Chapter 10: Long Premeditated

"What's wrong?"

Sophie followed Claire's gaze toward the thinning crowd.

"Nothing."

Claire shook her head and looked away.

Lately she'd been imagining things that weren't there. Again and again.

"Nathan brought Diana and her son to watch, by the way they left before the awards, though. No idea you were even competing."

"He's changed so much. He used to refuse to set foot in a theater with me."

Claire sank into the passenger seat, wrists already aching from a single match after years without practice.

"Stay at my place tonight," Sophie offered.

"I'll pass. Just take my gear back with you."

Claire had no interest in hearing Nathan invoke his grandmother again tonight but as long as they weren't sharing a bed, she could manage.

Sophie walked her to the door. "Night, Claire baby!"

Watching her go, Sophie felt a genuine ache in her chest. Life had a way of handing people more than their share of bad luck.

"Night. Drive safe."

Claire watched Sophie's car disappear before heading inside. Having a friend that steady in her corner felt like its own small blessing.

Sometimes, more than love, it was friendship that actually held you up.

Nathan's first words to her were: "Tell Sophie to watch her mouth from now on."

She didn't need to ask what had happened. Sophie had clearly said something a little too true during the match, and Diana hadn't liked it.

"Sophie says what she wants. That's her right."

Nathan's patience thinned visibly. "I don't want to see you targeting Diana anymore. Every time you push her, it just adds to what I already owe her."

His brow creased with exhaustion, as if he genuinely couldn't understand what had happened to the compliant woman he used to know.

Bullying. From where he stood, Claire had always been the one bullying Diana.

Claire sat down on the sofa, rubbing at her sore wrists.

"Divorce me and marry her, then. Problem solved, you won't owe her anything anymore."

Her tone stayed gentle, no bitterness in it, almost like she was doing him a favor.

Something in Nathan's eyes turned to ice at that, cold enough to reach clean through her.

"They move into your house for a few weeks and suddenly you want out?"

Claire's eyes lifted slightly, words crowding her throat, unspoken.

Every time she and Diana clashed, Nathan sided with Diana. Always.

Once someone's heart had already picked a side, nothing she said would move it.

She didn't care much for the marriage itself anymore. But she still cared about her name.

Her husband was sleeping in another woman's room, under this very roof, before the divorce had even happened.

If word of that ever got out, she wouldn't just be the woman wearing a crown of thorns she'd be the punchline of it.

His presence alone, right now, felt like something vast and immovable, a man carved entirely out of this is how it is, and nothing else.

"If we divorce now, we can still walk away with some dignity intact. If our paths cross again someday, I could still call you Nathan without it hurting."

Something in Nathan's chest tightened like a blade had found it, his handsome face darkening instantly.

"Claire. I will only ever be your husband. In this life, there's no version where that isn't true."

This marriage hadn't been fate. It had been engineered by him, through his grandmother, deliberate and calculated from the start.

He'd used his own disability to appear helpless, pressured his dying grandmother into rewriting her will around it.

The scheme had started the day of Claire's eighteenth birthday, long before anyone else even knew to look for it.

There was no version of this where he let go.

"You're all I have left, Claire."

His voice cracked with something raw, hoarse, hitting the one place in her chest she couldn't armor against.

Her eyes stung without warning, her legs suddenly heavy as lead.

She stood there a moment, then turned and wheeled him forward without another word.

Before Diana came back into their lives, this was simply how the two of them had survived leaning on each other, five years running.

She didn't need him to say a word to know exactly where he wanted to go.

She hated him for never letting go of Diana and her son, for trapping her in this half-life alongside it.

She hated herself more, for being so sure she wanted out, and still unable to be cruel to him when he looked this fragile.

"Come up to the roof. Look at the stars with me."

Claire said nothing as the elevator carried them straight to the top floor.

She reached for the light switch out of habit, then remembered Nathan hated the lights on up here and pulled her hand back.

She wheeled him to the glass wall and settled onto a single armchair a short distance away.

The chair was worn soft and familiar; it had always been her spot.

When she'd first arrived at the Wade estate as a child, homesick and unable to sleep, it had been Nathan grieving his own parents too who told her that hers had gone to the sky to become stars.

A lie meant to comfort a child. She'd believed it completely, spent countless nights afterward staring up, searching for them.

By the time she grew old enough to understand what death and loss actually meant, the habit had already taken root. She never stopped looking up.

As long as she could find stars in the sky, something in her settled.

After Grandma Wade passed, she and Nathan had moved into this house together. He'd had this rooftop built into an observatory specifically for her clear nights, no obligations, he'd sit up here with her for hours.

Tonight, the sky refused to cooperate. Nothing but clouds.

Claire's eyelids grew heavy, yawns coming one after another.

"I want to go back to sleep."

"Go ahead. I'll stay up a little longer."

The empty night pressed down through the glass, and against it, Nathan's silhouette looked smaller than she'd ever noticed before.

She watched him a moment longer, said nothing, and left him there alone.

No matter how many nights they spent up here counting stars, none of it would ever bring things back to what they'd been.

—

Aunt Carol woke her the next morning Nathan had spiked a high fever.

Claire bolted upright, barefoot, and ran straight for Diana's room without even thinking to grab her shoes.

Nathan was curled in on himself, delirious, muttering nonsense through the fever.

"Brother... brother..."

"Claire, don't be scared. I'm here."

"Grandma please, please"

Claire pressed a hand to his forehead. Burning.

She had Marcus carry him down to the car while Mr. Hughes started the engine.

She climbed into the passenger seat, yanking on the clothes and shoes Carol had shoved into her arms mid-run.

Diana grabbed the car door. "I'm coming too."

"Move."

Claire slammed the door shut and told Hughes to drive.

Outside, the night hadn't fully broken yet empty streets, silence, streetlights blurring past the window.

Claire twisted around from the front seat, fingers white-knuckled around her seatbelt.

The passing lights caught Nathan's face soaked in sweat, cheeks flushed deep red from the fever.

Ever since the accident, his health had never fully recovered. Any fever aggravated the old injury, sent his temperature spiking fast and hard.

Left unchecked, it could turn fatal.

Under her care, he hadn't run a fever like this in two years.

"Faster, Mr. Hughes."

She pulled out her phone.

"Ethan Nathan's at forty-two degrees. We're on our way."

"Marcus is doing what he can to bring it down. He's unconscious, skin's gone red all over."

Dr. Ethan Lawson's voice came back calm, steady. "I'll meet you at the entrance."

The call ended with a soft beep.

Claire turned back to Nathan, still muttering through the fever.

"Brother, don't kill me..."

He had to be out of his mind with it. Adrian wasn't close to his younger brother, but he'd never wish him dead.

Since the accident, Nathan had grown paranoid, suspicious, thin-skinned in ways he'd never been before. Claire chose not to hear it.

Marcus, deaf, caught nothing. And Hughes knew better than to repeat a word of it.