Chapter 3: The Humiliation

Varena's POV 

I can’t make myself drive home. Not tonight. I stay parked in Lysara’s guest spot, engine off, hands still trembling on my lap, the kind of shaking you feel in your bones and not just your skin. I send her one text, because honestly, I just can’t face the stairs alone right now. She doesn’t say much when she comes down. It’s late. She’s got a coat tossed over her pajamas and she just slides into the seat beside me, silent except for flicking the heater up a notch. We don’t talk. We just let the quiet grow. Eventually, tears come, and they can’t seem to stop. Lysara doesn’t try to patch anything or fill the silence, not yet. The engine’s low hum is the only thing between us and the too-big ache in my chest. Finally, don’t ask me how long later, time’s a blur, I manage to tell her what happened.

Days pass. Eleven of them, if anyone’s counting. It takes that long just to settle enough to open a box, to let my energy rest somewhere more than a night or two, to stop living out of a duffel and start calling this place “mine.” The apartment smells sharp and half-baked, fresh paint chasing old plaster and stale dust that scratches your throat when you breathe in too deep. It echoes. It’s a funny little space, a walk-up in Ferrow Heights, and utterly unlike the glass and steel I used to call home. The radiator makes itself known before sunrise every morning with a crash, as proud as any alarm. If I touch the window latch, it creaks in complaint. And the air conditioner, when it finally shudders on, sends a ripple through the whole room.

On moving day, Dez from 2B hands over the keys and says, “Shower quick if you want hot water. You and a neighbor before eight? Someone’s getting frostbite.” He’s not wrong.

There’s a fire escape off the kitchen, and at night, you hear the train screeching two blocks away. That grinding-metal, bone-deep sound. Brakes sighing. Exhaust and speed and routine, repeating so much it starts to blend with the static in my own head. Even now, after eleven days, that noise sneaks up on me every time.

Tonight, Lysara’s on my living room floor. She looks almost comfortable, surrounded by takeout containers and flattened cardboard, trying and failing to eat cold pad thai with chopsticks. It’s a mess, but at least it feels lived-in.

“You know forks exist, right?” I ask her, grinning despite everything.

She shoots me a look, noodles dangling. “Forks are for boring people. You want adventure, you use chopsticks.” She keeps eating, missing her mouth completely. Then she snaps her eyes up, chewing. “Let me guess, you still haven’t called your mother?”

I groan. “Not yet.”

She arches an eyebrow. “Varena. C’mon.”

“I will.” The promise hangs there, thin, worn out by repetition.

She’s unimpressed. “You’ve been saying that for eleven days.”

She’s right, but I just turn away. My hands dig around in a box marked OFFICE. My old handwriting, faded, a little cocky, the sort that thinks it has somewhere important to go. I pull out a navy spiral notebook, corners curled, the kind you keep because, somewhere inside, there’s something you still can’t throw away. My name’s still on the cover. VARENA SOLEN, CONCEPTS, written in streaky silver ink. It makes me feel fifteen and braver than I do right now.

Inside, the pages are crowded with pencil, nothing finished, just raw ideas stacked up like platelets. Cash flow charts. Logo sketches for “Solen Strategic”, lined out, redrawn, crossed out again. Tucked between the pages is a bent bakery receipt: Mott Street, $2.50, circled, dated a week before I wrote a plan on the next page. I needed pastry fuel back then. Everything seemed urgent and important.

Maybe I left too much of myself behind without noticing.

“Find something good?” Lysara pauses, carton wobbling in her hand.

“My own handwriting,” I say, flipping through. Page after page, diagrams, arrows, scribbled instructions about cash flow, every page a time capsule. All from eight years ago. That spring’s burned into my brain, hard to forget. Rykar’s first office, just a kitchen table. No windows. Long before Valthor Global had glass walls or a logo. The two of us sacrificing sleep, squeezing out one last late night of strategy because the company had less than a month’s runway. I remember the fear, his fear most of all.

“You know,” I murmur, almost startled to hear my own voice. “This is it. This plan. This saved the company.” I can barely believe I’m the one saying it.

Lysara sits perfectly still, almost too still, like she’s not going to look away, no matter what I say.

“You built it?” she asks, the weight heavy in her words.

I hold up the notebook, turn it so the lamp hits the page. This isn’t theory; it’s lived. I can see Rykar, eight years younger, snapping a photo of these pages because we couldn’t afford a scanner. Even now, I can name each of the coffee stains, because I made them, one bitter cup at a time.

She says, “But that’s not how people tell the Valthor story.” She’s waiting. She needs to hear it out loud from me.

I shake my head. “No.” Everyone’s got their script, and I can recite it by heart, the myth of Rykar, genius founder, nothing but pluck and vision. I’ve sat through dinners, interviews, hell, our own wedding, watching people give him all the credit. History morphs with enough retellings.

Lysara puts down her food, the cartoon brightness gone. “So what, he forgot? Or did someone erase you?”

“He didn’t forget.” My words come out sharp, and I hate that I sound so raw. Rykar, he remembers everything. Dates, numbers, details. Paperclips, for godsakes. The fact that he never tells this story? Says plenty about who mattered to him in that moment, and who didn’t.

She nods, quietly. “Erased, then. People do that. Doesn’t make it right.”

I close the notebook slow, the way you close something you’re not ready to lose yet, seeking some comfort from old pencil and worn paper. Outside, the train wails again, steady, familiar. A car alarm breaks the quiet, then clicks off.

I stare at the notebook in my lap. “I can’t let this make me bitter,” I say, almost whispering. “I don’t want to turn into that, I don’t want to spend my life digging up things better left buried.”