Chapter 15
Sometimes, after everything, I still ask him, “Did you do it on purpose?”
He always blinks at me with saintly innocence.
“Do what?”
“Hand me the company while you spend your days playing piano, cooking dinner, and waiting for me to come home like some kind of retired prince.”
He tilts his head. “I don’t understand.”
Liar.
An adorable liar, but still.
One night after a concert, I was complaining about being exhausted when he looked at me and asked very seriously, “Are you hungry?”
I stared at him.
“We literally just ate.”
Without another word, he started unbuttoning his shirt.
I forgot how language worked for a second.
There are some moments in marriage nobody prepares you for.
For example: your elegant, once painfully shy husband standing in front of you with velvet ribbon wrapped around his torso like he personally hired temptation as a stylist.
I swallowed.
Then reached out and pinched his chest.
“Who taught you this?”
He leaned down, scooped me into his arms, and murmured against my ear, “Do you want dessert?”
Reader, I was weak.
Very weak.
Later, much later, when the room was quiet and I was half asleep against him, Adrian held me with that same fierce, reverent care he had always had, like he still could not quite believe I was real.
Sometimes I think he still sees himself as the boy in the dark.
The one with no way out.
The one who heard footsteps outside a closet door and expected them to leave.
But they didn’t.
I didn’t.
And maybe that is the whole story in the end.
Not that he stole me.
Not that someone else lied.
Not even that love found us in a strange, crooked, almost unforgivable way.
The real story is this:
A boy who had lived too long in fear reached through a screen and found one small beam of light.
And because life can be unexpectedly kind, that light loved him back.
When Adrian falls asleep, he still holds me tightly, as if letting go would be a mistake the universe might punish.
I let him.
In the dark, his breathing deep and even against my neck, I sometimes hear the faint ghost of a notification sound in my memory.
A tiny digital chime.
The beginning of everything.
Then I close my eyes, fold myself closer, and think with a kind of helpless gratitude that maybe, in all his past lives, he really did do a thousand good things.
Because when he had no road left in front of him, he found me.
And when I finally reached the end of mine, I found him too.