Page 97 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“Actually, what I would really like is to have a gallery. An auction. Anyone you can think of from your school who you thought was quite talented. And perhaps your art. If you will allow me to arrange it. I know that you didn’t want me to give you a gallery…”
“An art auction? For what?”
“A charity.”
“What charity?”
“It doesn’t matter. Does it?” I ask, feeling frustrated.
She looks at me for a long moment. “Think of something that you care about. Your charity is allowed to be one that you choose. It’s allowed to be an issue that matters to you. What matters to you?”
Something inside of me feels shaken. I don’t know how to respond to this. And yet, there is one looming issue that comes to my mind. As I remember watching my father strike my mother. As I remember both my parents lifting their hands to me. Slapping me into silence. My father hitting my face with a closed fist.
“Domestic violence,” I say finally.
What a mundane thing. I was a victim of child abuse. My mother a victim of domestic violence, as well as a perpetrator of it.
These are things that every person deals with. My father made it seem like we were special. Kings of the sort. People who mattered. Above the law, above all manner of petty things, and we were just a home full of violence.
One of the most common ills in all the world.
“That’s wonderful,” she says. “And I would love to contribute work to that. And I’d love to contact my…my old friends.”
“You haven’t had them in your life much since you met me.”
“No. I haven’t. Things have been too different.”
“Then contact them. We will… We will have the charity event at the place where… The place where you met me. And I suppose it is still where I met you. Even if I had seen you before.”
She takes a deep breath. “I’m not angry at you about that anymore. It’s another thing that you didn’t understand. You didn’t know how to go about meeting somebody that you wanted to meet. But you could’ve just come over and said hello to me. The effect would’ve been the same. I was drawn to you from the first moment that I met you. You made me act out of character. You made me do things that I never wanted to do before. It would’ve been the same then. But actually realizing that… Realizing that made me think that being mad at you about that is silly. You can’t go back and know what you didn’t know. And I would’ve gone with you either way. That is the actual truth. Likely, if you would’ve told me that you were a crime lord, I probably still would’ve let you take my virginity.”
“We sound unhinged.”
“I think we are.”
But I know some measure of peace after that conversation. And then I throw myself into the charity event. Not just to make myself good. But because I find I actually want to do something to change some of the ugly things in the world.
And I wonder, for the first time, if I might actually be changing myself.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Cassandra
WE’RE BACK FORa month before I contact my friends about the art auction. The contact is tepid and awkward at first—I basically ghosted them after all. But eventually things thaw.
It culminates with the four of us going out for coffee. The three that Dragos saw me with at Trafalgar Square that first day. We’ve barely been in contact since Dragos and I got married, though they did come to the wedding. I think Stephanie, Michael and Cheyenne were always a little bit upset that I left school.
Understandable.
“My husband wants to have an auction, and he told me that he wanted me to talk to my friends I thought were the most talented. Naturally I thought of you.”
“Oh,” Cheyenne says, looking down. “That’s… That’s really surprisingly thoughtful. I didn’t think that he cared about that sort of thing.”
“What makes you think that?”
“But you dropped out of school after you married him. And we’ve barely heard from you since then,” says Michael.
“That was me,” I say. “I let myself get very consumed by the relationship. And we had a little… Rough patch. Recently. But we’re trying.”
