Chapter 5

The Man Who Let Me Go

Virelle's POV

I went back to the penthouse one last time. Kael was in his study, exactly where he always was, behind a desk covered in papers that mattered more to him than the woman standing in the doorway. He looked up and something flickered in his eyes when he saw the folder in my hands.

"What's that?"

"Divorce papers. I need you to sign them."

The study smelled like it always did, leather and the faint bite of the whiskey he kept in the cabinet behind his desk, and for a second the familiarity of it almost made me lose my nerve. I watched him carefully, waiting for something, anger, panic, anything that would tell me he wanted to fight for us.

"You're serious about this," he said slowly.

"I've never been more serious about anything."

He leaned back, studying me the way he studied a contract before signing it, looking for the catch. "You're upset about the hotel. I understand that. But throwing away four years over a joke seems extreme, don't you think?"

"Do you remember the last time you asked me how my day was and actually waited to hear the answer?"

He blinked, thrown by the change of direction. "That's not what this is about."

"It's exactly what this is about. You just can't see it, because you've never had to."

"This isn't about the joke. It's about everything it told me." I set the folder down. "You could go your whole life without me and never notice the difference. I heard you say it yourself."

"People say things when they're trying to sound impressive in front of other men." He waved a hand like he was swatting something away. "It didn't mean anything."

"It meant everything, Kael. That's the part you don't understand."

He stared at the folder for a long moment. I held my breath, some small, stubborn part of me still hoping he'd push it aside and reach for my hand instead, tell me he'd been a fool, ask me to stay and let him try again…

He picked up the pen.

"If this is what you want," he said, "I'm not going to force you to stay somewhere you don't want to be."

He signed his name at the bottom without reading a word of it. Fast and clean. The same energy he used to approve a lunch order. I watched the pen move and kept waiting for his hand to stop, for him to look up and ask me to give him one more chance, one more year, anything. It didn't stop.

Something in me went quiet and empty. I'd spent four years believing that if I loved him enough, was patient enough, he'd eventually fight for me the way I'd always fought for him. Here he was, signing away our marriage without even looking up twice.

I didn't cry. I'd already cried enough for this man. I picked up the folder and walked toward the door.

"Virelle."

I stopped, my back to him, my heart lifting despite everything I already knew.

"Take care of yourself," he said.

That was all, I nodded, even though he couldn't see my face, and walked out of that penthouse and out of his life without looking back. The elevator doors closed on the sound of him not calling after me.

Kael's POV

I watched her go and told myself I felt nothing. I sat back down and stared at the space where she'd been standing, her perfume still hanging faintly in the air. I picked my pen back up, tried to return to the contract I'd been reviewing before she walked in. The numbers wouldn't hold still on the page.

Something tight settled behind my ribs. I told myself it was nothing, divorces happened, people grew apart, this was probably just the end of something that had run its course years ago, and I was too practical to waste time mourning what couldn't be fixed.

I ignored it and went back to work, and told myself that was the end of it, the way I told myself a lot of things that turned out not to be true.

I didn't know it yet, but somewhere over the Atlantic a plane was climbing into the night, carrying away the only person who'd ever actually known me.

Virelle's POV

I watched the city lights shrink beneath the window as the plane climbed, until they looked more like scattered stars than a place I used to call home.

I rested my hand on my stomach.

"It's just going to be you and me now," I said quietly.

I closed my eyes and let the engines carry me away from four years of candlelit dinners eaten alone, four years of loving a man who never once thought to ask if I was happy. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt something close to peace.

Kael's POV

I found the box while looking for a missing file in our room. It was pushed under the bed, half hidden by the skirt, wrapped in plain white paper with a small blue ribbon. I pulled it out and lifted the lid slower than I meant to.

Three pregnancy tests. All positive.

I stared at them without being able to make my mind catch up. Underneath sat a folded note in her handwriting, careful and deliberate the way she wrote everything.

I couldn't wait to tell you.

The paper shook in my hand. I thought about that night,  the candles burned down to nothing, the dinner cold under its foil, while I sat in a hotel lobby laughing with Selene about numbers that didn't matter.

She'd been pregnant. She'd been carrying our child, and I'd told a room full of strangers her absence wouldn't change a single thing in my life.

I called her, fingers clumsy with a kind of panic I'd never felt before. Straight to voicemail. Again. Nothing. I sat on the floor holding a box that should have been the best news of my life, and for the first time, the quiet in that house didn't feel like peace.

It felt like punishment.

I read the note again. I couldn't wait to tell you. Four words that meant she'd stood in this room, maybe on this exact patch of carpet, happier than I'd seen her in longer than I wanted to admit, and I hadn't been here for it. I'd been at the Windermere, telling Frank a joke that wasn't even funny.

Somewhere over the ocean, a plane was carrying away the woman I had known all my life and a child I hadn't even known existed. And I had let her go without a single word to stop her.