Chapter 7

At noon that day, I saw Serena again.

She was standing outside the front entrance to Thorne Manor, her eyes fixed on the study window on the second floor.

Cain was sitting at the window, head down, playing.

Serena stood there for a long time, then didn't go in to find Cain. Instead, she came to find me.

She handed me a stack of worn sheet music.

"He's been looking for this score. Could you pass it on to him?"

I was surprised. "Cain's right upstairs. Why don't you give it to him yourself?"

"I can't." Serena shook her head, a faint smile that wasn't happy. "He doesn't want to see me anymore."

That's when I realized — Serena had been absent from the Manor for a while now. And the ring she'd given Cain was gone from his hand.

"Ember." Serena spoke up, pulling me out of my thoughts.

She asked: "I like Cain. You could tell, right?"

I nodded. It was obvious.

"At the concert, everyone was in groups. He was alone, standing apart from everyone, like he didn't belong in the same world. I noticed him immediately."

"He was so striking. I barely heard a single piece of music that night. I was just watching him."

"When I found out his phone had died, I offered to walk him home."

"I'm not naive. After two sentences I could tell he wasn't like other people. But I thought that made him more genuine, more interesting."

When she talked about Cain, a soft light came into her eyes.

"After you left, Gerald contacted me and said you were pushing for a dissolution."

"I was honestly happy when I heard that."

"I always thought you and Cain were from completely different worlds. He lives in music, and you only ever seemed to care about practical things. He and I shared the same taste, the same references, hours of conversation about music we both loved. I thought I was the right one for him."

"I told him dissolving the Bond wasn't a bad thing. That I could take on the responsibility of caring for him."

"But do you know what happened?"

Serena was still standing outside the entrance of Thorne Manor, talking to me.

I asked if she wanted to come inside and sit down.

She glanced up at Cain's window on the second floor and shook her head.

She told me what happened after I left. She had stayed with Cain at the Manor for a few days.

In the study, Cain and she talked about music.

Outside the study, Cain talked about me.

"I made him a strawberry cake, and he stopped and told me you love strawberries the most."

"There's a row of stuffed toys on the living room couch. He told me you sewed them yourself. That you'd named each one together."

"His window cabinet is covered in photos of the two of you. I tried to count them and gave up."

"But the worst part — the thing I couldn't get past — was when he played a progression of chords and told me the melody suited you. That he'd never been apart from you this long before. That he missed you."

I hadn't known any of this.

"And then?" I wanted to know why Cain had stopped wanting to see her.

"And then I realized — in all the time Cain and I had known each other, he'd never talked about anything except music with me. We'd never had any physical contact, not even once."

"I asked him directly if he would dissolve the Bond with you. He didn't hesitate at all. He said no."

"That night I got a little desperate. I wanted to prove he cared about me."

"So I went into his room and took off my clothes in front of him. I thought — if he was willing to do that with me, it would prove something, right?"

"He'd said being with you was disgusting. So if he'd be willing to try with me, didn't that mean he preferred me?"

I didn't say anything. I just listened until she was done.

"I wasn't expecting that reaction. I don't know how to describe his face — disbelief, panic, disgust, revulsion — all of it at once. He was furious. He pushed me away and threw me out."

"Before I left, his face was flushed with anger."

"He said he'd thought I was different from other people. He said he'd been wrong."

"He told me to stop coming to find him. He didn't want to see me again."

Serena looked down, hiding whatever was in her eyes.

"When I left, he was sitting on the couch among all your stuffed toys, and he said your name quietly."

"Before all this, I could keep telling myself that he didn't care about you, that you'd trapped someone who didn't know better into a Bond, and that the real third wheel here was you."

"But now," she looked up at the window, at the figure on the other side of the glass, and exhaled slowly. "I still like him. But I know it's over."

"Please give him the score. I looked for it for a long time."

As far as I could tell, Cain either hadn't seen Serena standing there, or had chosen not to look down.

She stood outside Thorne Manor for over an hour. Cain never once glanced in her direction.

When she finally left, she walked slowly. By the time she disappeared from view, she still hadn't managed to catch his eye.