CHAPTER 5- CELESTE VANE

I spent most of the afternoon trying to talk myself out of how I felt.

People hosted business associates all the time. Dominic ran a billion-dollar company — meetings happened, partnerships happened, important people traveled and needed somewhere to stay.

None of that was strange. I told myself that three or four times, like repetition, could make it true.

So why did I feel like someone had cracked a window open in the dead of winter and let the cold pour straight into my home?

Luca was asleep against my chest when I heard the elevator doors open down the hall.

My stomach tightened before I even understood why.

The penthouse was quiet enough that I could hear footsteps crossing the foyer. Then Dominic's voice, low and easy, in a tone I hadn't heard him use with me in weeks.

"Watch your step."

A woman's laugh followed it. Soft, confident. Comfortable. I stood slowly, careful not to wake Luca.

Dominic appeared in the living room a few seconds later. He looked tired — tie loosened, faint shadows pooling under his eyes.

Behind him stood a woman.

For a moment neither of us said anything. I felt my own pulse in my throat.

She was beautiful in a way that didn't invite warmth — striking, deliberate, every detail of her looking considered. The dark hair falling over one shoulder.

The cream coat draped just so over her arm, like a prop she'd practiced carrying. The heels. The flawless makeup.

Then she smiled at me.

My skin prickled. I couldn't have explained why if you'd asked me.

"Amara." Dominic's voice pulled my eyes back to him, and for a second I almost forgot to be unsettled — almost.

"This is Celeste Vane."

Celeste stepped forward immediately, hand already extended, like she'd rehearsed the motion.

"It's so nice to finally meet you."

I shifted Luca carefully and shook her hand. "You too."

Her grip was firm. Professional. The smile didn't move an inch.

"I've heard so much about you."

"Have you?" I asked Celeste, keeping my voice light.

"Oh, yes." She laughed — light, easy. "Dominic talks about you all the time."

I waited. The pause stretched a beat too long.

He slipped the phone away and glanced toward the guest wing without meeting my eyes.

"We should get your things settled." He said.

And that was it. The moment folded shut, smooth and quiet, like it had never happened at all. I stood there holding our son, feeling strangely like the only person in the room who'd noticed anything.

---

An hour later I was in the kitchen, Celeste's voice carried down the hallway as she helped Dominic with documents, discussing schedules, meetings, investors, people I'd never met and would probably never meet.

She moved through his world like she'd been walking those halls for years — no awkwardness, no adjustment period, like she'd simply always been there and the rest of us were the ones still catching up to the present moment.

My son sat in his highchair beside me, gnawing happily on a silicone toy, utterly unbothered by any of it. I looked down at him and felt something in my chest ease, just slightly.

"At least one man in this house is happy to see me," I said.

He gave me a wide, toothless grin.

"Exactly." I said.

Footsteps behind me. I looked up, already bracing without quite knowing why.

Celeste — in a fitted black blouse and tailored trousers, looking entirely too at home in my kitchen, like she'd cooked here a hundred times before.

"Can I help?" she asked.

"Oh." I hadn't expected that, and it threw me for a second. "Sure."

"What do you need?"

I handed her a bowl, my movements a little stiffer than before. "Strawberries, if you don't mind."

"Of course."

We worked in silence for a few minutes. It should have been uncomfortable — two strangers standing shoulder to shoulder in a kitchen, one of them not knowing why her skin felt tight.

"Your son is cute," Celeste said, glancing over.

"He is." I didn't look up from the cutting board.

"He has Dominic's eyes."

Everyone said that. The same grey, the same long lashes, that same serious little expression whenever he was studying something new.

"He definitely does."

She looked at Luca a moment longer than felt necessary — long enough that I noticed, and noticed myself noticing.

"Dominic showed me pictures. When he was born." She said.

My hand stopped on the cutting board.

"He did?" My voice came out almost normal.

"Of course." She smiled — soft, warm, the kind of smile that should have meant nothing. "He was so proud."

Something twisted low in my chest, slow and sour. I remembered Dominic working late nearly every evening, his side of the bed cold more nights than not.

I remembered being alone in a way I hadn't told anyone, not even Nina, not the full truth of it.

I went back to chopping. My grip on the knife was tighter than necessary.

Dinner was at seven. For a few minutes it felt almost normal — the kind of normal I'd been starving for.

Then the conversation turned to work, and I disappeared.

Not literally. But it happened so smoothly, so seamlessly, that I barely registered it happening.

I sat quietly, spooning mashed sweet potato into Luca's mouth, watching my husband's face come alive in a way I hadn't seen in months.

At one point Dominic laughed. A real laugh — head tipping back slightly, eyes creasing. The kind that used to belong to me.

I stared at him, spoon frozen halfway to Luca's mouth.

“When was the last time he laughed like that with me?” I thought.

"Amara?"

I blinked, pulled back into the room. Celeste was looking at me, head tilted slightly, that same patient smile in place.

"Sorry — what?" I said.

"I asked how you're adjusting to motherhood."

"Oh." I found a smile from somewhere deep in my reserves. "It's been an adjustment."

"I can imagine." Her eyes moved over me — slow, unhurried, cataloguing. "You seem tired."

It wasn't said unkindly. Not on the surface. But it landed somewhere soft and unguarded, somewhere I hadn't braced.

"I have a newborn," I said, keeping it light, keeping my voice steady.

"True."

Her gaze flickered again — stomach, hips, the parts of my body I'd been quietly at war with for months without telling a single soul — and then she smiled, gentle as anything.

"The body takes time too."

My stomach dropped, slow and complete, like missing a step in the dark.

It was said so softly that Dominic didn't even glance up. He kept eating and listening.

I felt every soft, changed inch of myself become suddenly, painfully visible — the stretch marks, the exhaustion, the body I was still learning to live in, all of it laid out under fluorescent kitchen light for a woman I'd known less than three hours.

I smiled anyway.

After dinner I took Luca up. Bath, bottle, bed — the routine that usually steadied me, usually gave my hands something to do while my mind settled.

The apartment was silent when I came back downstairs. For a moment I thought everyone had gone to bed, and some small, tired part of me was relieved.

Then I heard laughter.

Dominic's laughter, drifting from the office. Warm, easy, unguarded. Happy, in a way I genuinely could not remember the last time he'd sounded with me.

Eventually I made myself walk to the kitchen.

The office door opened a few minutes later, and Celeste stepped into the hallway, spotting me almost instantly, like she'd known exactly where to look.

"There you are."

"Couldn't sleep," I said, the smile costing more than it should have.

"I know the feeling." She wandered into the kitchen and leaned against the counter, unhurried, settling in like she had nowhere else in the world to be and all the time in the world to spend it here.

Then Celeste laughed — soft, almost to herself, like she'd just remembered something amusing.

"Actually, speaking of Dominic." Something shifted in her tone, and I looked up properly this time, every nerve suddenly awake.

"What about him?"

"Oh." She waved a hand, dismissive, light as anything. "It's probably nothing."

My chest tightened, that same low drop from earlier returning all at once. "What is it?"

"I just assumed he would have told you."

"Told me what?"

Then she laughed again — soft, almost fond.

"About the conversation we had last month."