Page 27 of Hold On to Me
He stood in the dark. Surrounded by broken crystal. The fragments glittered on the carpet like something precious that had been destroyed beyond repair.
He sat down. In her galley. On the floor. His back against the counter, his scarred hands on his knees, his head bowed.
He knew, with absolute clarity, the kind of clarity that arrives too late, that illuminates the wreckage after the act rather than the path before it, that he had destroyed the only real thing in his life.
The blue light pulsed. The cabin ticked. Somewhere in Nice, a woman who had offered him everything was walking away, and she wasn’t coming back, and the man who loved her was sitting in the dark surrounded by broken glass because he had decided, with the ruthless, misguided, catastrophic logic of a man who believed he was a monster, that breaking her heart was the kindest thing he could do.
He had been wrong about everything.
The crystal glittered. The cabin was empty. The night was very long.
Chapter 9
THREE WEEKS LATER,she sat across from a good man in a restaurant in Nice and tried very hard to feel something.
His name was Paolo Sabbatini. He was thirty-one, Sicilian, with dark eyes and an easy smile and hands that moved when he talked, open, expressive, the hands of a man who had nothing to hide and no reason to grip the edges of anything. He worked for Interpol’s Monaco liaison office. He had left Sicily at nineteen because he’d seen what the old world did to good people and had decided to be the kind of man who stopped it instead of perpetuating it. He was kind. He was present. He reached across the table and took her hand and his skin was smooth and unmarked and warm in the way that skin is warm when it’s never been scarred.
She let him hold it. She smiled.
She felt nothing.
Not nothing as numbness, she had felt that, in the first week, the anaesthetised blankness that follows a wound too deep to register immediately. This was different. This was the nothing of a woman sitting across from a man who was objectively, inarguably, by every metric she could name, someone good, and discovering that her body had been recalibrated. Rewired. Tuned to a frequency that Paolo Sabbatini didn’t broadcast on, because the frequency was scarred hands and cedar smoke and Russian murmured in the dark and the sound a man makes when his walls come down, and no amount of smooth skin and easy kindness could replicate it.
“You’re somewhere else,” Paolo said. Not accusatory. Gentle. The observation of a man who read people for a living and was too decent to pretend he hadn’t noticed.
“I’m sorry.” She meant it. “It’s been a long week.”
“Raven said you’d been through something.” He turned his wineglass by the stem, a careful, unhurried gesture that in another man might have reminded her of someone. In Paolo it was just a gesture. “She didn’t say what. She just said you could use someone uncomplicated for a while.”
Uncomplicated. The word sat between them like an offering: a clean, well-lit room after months in a sealed cabin at forty thousand feet. She should have wanted it. She should have wanted the open smile and the unmarked hands and the man who had chosen law over legacy, who had walked away from a world that looked like Andrei’s and built something clean instead.
She should have wanted someone good.
She couldn’t.
She was back on commercial routes. Nice–Paris–London. Normal passengers, normal schedules, normal layovers in hotels with thin walls and loud plumbing and the anonymous, interchangeable comfort of a life she had built to be exactly this: unremarkable. Safe. Hers.
The transfer had gone through in three days. She hadn’t heard from Andrei. She hadn’t expected to. The company portal showed her new routing without comment, as though the reassignment from the private charter division to commercial operations were an administrative adjustment rather than theaftermath of a woman walking away from a man who had broken her heart with another woman’s hand on his.
Raven was back. That was the one good thing, the one piece of her old life that had survived the wreckage. They flew the same routes again, worked the same cabins, fell into the familiar rhythm of service and friendship and the particular intimacy of two women who had spent four years navigating the same narrow aisles. Raven didn’t ask about the jet. She didn’t ask about Andrei. She asked about Paolo, because Paolo was the future and the jet was the past and Raven understood, with the intuition of a best friend, that the past was a room Ciana couldn’t re-enter without disintegrating.
The first week was manageable. She worked. She slept. She ate meals in her flat that wasn’t the flat in Cimiez, she had moved back to her old neighbourhood, a smaller place, no security panel, no parquet floors, no bedroom with a window that let in golden evening light. She had left the photograph of her mother on the bedside table in the Cimiez flat because taking it’d have meant returning, and returning would have meant standing in the rooms he had built for her and breathing the air that still held the shape of his arrangements.
The second week was harder. She woke at two a.m. and pressed her hand to her collarbone, the hollow at the base of her throat, the place where Andrei’s mouth had never been but where she felt him anyway, a phantom pressure, a bruise with no visible mark. Three weeks since the galley. Three weeks since his fist on the wall and the sound he made and the morning after when Justina Karpov sat in the cabin and touched his hand and everything went quiet.
She could still feel him. That was the cruelty of it. Not a memory, a presence. As though his hands had left something on her skin that soap and time couldn’t remove. She pressed her fingers against her collarbone in the dark and felt the ghost of a touch that had never happened there and she thought: this is what it means to be ruined by someone. Not the breaking. The inability to un-feel them afterward.
She went on a second date with Paolo. A third. He took her to a small restaurant near the port where the owner knew his name and the wine was local and the conversation was easy in the way that conversations are easy when neither person is fighting a war with themselves. He told her about Sicily. About his family, the ones he’d left behind, the ones who understood, the ones who didn’t. He was honest about where he came from, and the honesty was clean, without edges, the confession of a man who had made his peace with his past and moved on.
She tried to want it. She sat across from Paolo Sabbatini and his unmarked hands and his easy honesty and she told herself: this is what “someone good” looks like. This is the man Andrei wanted for you. This is the clean, safe, civilian life that a dying father asked his son to provide.
She couldn’t want it.
She couldn’t want it because every time Paolo smiled, she thought about the way Andrei didn’t smile, the way his face held stillness instead, and how the absence of a smile on that face was more expressive than any smile she had ever seen. Every time Paolo reached for her hand, she thought about scarred knuckles on a champagne flute. Every time he spoke, openly, warmly, without the weighed, rationed delivery of a man who counted every word before releasing it, she thought about a voicein a Geneva galley saying her name once, low, like it cost him something.
Paolo deserved better than a woman who was thinking about someone else every time he touched her.
She knew this. She’d end it soon. She owed him that.
