Chapter 143: Thoughts [FIXED!]

Liam stepped out onto the small balcony attached to the suite, the night air cool against his skin, city noise humming faintly somewhere below. Inside, Darren was snoring through whatever dream had claimed him for the second time that night, and Mateo had gone quiet hours ago, curled up in the guest room with his new action figure still sitting on the nightstand.

There was no reasonable version of sleep coming for Liam anytime soon, not with his mind still turning over everything from the day, so stepping outside felt like the only productive option left.

He found himself wishing, briefly, that he smoked. There was something about nights like this that seemed to call for it — the quiet, the stillness, the need for something to occupy his hands while his mind worked through whatever it needed to work through. He didn’t, though, and never had, so he settled for leaning against the railing instead, arms crossed, staring out at the skyline.

It had been a genuinely good day. More than good, honestly — full of small, unplanned moments that added up to something Liam hadn’t expected walking into it. Mateo’s haircut. The movie. The easy, unguarded laughter that kept surfacing between the three of them at odd intervals throughout the afternoon. He thought about how different Mateo had looked walking out of that theater compared to the kid who’d been curled up outside his school, and something settled comfortably in his chest at the memory.

But the quiet always eventually gave way to the bigger picture, and tonight was no exception.

Richard. Mrs. Harriet. The firm. Arthur’s obsession, whatever shape it actually took beneath the surface. The rebate system quietly reshaping his entire trajectory in ways he still hadn’t fully mapped out for himself. All of it sat there, layered and unresolved, waiting for him the second he stopped actively distracting himself with something else.

He exhaled slowly, watching his breath fog faintly in the cooler night air.

Strange, he thought, how something that had started as the worst period of his life — the termination, the public humiliation, everything falling apart in a matter of weeks — had somehow rerouted into this. Mateo wouldn’t have had today if none of it happened. Wouldn’t have had someone showing up outside his school, wouldn’t have had the haircut, the movie, the version of himself that had walked out of that theater a little taller than he walked in. Liam wasn’t naive enough to think one good day fixed everything the kid was dealing with, but it mattered. He believed that much.

He pulled his phone out, more out of habit than intention, and scrolled without much purpose until his thumb landed, almost on its own, on a message he hadn’t opened in longer than he wanted to admit.

Because deleting the message didn’t mean it was gone, as deleted messages were in trash for a fixed period of time.

He stared at the contact for a long moment, thumb hovering.

He told himself, briefly, that this was about closure. That reaching out now, after everything, after finally reaching a place where her name didn’t sting the way it used to, was simply about finishing something that had been left open too long.

He knew, even as the thought formed, that it was an excuse. A convenient one, dressed up in language that sounded rational enough to justify the impulse currently sitting in his chest.

He didn’t fully understand what actually pulled him toward opening that conversation again. Curiosity, maybe. Some leftover need to know exactly what she wanted, now, after all this silence. Or something messier underneath that he wasn’t ready to examine too closely standing out here in the cold at this hour.

He unlocked the phone fully; the contact page sat open in front of him, cursor blinking in the empty message field.

-

Rachel sat on the edge of her couch long after Marcus had left, the folder still resting on the table where she’d set it down, unopened.

Her hands hadn’t fully stopped shaking.

She’d known, in the abstract way people know things about their past without fully processing them, that Marcus was capable of ruthlessness. He ran Kellerman Holdings, a real estate development firm with its hands in half the commercial projects across the state, and running something at that scale required a particular kind of coldness she’d witnessed plenty of times during their marriage — competitors dismantled quietly, deals structured to bury smaller players who dared push back, entire companies absorbed or crushed depending on which outcome served him better.

She’d seen it. Had even, at one point early on, found something almost attractive about how effortlessly he moved through that world.

What she hadn’t fully understood — not until today, standing in her own doorway looking at him — was what it felt like to be on the receiving end of that particular gaze.

There had been no love in his eyes. Not even the hollow, resigned kind that sometimes lingered in divorces long after the actual feeling had died.

What she’d seen instead was calculation. Distance. The exact expression she remembered him wearing across a boardroom table from men he intended to ruin.

She wasn’t his wife anymore, not in any sense that mattered to him. She was an obstacle. A problem requiring resolution.

That realization sat in her chest like something physical, heavy and cold, and her mind reached instinctively for the one person who’d managed, somehow, to steady her the last time panic like this had taken hold.

Liam.

She grabbed her phone before she could think better of it, thumb already hovering over his contact, the impulse pulling harder than any hesitation currently standing in its way.

Then she stopped herself.

She sat there, phone in hand, and forced herself to actually think it through instead of reacting purely on instinct.

Liam wasn’t her boyfriend. Wasn’t anything, really, beyond whatever undefined arrangement existed between them — comfortable, occasionally intimate, but carrying no actual obligation on his end to answer every time she found herself unraveling.

Calling him now, at this hour, over something that had nothing to do with him, was exactly the kind of behavior that turned men away fast in a dynamic like theirs. Nothing killed interest quicker than being handed weight you never signed up to carry.

She set the phone down, forcing her breathing to slow, and let the quiet settle around her instead.

That was when the other thought crept in, the one she usually kept buried beneath everything else.

Her marriage hadn’t ended cleanly, and it hadn’t ended because Marcus stopped finding her attractive, or because the years had worn something essential away between them. It ended because she’d been unfaithful — not physically, not in the way people typically meant when they used that word, but unfaithful all the same. There had been someone else, somewhere in the later years of the marriage, a connection she’d never once acted on physically but had let grow anyway, quietly, in the parts of herself she never let Marcus see.

Emotional. Distant. Nothing that would hold up as proof in any conventional sense.

But cheating regardless. She’d known it then, even as she told herself otherwise, and she knew it clearly now, sitting alone in her apartment with her ex-husband’s folder still sitting untouched on the table in front of her.

She’d never fully reckoned with that part of herself. It was easier, most days, to frame the divorce as something that simply happened to her rather than something she’d played an active hand in causing.

Tonight, with Marcus’s cold, calculating expression still fresh in her mind, that easier version felt harder to hold onto than usual.

Because she needed comfort... from anyone.

-

Sophia poured herself a generous glass of red wine, wrapped a soft robe around her shoulders, and sank into the couch with a contentment she hadn’t felt in longer than she could actually pin down. The apartment was quiet in a way it rarely got to be — no homework negotiations, no controller sound effects blasting from the living room, no small footsteps padding around at odd hours. Just her, the wine, and the rare gift of an entire evening with nothing demanding her attention.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a night like this to herself.

She let her mind drift, sipping slowly, and inevitably it circled back to the arrangement she’d fallen into over the past several days. Liam. Mateo staying with him and Darren tonight, out doing whatever the three of them had gotten up to since the pickup this afternoon.

The thought settled comfortably at first, but the longer she sat with it, the more edges started forming around it.

There were so many ways this particular situation could unravel. Whatever existed between her and Liam was casual by design — she’d made that clear early on, mostly to herself as much as to him, and she had zero interest in pursuing anything more defined right now. Liam had simply become a distraction, a welcome one, something uncomplicated in a life that didn’t offer her much room for anything else.

But casual arrangements had a way of getting messy, especially once other people became attached to the outcome. And Mateo had attached himself completely.

That was the part that unsettled her most, sitting here now with the wine loosening her thoughts just enough to actually examine it directly. If whatever this was with Liam eventually fell apart — and casual things usually did, eventually, one way or another — Mateo would be caught directly in the wreckage of it, regardless of how carefully she tried to shield him.

She’d seen other men pass through her life perform interest in her brother before. The forced enthusiasm, the strategic kindness clearly aimed at winning her over rather than actually caring about the kid himself. She’d learned to recognize it instantly, and she’d learned to keep Mateo at a careful distance from any of it.

Liam was different. She could tell, watching from a distance, that his time with Mateo wasn’t performance. He wasn’t doing it to score points with her. He was doing it because he’d apparently, somewhere along the way, genuinely started to care.

No one before him had managed that.

A small, private smile crept across her face as she took another sip of wine, turning the thought over slowly, unsure yet what to actually do with it.