The warehouse greets me like a crime scene where the victims are still processing what happened.
Miles and Dorian stand among buckets of roses, looking like an unlikely alliance formed by two people who've realized their common enemy is my complete inability to communicate like a functioning adult.
They're not exactly holding hands and singing friendship songs, but they're also not actively trying to destroy each other, which counts as progress in Valmont relationship dynamics.
"She's alive," Dorian observes as I walk through the door. "I told you she hadn't fled to a remote island to start a coconut-based economy."
"I said Uruguay," Miles corrects, and the fact that they've been debating my potential escape destinations makes my chest do complicated things. "You look like hell."
"Thank you. I worked hard on this aesthetic." I drop my bag on the nearest surface. "It's called 'transcontinental emotional devastation' and it's very in this season."
They exchange a look—the kind suggesting they've been exchanging many looks in my absence, bonding over their shared experience of caring about someone who communicates through disappearing acts.
"Where were you?" Miles asks, concern cutting deeper than anger would.
"London. Saw my mother. Learned some things. Need time to process. That's the short version."
Neither pushes. They just accept it—accept me—with patience that makes my throat tight and my eyes dangerous.
Miles moves to the coffee station without asking, hands me a cup made exactly right: splash of oat milk, no sugar, slightly cooler than scalding because he knows I'm impatient. He's been making my coffee for years, and somehow that small act of knowing feels like the most intimate thing anyone's ever done for me.
"I can handle the press," Dorian offers. "Draft a statement, field the calls, give you space to breathe without journalists camping outside your apartment."
"Why?" The question escapes before diplomacy can catch it. "You have every reason to let me drown in this."
His smile is wry, self-aware. "Because I'm practicing being a decent human instead of a walking merger proposal. It's a new hobby. Very time-consuming."
They leave eventually—Miles with a hand squeeze that says more than words, Dorian with a nod acknowledging everything we're not discussing. I stand surrounded by flowers for other people's celebrations, and I realize I have one more conversation that can't wait.
The Valmont estate feels different this time. Maybe it's the late afternoon light casting everything in amber, or maybe it's what I now know, but the familiar hallways seem smaller. Less intimidating. Just a house where a family failed each other in slow motion for decades.
I find Laurent in his study. But the man I find isn't the one I expected.
He looks old. Not frail, but worn in a way I've never noticed. The sharp edges that always seemed designed to cut have softened into exhaustion. His whiskey sits untouched, ice melting into amber.
"Aurelia." He doesn't stand when I enter, which is unprecedented. "You came back."
"I went to London."
His hand stills on the armrest. "I see."
"I talked to Elisabeth. She told me everything." I move into the room, taking the chair across from him. "About not wanting children. About feeling nothing but obligation. About you protecting me from the truth when she left."
The silence has texture—thick, weighted with years of careful construction finally crumbling. Laurent's face cycles through expressions I've never seen: relief, grief, and exhaustion that runs bone-deep.
"How much did she tell you?" His voice is quieter than I've ever heard it.
"Enough. That she never wanted me. That you became the villain so I wouldn't know my mother felt nothing. That your controlling behavior was twisted protection because being soft would have broken you."
He's quiet for a long moment, staring at his melting whiskey like it contains answers to questions he stopped asking years ago.
"I thought about telling you. A hundred times. A thousand. But how do you tell your child their mother didn't want them? How do you explain that I stayed, that I tried, that I made myself into something hard because the alternative was falling apart in front of a daughter who needed at least one parent to function?"
"You could have tried honesty."
"Honesty would have destroyed you." His eyes meet mine, raw and unguarded. "You were fifteen. Your mother had just vanished, and you were looking at me like I was the reason, and I thought—better she hates me for driving Elisabeth away than knows Elisabeth was never capable of loving her."
The admission lands like a physical blow. "So you let me build my entire understanding of relationships around the idea that love turns toxic. That partnership means destruction. That caring about someone eventually leads to screaming matches over breakfast."
"I didn't plan it that way." His voice cracks. "I was surviving. Every day was just getting through without letting you see how close to collapse everything was. And then years passed, and the lie became the foundation, and I didn't know how to tear it down without bringing everything else with it."
"The leak." I force the question out. "You sabotaged my inheritance bid. If you love me so much, why would you—"
"Because I was terrified." The admission costs him—I see it in how his shoulders curve inward, how his hands grip the armrest. "Of losing you to someone else. Of watching you make the same mistake Elisabeth made—choosing emotion over logic, risking everything on feelings that might not survive reality."
He takes a shuddering breath. "I watched her choose to leave. Watched her decide that freedom mattered more than staying. And when I saw you with Miles, saw the way you looked at him, I was so afraid you'd choose love over legacy and end up destroyed the way I was."
"That's not an excuse."
"No." He meets my eyes directly. "It's not. It's just the truth. I've spent so long trying to protect you from pain that I became the source of it. That's not wisdom. That's fear wearing a very expensive suit."
We don't hug. Don't cry. Don't resolve decades of damage in one conversation like a third-act reconciliation in a movie that's running out of time.
But something shifts between us. An acknowledgment that we're both broken in ways that might finally be speakable. That the walls we built to protect ourselves became prisons for everyone else.
"I don't know how to fix this," Laurent admits. "Any of it. The board, the scandal, the years of distance."
"Maybe you don't have to fix it." I stand, exhausted beyond jet lag. "Maybe you just have to stop trying to control the outcome and let things be messy for a while."
He almost smiles—a ghost of expression that suggests he remembers how. "That's never been my strength."
"I noticed." I pause at the door. "The board vote is tomorrow. I'm not asking you to support me. I'm just asking you to stop fighting against me."
"And if I can't?"
"Then I'll win anyway. But it would be nice, for once, to not have to fight my own family while I'm doing it."
I leave him sitting in his study, whiskey untouched, looking more human than I've ever seen him.
The drive home feels lighter. Not resolved—nothing's resolved—but at least honest. At least real. At least built on truth instead of comfortable lies.
Tomorrow, the board votes.
Tonight, I have a Miles-shaped conversation that can't wait any longer.