Page 55 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cassandra

W E’RE BACK FOR a month before I contact my friends about the art auction. The contact is tepid and awkward at first—I basically ghosted them after all. But eventually things thaw.

It culminates with the four of us going out for coffee.

The three that Dragos saw me with at Trafalgar Square that first day.

We’ve barely been in contact since Dragos and I got married, though they did come to the wedding.

I think Stephanie, Michael and Cheyenne were always a little bit upset that I left school.

Understandable.

“My husband wants to have an auction, and he told me that he wanted me to talk to my friends I thought were the most talented. Naturally I thought of you.”

“Oh,” Cheyenne says, looking down. “That’s… That’s really surprisingly thoughtful. I didn’t think that he cared about that sort of thing.”

“What makes you think that?”

“But you dropped out of school after you married him. And we’ve barely heard from you since then,” says Michael.

“That was me,” I say. “I let myself get very consumed by the relationship. And we had a little… Rough patch. Recently. But we’re trying.”

“Trying?” Stephanie asks.

“That makes it sound precarious. Or like maybe I don’t want to be with him. That’s not true. What we’re trying to do is learn a different way of communicating. And that’s difficult when you spent four years not doing it.”

“Love’s not supposed to hurt,” Michael says, sounding sage.

I’m not sure that I agree with him.

I think anything that consumes you with the desperate enormity that Dragos consumes me with is bound to hurt sometimes.

But I think of art, and my relationship with it. How badly I’ve always wanted to express myself that way.

It hurts too.

Everything I’ve ever wanted has been painful.

That’s just who I am. I’m passionate, and I tend to wrap it up in the mask of overachieving. Dragos was the first thing I ever flung myself into that I was willing to fail at. He’s given me access to the messier parts of myself. The parts that don’t have to be perfect.

There’s a lot of good in the difficult.

And since we came back from Switzerland, we’ve been better. So much better. He talks to me now. And yes, some of it is moral triage. But I have to give him credit where it’s due.

“He had a very hard childhood,” I find myself saying. “And I didn’t really appreciate how much that affected him until recently.”

“He’s very controlling, it seems to me,” Cheyenne says.

I bristle. “He’s actually not. He was…” I want to call him paranoid, but that’s not really fair.

There were real threats. He was involved in bad things.

But I don’t exactly want to expose him either.

“He has a lot of trauma in his past,” I say, because I know they can understand therapy speak.

“And he’s working to unpack that. But it didn’t actually come from a place of wanting to control me.

He wanted to protect me. He’s learning to accept that that needs to take a different form.

He’s also trying to get involved in acts of charity.

And I think it was really… It was really a lovely thing that he wanted to include me. And all of you.”

Whether they can understand it or not, I can.

I feel protective of him. Which is silly. My big bruiser of a Romanian husband hardly needs me to defend his honor. Such as it is. But I find that I want to.

I realize right then that I don’t have to please them. They don’t have to understand.

I understand.

I feel free of a burden I didn’t even realize I was carrying.

This need for people to understand what I’m doing and why.

Because honestly, who cares?

I’ve been burdened by that for a very long time.

I’m just not now.

It takes a while, but eventually my friends are satisfied that I’m not a prisoner of some kind.

After that, I get to work on my paintings.

Not the dark, gritty series of paintings I was doing of Dragos’s body, though someday, I would like to do something with those paintings, which have since been rescued from the flat in Paris.

Instead, I decide to paint concepts of home. I’m halfway through the series when I decide to call my mother, and invite my parents out to the auction. I also take it as an opportunity to tell her what I’ve been meaning to tell her for a while now.

“Dragos and I are back together.”

Her indrawn breath lets me know she doesn’t approve. And that butts up against all that perfectionist people-pleasing inside of me.

“He’s a good husband,” I say. “Maybe our marriage doesn’t look exactly like yours and Dad’s, but…”

“I don’t understand it,” my mom says.

It doesn’t come from a place of wanting to be mean. I can see that she doesn’t understand it. But I’ve always wanted a life she didn’t understand. It’s just that Dragos is a bridge too far.

“You really can’t understand?” I ask. “Have you seen him?”

“You’ve been married to him for four years, I would imagine if it was only sex that it would have faded,” my mother says, obviously deciding to go ahead and be bold.

To call my bluff, since I thought I was being the shocking one.

“It hasn’t,” I say, pushing right back. “And that might’ve been what brought us together, I’m not going to lie.

But I love him. He is an extraordinary man.

He’s been through so much and he…” I’m suddenly infused with conviction about this.

Suddenly completely understanding of why I love this man.

“No one ever taught him what was right, and he’s finding it anyway.

No one ever taught him that love was something human beings needed, and he found it anyway.

It’s a miracle, actually. And I want… I want to see this journey through with him.

Yes, it’s a journey. And it isn’t perfect, it isn’t necessarily always easy.

But I could’ve married some normal boy from the same kind of street that I grew up on, and maybe we could’ve fallen into a rhythm, and it would’ve felt like easy, but I don’t think it would’ve felt like this.

Like…finding the most beautiful, rare art piece.

One of a kind. It takes my breath away every day. ”

“To me, love is something steady. Something that keeps you safe. Security.” She sounds so weary, wary too. And I get that. I’ve never been what my parents expected, and I can understand why this looks…

I can understand why she’s worried. But I want what I want.

“But I never wanted the same life as you. Not because I don’t love and appreciate the life that you gave me.

I do. It’s that life that gave me this one.

But I always knew that there was something different out there.

Something I’d never seen before. And Dragos is that.

I could paint pictures about that man to the end.

But I can also paint home. Loving one doesn’t mean I don’t love the other.

And it doesn’t mean that I don’t think… That what you’re saying is important. I do.”

“Oh, Cassie. I… I just want you to be happy.”

“Me too. But I’m looking for something more than that. I’m looking for joy. The kind that fills you. The kind that makes you into something totally new. I know it’s with him.”

She pauses for a moment. “You’re going to stay with him and have kids with him?”

I want that. His forever. His child.

“I think so,” I say slowly. “But you know what, if I need to leave, I’m strong enough to do that. Because you taught me to go after what I need. So don’t worry about me. And please come to the auction.”

“Of course we will.”

She doesn’t understand. And I’m okay with that. I understand. I’m the only one that needs to.

And that’s a revelation I didn’t expect to have. It was one I wasn’t even looking for. The focus has been on fixing Dragos. But this new firmness I’m finding in myself is something I needed.

Because suddenly all my actions make more sense. I’ve felt this whole time like I got caught up in his current. But the current was mine too. It always has been. We are mutually undeniable. That means I am too.

What we have is something that not everybody understands, and I don’t need them to. I cannot please everybody. Which means I’m going to please myself. Because I want the kind of wild passion and joy that I can find with him.

I don’t want staid and steady.

And yet, I find that more and more we seem to have both. And that seems like something altogether magical.