him.
Without deciding to, he found himself in the old neighbourhood. The road he knew by reflex. He pulled up in front of the charred ground where the estate had stood.
Six months on, the site had been cleared. The rubble hauled away. What remained was a patch of blackened earth, open to the sky.
He got out and walked to the centre of what had been the living room — where they'd stood together choosing upholstery, arguing cheerfully about colours, laughing.
The night wind turned the ash up in small dark spirals.
Julian crouched down and let a handful of it sift through his fingers.
He remembered Lily in her wedding dress, standing here for the first time, turning to him: Julian, this is our home. We're going to be here forever.
Forever.
He said the word quietly into the dark, then again, as if testing whether it had ever meant anything.
And then he started laughing.
The sound went up into the empty air and came back wrong — hollow, cracked at the edges, like a man laughing at a joke he hadn't understood until it was too late.
Laughing, and then kneeling on the cold ground, forehead pressed to the blackened earth, shoulders heaving.
Somewhere in the city, a clock tower struck twelve.
A new day.
For him, time had stopped — stopped at the moment she turned and walked away, stopped at the moment he'd realised what he'd spent three years doing to the one person who had always come back for him.
…
Lily, across the city, knew nothing about this.
Two weeks later, she received an invitation to a charity auction gala.
The venue was spectacular — crystal chandeliers throwing light across every surface, the room full of people who knew how to wear what they were wearing and talk to the people they were talking to.
Lily moved through it easily, at Marcus's side.
She was wearing the sapphire gown again. At her throat, a piece Marcus had bid an extraordinary sum to acquire at an earlier sale — antique, unusual, quietly luminous. Every stone had the quality of something that had been kept safe and appreciated. Much like the woman wearing it.
Every camera in the room swung toward them at some point.
Lily leaned toward Marcus to say something quiet, and her smile in that moment was the particular smile of someone who is precisely where they are supposed to be.
The room was mid-auction when a disturbance came through the entrance.
People parted.
Julian walked in.
He looked as if he had not been taking care of himself for months. His suit was expensive and wrecked — hanging off him wrong, the shoulders carrying a body that had shed too much weight. His collar was open and stained. Below his eyes, deep bruising. His face hollowed out.
He moved through the room like a man walking in his sleep. People stepped aside. A few stared openly. One or two seemed almost sorry.
The auctioneer, on the dais, cleared his throat and pressed on.
The next lot: an abstract painting. Large canvas. Saturated colour, gestural marks, confident and unbounded. The kind of painting that looks, if you're in the right mood, like freedom.
Something in Julian's exhausted, unfocused gaze suddenly sharpened.
A memory: a narrow, sun-filled attic room. Lily curled in the secondhand armchair with an art book open, pointing at a painting just like this. There's something in this kind of work that feels like air. Like movement. Like no one owns you.
"One million." His voice came out of him like sandpaper.
The auctioneer paused.
The starting price had been fifty thousand.
The room went very quiet.