Chapter Five: One Umbrella

Aurelia's POV

He crossed the street like the rain wasn't even happening to him.

I stayed pressed against the covered entrance, watching him get closer, telling myself to move, to say something normal, to act like this was any other night. My legs didn't listen.

"You're going to catch a cold standing there," Kael said, stopping a few feet from me, rain sliding off his shoulders like it had given up trying to touch him.

"My driver's stuck in traffic."

"I heard." He glanced past me into the ballroom, where the party was still going, muffled and golden through the glass doors. "Cassian left in a hurry."

"He had a meeting."

"At this hour?"

I didn't answer that, I didn't have to. He already knew what kind of answer it would be.

"I can take you home," he said.....simple, like it wasn't a big deal, like no time at all had passed since the last time he'd said something like that to me.

"You don't have to do that."

"I know I don't."

Thunder rolled somewhere over the city, and the wind picked up, throwing rain sideways under the covered entrance until it caught the hem of my dress.

"Aurelia." He said my name carefully, like he was testing whether it still fit in his mouth after all this time. "It's just a ride."

It wasn't just a ride. We both knew it wasn't but standing there getting colder by the second, with no other way home and no husband coming back for me, I didn't have the strength to keep pretending I didn't want to say yes.

"Okay," I said. "Just a ride."

He didn't smile, exactly, but something in his face eased. He held his umbrella out over me first, then over himself, and we walked to his car like that, close enough that our shoulders almost touched the whole way.

*****

The inside of the car was warm and quiet, rain drumming steady against the roof. His driver pulled away from the curb, and for a long moment neither of us said anything.

"You didn't have to wait for me," I said finally, staring out the window instead of at him.

"You were standing outside in the rain. I wasn't going to leave you there."

"Still. Thank you."

"You don't have to thank me for a car ride."

I glanced at him. He was looking straight ahead, jaw tight, hands loose on his knees in a way that looked deliberate, like he was making sure they stayed there.

"You say that like it's just a car ride," I said quietly.

He didn't answer right away. The wipers kept going, fast, useless against the storm outside.

"It's not, is it," he said finally. Not really a question.

I looked down at my hands in my lap. "I don't know what it is anymore."

"Neither do I."

We sat there a second too long, I could hear my own heartbeat over the rain hitting the glass.

"Cassian's probably still at his meeting," I said, because I needed to say something that wasn't about us.

"Probably."

"He might be home late again."

"Aurelia." He said my name a second time, softer. "I'm not going to ask you about your marriage."

"I know."

"I mean it. That's not why I stopped the car for you tonight."

"I know, Kael."

Saying his name out loud like that, easy, like six years hadn't happened between us, did something to my chest I didn't have a name for.

"Six years," I said, before I could stop myself.

He turned to look at me properly for the first time since we'd gotten in the car. "What?"

"That's how long it's been. Since you left." I hadn't meant to say it out loud. It just came, sitting there in the dark with him......the number I'd never said to anyone but Rosa. "I used to count it in months. Then I stopped, because it started to feel pathetic."

"It's not pathetic."

"Isn't it?"

"No." His voice dropped, rough at the edges. "I counted it too, Aurelia. I just never told you that."

I didn't know what to do with that, I didn't know what to do with any of it.....the rain, the car, six years sitting between us like something neither of us had ever actually put down.

The car slowed as we came up on the estate gates. He had the driver stop right at the gate instead of pulling all the way up to the house, and I understood without asking why. If Cassian came home and saw Kael's car in the driveway, there'd be questions neither of us wanted to answer tonight.

He reached over and unlocked my door himself.

"Get inside before you catch a cold," he said. "I'll wait until the gate closes behind you."

I hesitated with my hand on the door. "You still do that. Wait until I'm all the way inside."

"Some things don't change." A pause. "Even after six years."

I got out into the rain and didn't look back until I was through the gate, when I finally turned, his car was still there, headlights cutting through the downpour, exactly like he said it would be.

He waited until the gate clicked shut behind me. Only then did the car pull away.

I stood in the driveway a long time after that, soaked straight through, watching the empty street where his headlights had just been.

*****

The house was dark when I let myself in....no sign of Cassian, no note either. Just Marta clearing dinner dishes no one had touched.

"He called," she said gently. "Said he'd be late."

"Of course he did."

I went upstairs and peeled off my wet dress, and I lay in bed staring at the ceiling for a long time, replaying a car ride that shouldn't have mattered as much as it did.

I told myself it was nothing, I told myself that until the words stopped meaning anything at all.

Because the truth was simpler than I wanted it to be, and colder than the rain had been. In four years of marriage, Cassian had never once waited to make sure I was safely inside before he drove away.

Kael had done it without even thinking about it. Like it was just something he did....like it had never stopped being something he did.

I fell asleep still turning that thought over, more seen in twenty minutes in a rainstorm than I'd felt in four years of being someone's wife.