Page 112 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
‘How do you survive it?’
‘You don’t,’ he said honestly. ‘You accept it.’
‘Accept it?’ she asked, and he heard the frown in her voice.
‘You live with it until it becomes as much a part of you as the blood in your veins,’ he told her, because her grief was brand new, and his was old. He knew how to navigate it. Whereas she… ‘But you never forget. You keep your mask on. You armour yourself against your feelings. You never get attached to anyone again, and you never get hurt again.’
‘That’s terrible advice.’ Her mouth turned down at the edges. ‘I don’t want to live like that. No one should have to.’
He shrugged. ‘My advice stands,’ he said. ‘What you do with it is your choice.’
She dropped her gaze to her hands knotted at her middle. ‘My choice?’ she repeated softly. Carefully. ‘I’ve spent my life making the wrong choices.’ She swallowed, and his gaze locked to the motion. To the tendons stretching taut in her throat. ‘Choices I didn’t really want to make, choices my parents wanted me to make. And they made me believe if I made them, they would love me. But they didn’t. They didn’t love anything but themselves. They only pretended, called their cold presentation of affection, love, because I made myself the pinnacle of goodness—the golden child they only desired to display for public respectability.’
A roar built in Sebastian’s chest.
Respectability. It was all the elite cared for in their gated communities, in their sky-high mansions. But it was all a lie, a cover-up, because the rot was already inside their communities, inside their mansions, in the very wood that held up their pretty homes, and yet they ignored it, until it all fell down.
Andshewas a damaged product of their selfishness to maintain a falsity.
Like you.
He stepped back. Heard the vines breaking beneath his feet.
He could not help her.
‘Find your shoes and go back inside.’
Her hands dropped to her sides. ‘What if I don’t want to go back inside?’
The mask on his cheeks dug into his cheekbones. ‘It isn’t a choice.’
She stepped closer to him.Too close.
She stopped and lifted her gaze to his. ‘I don’t want to go back inside with them,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t want to stand in a room full of people who don’t know me, don’t care if I’m hurting.’
‘I don’t care either,’ he told her, because he didn’t care. At least, that’s what he told himself, was convincing himself of. Not for her bare feet, not for her flesh covered in goose bumps. He did not want to carry her back inside to shelter, to warmth.
‘Do you really want to be alone?’ she asked. ‘On the twenty-fifth anniversary of all you have lost?’
His spine stiffened. ‘I do.’
She shook her head. Her high bun of twisted black silk loosened. His fingers itched to release it completely from its knot and watch it tumble to her shoulders. He curled his fingers into fists. ‘Go.’
‘You shouldn’t be alone tonight. And I don’t want to be alone,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never had such a frank discussion with anyone. About anything. But we are talking. Connecting. And I—’ She looked up at him. ‘I don’t want it to end.’
‘Why would I care whatyouwant?’
‘If you really wanted to be alone,’ she countered softly, ‘you would have waited for me to leave without revealing you’d seen me.’
‘But I did see you.’
‘And here we are.’ She inched closer until her scent, her softness, washed over him. ‘Together.’
‘Geography,’ he said dismissively.
‘Kiss me,’ she said, and it snatched the breath from his lungs.
‘Kiss you?’
