Page 52 of Unravelling: Aria & Crispin
Half her income was already gone. She wouldn't go back to Ophelia. The Du Valares job was ending next week. The cleaning agency had told her she was no longer being offered shifts. No one had called her directly, but the woman on the phone had mumbled something about a "black mark" on her record.
Blacklisted.
It hadn't been said outright, but the message was clear enough.
She had nothing. Just this flat with the rent due next week and a plastic stick in her bag that still said positive.
She had no income. She was still waiting for that reference she was promised.
She stared at the kettle, not really seeing it, until a knock broke her trance.
Was it wrong that she didn't want to see his face? He was all that was wrong with her life.
Crispin had become the embodiment of everything unravelling in her life: her lost jobs, her humiliation, the pregnancy she now had to protect like a secret.
She felt the resentment crawl up her spine like a hot wire.
Why couldn't he just leave her alone?
The knock came again.
She sighed, long, slow and resigned. Then she squared her shoulders and walked to the door, because no matter how much she wanted to shut him out, part of her still needed to hear what he had to say. When she looked through the peephole and opened it, Crispin was there with his hand raised to knock again.
His hair was windswept, coat unbuttoned, the collar askew like he hadn't realised he was still wearing it. His eyes locked on hers immediately.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The air between them sizzled, low and electric, just like it always had. They both registered the changes in silence.
She saw it in him first-how his suit hung slightly looser on his frame, the sharpness in his jaw more pronounced, as if sleep and food had become optional.
He saw it in her, too-how her collarbones jutted a little more than they used to, how her cheeks were subtly hollowed, the skin under her eyes smudged with shadows of fatigue.
They looked like people mid-undoing.
Aria blinked and had the stray, irreverent thought,Would it be too much to ask for a goodbye fuck before we ended this whole mess?
Her hormones were chaos. Her brain seemed to be on vacation and the substitute was cotton candy fluff. But her body still remembered him, still ached in ways that felt both shameful and necessary.
Then she mentally shook herself and stepped aside.
He passed her, their shoulders barely brushing in the narrow hallway, and stood facing each other across the room. For a moment ,they were just two people with a hundred things unsaid, and the wreckage of what had been between them.
He came in silently, and they stood facing her on the other side of the table. The same table where they'd once shared laughter and cold leftovers before their relationship became more and more perfunctory. In the beginning, he used to reach for her hand without asking.
She opened her mouth, wanted to ask if he was behind her being blacklisted. But he got ahead of her, as if there was a lot he needed to get off his chest.
"I need to tell you something," he said, his voice low and tense.
He sat down and gestured for her to do the same. She hesitated, then lowered herself into the chair opposite him.
"You know my family owns a large part of the company," he began. "What most people don't realise is how complicated that ownership really is."
He looked down at his hands, then back up at her. "My mother owns twenty percent. She comes from money. My father...he had the name, the title, but not the wealth. He was gifted ten percent by my grandfather when he married her. It was an arrangement."
Aria said nothing, listening.
"My sister and I... we each inherit twenty percent when we turn thirty-five. That's in a few months, for me. Until then, my parents have all the control."
