Before she left, Cassian’s mother took both my hands in hers. Her fingers were warm, but I felt the slight tremor in them. Vivienne Ashbourne had always treated me well. From the first night Cassian brought me to a family dinner, she had looked at me as though my place beside him was already settled, as though I belonged in this house, in this family, in this world.
Now there was shame in her eyes.
And something worse than shame.
Helplessness.
“Don’t carry this in your heart, child,” she said softly. “I’ll speak to him.”
I lowered my gaze and gave her a faint nod.
What else was there to do?
After they were gone, the silence in the mansion deepened.
A little while later, my phone lit up again. Vivienne. When I answered, her voice sounded older than it had a few hours earlier. Tired. Frayed. She told me I was the only woman she had ever recognized as Cassian’s future wife. She said he would come to his senses. She said he would apologize.
I listened without saying much.
Then I ended the call and set the phone aside.
I had no use for apologies that had not yet been given.
I sat alone in the front room after that, listening to the wind scrape softly against the tall windows. The estate felt strangely hollow. For years, I had built my life around Cassian’s presence. I used to know the exact rhythm of his footsteps in the corridor, the sound of him loosening his cuff links, the careless way he would drop into a chair and ask what I had saved for him to eat.
That night, I waited for none of it.
When dawn came, I was already awake.
I washed, dressed in silence, and pinned my hair back with steady hands. Then I went downstairs, told the kitchen staff not to fuss, and poured myself coffee I barely touched. My body moved on habit alone. My heart was no longer in any of it.
By the time the eastern sky began to lighten, I was already on my way to the family offices downtown.
The city was only just waking. Black sedans rolled through wet streets. Men from our night crews were changing shifts outside the clubs and warehouses. Delivery trucks backed into secured docks. Street vendors were setting up beneath the gray morning sky, unaware that half the city’s underworld had spent the night whispering about the humiliation of the Ashbourne fiancée.
Everything looked the same.
Only I had changed.