When She Stops Pretending

The board rejected my proposal for the second time in three weeks!

It wasn't even a controversial one, a modest expansion into a market we'd been studying for months, backed by numbers I had triple checked before presenting them. But Vesper stood up midway through the discussion, his voice full of fake concern, and suggested “we give it more time to develop, out of respect for Sabine's judgment, of course."

Respect for my judgment? As if delaying every decision I made was somehow protecting me rather than slowly proving his point, that I couldn't be trusted to make them.

By the time I left the office, I was too tired to even be properly angry. Just drained, the exhaustion settling somewhere behind my ribs where anger usually lived.

I came home and found Julianii in the living room, laptop open, papers spread across the coffee table. He looked up the moment I walked in, and whatever he saw on my face made him close the laptop immediately, without a word.

"Don't!" I said, before he could ask. "I don't want advice tonight."

"I wasn't going to give you any."

I looked at him, surprised despite myself.

"Sit," he said instead, moving his papers aside to make room.

I sat.

For a while, neither of us said anything at all. He didn't fill the silence with questions, didn't press me to explain what had happened, didn't offer the kind of reassurance people usually reached for when they didn't know what else to say. He just stayed there, steady, letting the quiet exist between us until I was ready to break it myself.

Eventually, I did.

"I keep wondering if they're right," I said, staring at my hands instead of at him. "Vesper, the board, everyone who has spent months waiting for me to fail. Maybe I inherited a company I'm not actually capable of running. Maybe my grandmother believed in someone who doesn't exist."

"You're not incapable," Julianii said. "You're afraid. Those aren't the same thing."

"How would you know the difference?"

"Because competence was never the absence of fear. I've watched you handle rooms full of people trying to dismantle your credibility, and you never once let them see you shake. That's not incompetence, Sabine. That's just what fear looks like when it doesn't win."

I looked up at him. "You sound like you're speaking from experience."

He was quiet for a moment, longer than the conversation strictly required.

"I spent years afraid of becoming like my father," he said finally. "After everything happened. He changed, after the collapse, he became someone harder, someone I didn't always recognize. I used to watch him and promised myself I wouldn't end up the same way, cold, unreachable, so focused on what I had lost that I forgot what I still had left to protect." He paused. "I'm still not entirely sure I've kept that promise."

I hadn't expected that. Not the confession itself, and not the ease with which he offered it, unprompted, without me having to ask twice or push past his usual careful restraint.

It was the first time he'd given me something vulnerable without me having to earn it first.

I reached over and took his hand, not thinking about performance, not thinking about how it would look to anyone watching, because no one was watching. It was simply an instinct, wanting to hold onto something steady while everything else in my life felt like it was slipping.

He turned his hand and held mine back.

Neither of us said anything about it. We just sat there, his hand around mine, the room quiet except for the low hum of the house settling around us.

After a while, I let my head rest against his shoulder.

He went completely still.

I felt it happen, the sudden tension in him, like he wasn't sure what to do with the weight of me leaning into him, like some part of him wanted to pull away out of habit and another part of him didn't want to move at all.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked quietly.

I closed my eyes.

"For tonight, yes."

His arm came around me slowly, carefully, like he was giving me every chance to change my mind before it was too late. I didn't.

Neither of us mentioned the engagement. Neither of us mentioned the six months, or the rules I’d written on that first night, or the line we both agreed never to cross.

We just stayed there, together, in the quiet, for as long as the night would let us.