Chapter Two: The Girl She Used To Be

The elevator doors closed and I finally let my shoulders drop.

Just for a second. Just until the fourteenth floor disappeared behind me and there was nobody left to perform composure for.

Claire was still upstairs collecting our documents. I had told her I needed a minute. She had looked at my face and not asked a single question, which is why I have kept her around for four years.

The elevator was empty. Mirrored walls on three sides. I stared at my own reflection and barely recognised the woman looking back.

Good. That was the point.

The Amelia who walked into that boardroom was not someone Sebastian had ever met. She was built deliberately, piece by piece, over six years of very quiet, very deliberate work. The posture. The suit. The way she looked at him and felt nothing.

Felt nothing.

I pressed the lobby button again even though it was already lit.

The elevator hummed downward. I watched my reflection the whole way. Composed. Untouchable. The woman I had built from the wreckage of the one I used to be.

She was convincing.

My driver pulled up before I reached the pavement. I got in, closed the door, and said, "Just drive for a bit."

He nodded and pulled into traffic without a word.

I watched the city move past the window. Tall buildings. People on phones. A woman pushing a stroller with one hand and eating with the other. Normal life, going about itself, completely unaware.

That was the thing about the world. It never paused for your worst moments. It just kept moving and expected you to move with it.

I had learned that lesson the hard way. Six years ago, at eleven-thirty at night, standing outside a house that had my things in it but never quite felt like mine.

I did not slam the door. I did not leave a note. I took the bag I had packed three days earlier — I had known it was coming, I had known for weeks — and I walked out while he was on the phone with her in the next room, laughing at something she said.

He did not even hear me leave.

I remember sitting in my car outside his gate and putting my hand flat on my stomach. Six weeks along. I had found out four days before he told me we were a mistake. I had been trying to figure out how to tell him. I never got the chance.

I started the car and drove.

I did not cry until I hit the motorway.

The thing people do not understand about marrying someone as a nobody is that you go in with your whole chest open. No armour. No backup plan. I had money and a name and an empire waiting for me, and I chose to set all of it down at his feet like an offering.

Choose me as nothing and I will know it is real.

I proposed to him in his kitchen on a Tuesday morning. He had flour on his shirt because he had been attempting to make pancakes and failing badly. I was not even planning to do it that day. The words just came out of me.

"Marry me."

He had looked up from the pan.

"Amelia —"

"Not for anything. Not for convenience or timing or because it makes sense. Just because you want to."

He had smiled. That slow, real smile that he did not give to everyone, the one that started at one corner of his mouth before the rest of his face caught up.

"Yes," he said.

And I had believed him completely.

I was good at believing him. I did it for three years while I quietly kept his company breathing from the shadows. While I watched him take meetings I had arranged and shake hands with people I had called first. While I told myself that love did not need credit, that being the person who holds everything together matters even when nobody claps.

Then Victoria walked back in.

And I watched him look at her the way he used to look at me.

That was the part I never said out loud to anyone. Not Claire. Not my mother. Not a single person. It was not just that he chose her. It was the way he looked at her — like remembering something he had missed — and I understood in that moment that I had never been the real thing.

I had been the waiting room.

I had given him three years, a secret, and the best version of myself. And I had been the place he stayed until something better came back.

My phone rang.

I looked at the screen and whatever face I had been holding together just — quit.

Eli.

"Mummy."

His voice. Six years old and already sounding like a small person with opinions and a preferred sleeping position and feelings about which brand of cereal was acceptable.

"Hey, baby."

"When are you coming home? I finished my homework and Mrs. Adaeze said I did it right and I want to show you."

"Every single page?"

"Every single page. Even the maths."

"I'm on my way. Give me an hour."

"Okay." A pause. "Mummy, are you okay? Your voice sounds different."

I pressed my free hand flat against my knee.

"I'm okay. I'll see you soon."

"Okay. Bye. Love you more than rice."

"Love you more than everything."

I hung up.

And then, because he could not hear me anymore, because the car was moving and Claire was not here and there was nobody watching —

I let myself cry. Properly. Just for a minute. For the girl who proposed in a flour-dusted kitchen and meant every word of it. For the woman who walked out at eleven-thirty with a secret she carried alone. For every version of me that loved him when he was not paying attention.

For all of it.

I wiped my face. Fixed my mascara in the phone camera. Straightened up.

My driver glanced in the rearview mirror once. He said nothing. That was why I kept him too.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number. But the digits were not unknown to me. I had deleted the contact years ago but some numbers you do not actually forget.

One message.

We need to talk. Alone.