Page 31 of What You left in Me

The classical station hisses. I wipe my face with the back of my hand. My chest hurts like I’ve been running in the wrong shoes.

“We’ll go home,” I say, and the wordhomesounds so strange. It isn’t his home or mine, not really. “I’ll sleep. I’ll go back in the morning.”

“Yep,” Finn says, after a long beat.

He starts the car again. The headlights slice the dark, unapologetic. I force my hands to stop shaking long enough to buckle my belt. The ring gleams and I want to hurl it into the ditch and then I want to cradle it like an apology.

We drive and neither of us speaks anymore. I watch the night slip past in coils: the black ribs of trees, the pale shapes of mailboxes, the occasional startled deer frozen mid-thought. My mouth remembers him. My skin remembers the exact places his hands were, like I’ve been marked with invisible ink.

At the gates, the estate materializes out of shadow, all that rented glamour dimmed to bones. The guardhouse is empty; the staff must still be at the hospital or cleaning up the party-that-became-a-wake. Gravel crunches under the tires, familiar and wrong.

He stops in the circular drive and cuts the engine. The sudden quiet is a pressure change. We sit there stupidly for three heartbeats that feel like a cliff waiting to be named.

“I shouldn’t have—” I choke out. “I know better.”

“You do?” he says, a rough thread of humor, and it almost unspools me. “You’re the one who jumped the console.”

I choke on a laugh that is half-sob. “Shut up.”

“Working on it,” he says, and the way he’s controlling his voice makes me ache. “Go inside, Ariane.”

I nod.

My hand is on the door when he adds, soft and lethal, “And don’t pretend this didn’t happen. Don’t lie to yourself because it makes it neater.”

The words pin me in place. He’s my step-brother. This isn’t something that we can do. It’ll destroy everything. My Mom. Richard. God… Richard. I set my forehead on the rim of the door, eyes closing. “I’m engaged. We’re siblings!” I say, like he doesn’t know, like I didn’t forget it on purpose for the exact length of a kiss. “I’m…God, I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” he says.

The honesty hits like a slap of cold water. I force the door open before I can drown in it. Night air rushes in again, smelling like lake and old stone. I step out on legs that don’t feel like mine, the dress whispering around my ankles and the ring suddenly a ton of metal.

I don’t look back. If I do, I’ll climb over the console again and I will not stop. I can’t handle three disasters in one night.

The front door feels heavy as a boulder. I may as well be Sisyphus. I slip inside, shut it behind myself carefully, guilty, feeling ridiculous and stupid, and stand in the foyer like a ghost trying to remember which staircase leads to heaven.

I force myself to breathe. I tell myself to be good. I tell myself to sleep and wake and go to the hospital and be a daughter who keeps vigil, a fiancée who says the right words.

I start up the stairs. Halfway, my lips sting like they’ve been kissed too hard, and the truth slips out into the empty house.

“We can’t,” I whisper.

And the part of me still pressed to the driver’s seat answers, treacherous and certain:You already did.

Chapter 11 – Finn – Beyond the Line

When I finally step out of the vehicle, I force myself not to chase Ariane. There’s nothing I can do there but make things worse. I know that.

At least there’s hell to corral into submission all over the Wagner estate.

The front doors are propped open, and I see the carrion of the party remains fumbling around in skittish pieces. Everything is too bright and half-empty all at once. Caterers carry their trays to a van like they’re ferrying the dead. Two photographers are huddled by the coat closet muttering unsubtly while they scroll through shots they definitely won’t be fucking selling to the highest bidder.

Not on my fucking watch.

“Hey,” I snap, crooking a finger at the photographers, summoning them. They have the good sense to at least look fucking terrified. It doesn’t soften my tone when I demand, “Cameras.”

“We… sir, these are our…”

“Cameras,” I repeat, bored.