Too Close To The Truth

I woke up on the sofa the next morning with the blanket still around my shoulders and no memory of falling into whatever sleep had actually taken me.

Julianii was already gone by the time I sat up, off to whatever early meeting he'd apparently scheduled, and I spent most of breakfast trying to figure out how to act normal around a man who had said something I wasn't supposed to hear.

“You shouldn't have to carry all of this alone.”

I felt ridiculous, sitting there replaying it, my cheeks turning red out of embarrassment. I told myself it didn't matter. He had said it thinking I was asleep. It wasn't meant for me to respond to, which meant I didn't need to acknowledge it at all.

When he came down later that morning, he didn't bring it up.

He didn't act any different either, which somehow made it worse. He simply poured his coffee, mentioned something about a call he had at eleven, and asked if I slept all right, as though the previous night had contained nothing more significant than falling asleep on a sofa.

I decided to let it stay that way. Whatever quiet understanding existed between us now, it seemed safer left unspoken.

While I spent the day taking calls from board members still nervous after Vesper's performance at the last meeting, Julianii spent his time buried in old business records.

He didn't tell me at first, I only learned later, piecing it together from what he eventually admitted, that he had gone back into the archived files connected to the collapse that had ruined his family, looking for something he hadn't found the first hundred times he searched.

This time, he found inconsistencies.

Several transfers, made years ago, linked through a subsidiary, connected to Castellane Group. The records existed, technically, but whoever had processed them had left the authorization fields curiously incomplete. No clear signature. No definitive name attached to the decision.

It didn't prove anything, at least not yet. But it meant the story he had believed for years, clean and simple, entirely his family's misfortune and someone else's carelessness, might not have been as straightforward as everyone had always assumed.

What unsettled him more, was what he found alongside it.

Someone had recently accessed the same archived files. Not months ago, but recently. Someone currently inside Castellane Group had gone looking through records tied to a collapse that had happened over a decade earlier, and there was no obvious reason for anyone to be looking unless they already knew there was something worth finding.

He didn't tell me any of this that day. He said he would, later. He wasn't ready to bring it to me without knowing more, without understanding whether what he had found meant anything at all, or whether it would only complicate something already complicated enough.

So that evening, when we dressed for a small private dinner hosted by one of the city's older business families, he said nothing about any of it, and I had no idea anything had happened.

The gathering was smaller than most of the events we attended together, a dozen or so people gathered in someone's private dining room, old money mixed with the kind of polite curiosity that always followed us now.

"The infamous rivals," someone said with a laugh, early in the evening, gesturing between the two of us with a glass of wine. "I still can't quite believe it. You two spent an entire dinner party arguing about tariff policy about two years ago. I remember it specifically because I thought Sabine might actually throw her wine at you, Julianii."

"She considered it," Julianii said, deadpan. "I could see her calculating the angle."

Roars of laughter erupted around table. I laughed too, easier than I expected, and without entirely deciding to, I slipped my hand into the crook of his arm the way I imagined an actual fiancée might, comfortable and easy.

It was meant to be nothing. A gesture for the room, the same kind of performance we had rehearsed a dozen times by now.

Except neither of us let go.

The conversation moved on around us, someone asking about wedding plans, someone else mentioning a mutual acquaintance, and through all of it my hand stayed exactly where it was, and Julianii didn't shift away from it either.

I felt him glance down at my hand at one point, just briefly, and something in his expression shifted, something I couldn't quite name and didn't try very hard to.

I didn't move my hand.

I told myself it would look strange to pull away mid-conversation. I told myself several other things over the course of the evening, none of which fully explained why I kept finding reasons to stay close to him for the rest of the night.

Afterward, he walked me to the car.

The night was cool, quiet enough that I could hear our footsteps against the pavement, and I found myself slowing down instead of hurrying toward the door the way I normally would have.

I didn't get in right away.

"When this ends," I said, "what happens to us?"

Julianii was still beside me.

Neither of us had talked about the six months in weeks. It had been easy to avoid, easier than I expected, buried beneath boardrooms and dinners and quiet evenings on the sofa that had started to feel less like an arrangement and more like something else entirely.

"We're not there yet," he said finally.

"But we'll get there."

He looked at me for a long moment, longer than the question probably needed, something working behind his eyes that I still hadn't learned to fully read.

"Eventually," he said.

Neither of us said what we were both thinking.

I got into the car, and he closed the door behind me, and I watched him through the rear view mirror as the driver pulled away, his expression giving away nothing and somehow everything at once.