Page 116 of Angels Are Falling

“Did Kai ask you to keep me away from Amelie?” I couldn’t help asking. My voice had gone strange in my own ears.

“Kai didn’t say anything,” Ruby said gently, watching me. “But people have read the article about their happily married life. And Lucy has crafted a tasteful explanation for why you and Amelie still live in the same house. The story is heartwarming. That’s why nobody is whispering about your unconventional living arrangement.”

Lucy touched my shoulder in a consoling manner. “The story’s believable, and it works for both you and Kai. You’re both public figures and have to maintain your images. If people found out that the president of the magazine is a third in someone else’s marriage—” She let it hang, and then she finished it anyway, because Lucy always finished things. “You’d look like a pervert. And everything you built would be affected. The magazine. Your new life.”

“Just maintain some distance for today,” Matt added cautiously. “The optics won’t be great if you start playing the husband in front of everyone.”

That fucking word again. Ruby said Kai had nothing to do with it, but that word optics. Kai used it, and my friends have repeated it ever since. A word that had walked me, one reasonable step at a time, all the way out of my own life.

I looked out at the party under the string lights and then at the presents still tucked under my arm, undelivered. My wife was laughing across the yard. Kai bent his head to say something only she could hear, and she tipped her face up to catch it, and whatever it was made her go soft, and his hand found the small of her back, and the kids ran a loud circle around the two of them and folded back in, and the whole bright sealed picture of it sat perfectly, complete, needing nothing else.

I knew that picture. I’d been inside it once. I’d stood in the warm middle of it and spent the entire time looking out the window at something I thought was better.

Now I was the one outside, watching a life that used to be mine carry on without me, and not one person, not the kids I looked after, not the woman I’d loved since I was barely a man, not a single soul, looked back at me.

They didn’t even know I was there. I was a ghost to them. So, I did what ghosts did best. I drifted.

I set the boxes down on the gift table and roamed aimlessly through the party. Guests kept coming up to me to network or to congratulate me on the new job. I had a lot of fans now, Lucy made sure of it. People in this town had been following my rising fame and were curious about me, to say the least. Women showered me with attention; men wanted to know how I’d become so successful at such a young age.

The compliments rang hollow.

I saw your new billboard across from Darster Mall. Looking good.

I read the new article. Loved the pictures.

What’s the deal with you and Ruby? She is smokin’.

The superficial admiration was tiring, and the people who actually mattered—my wife, my brothers, my sister—not one of them noticed me the whole time. Suddenly exhausted, I moved along the dark edges of the party to stay out of the limelight. That was how I ended up close enough to hear them.

Kai was speaking with Caden in a low voice. The one person at that whole party—besides Amelie and the kids—that Kai had interacted with. They were standing apart from everyone else, near the row of tall hedges. They didn’t see me on the other side. I only saw parts of them, though I heard them perfectly.

Caden was speaking in that flat, dry tone of his, the voice of a man who’d never once had to raise it because it had never crossed his mind that he wouldn’t be heard.

“Glad to see you finally cleaned up your act, Cavendish,” Caden was saying. He wasn’t looking at Kai. He was watching the party, watching Rose. “Watching you watch her… it was getting old.”

Kai didn’t answer right away. When he did, it was mild, almost bored. “It took as long as it took.”

“Years of patience.” Caden tipped his glass a half inch toward Amelie. “Hope it paid off.”

“It did.” His response was immediate.

Years.

Caden said years. But Kai and Amelie met over the winter when she took a job with a cruise line. In fact, Caden owned the ship and offered her the position. She was the nurse on the boat when Kai had hurt himself. Months later, he happened to move to Darster and did his follow-up appointment at Amelie’s hospital.

That was the story as I understood it. They knew each other for months. Not years, like Caden insinuated.

How could you watch a woman for years when you only met months ago?

Unless the boat had never been the beginning.

Standing there in the dark, I finally understood it all.

That story he told us, about being in love with some mysterious woman from years ago, I never once looked into it. He practically admitted to stalking a woman and learning everything about her from a distance, yet not once had I called it that. I was too enamored by Kai and his lavish life. I had never looked into him. Not once. The man had walked into my life with an offer in his hand that I’d wanted so badly I’d have signed anything for it. I’d been so dazzled, so frantic to say yes before he thought better of it, that I’d never once turned the offer over to read what was written on the back.

I never read the fine print.

I knew the things he wanted us to know about him. But I didn’t know where he came from. I didn’t know who his people were, or where any of it had started, or a single thing he’d done before he’d done all this to me.