[Serena’s POV]
* Present *
Maya’s apartment feels suffocating—not for its six hundred square feet, but because every inch screams that I’m running. Again.
“Mommy, why can’t we go back to the castle?” Aria asks for the fourth time, cross-legged on the air mattress, coloring with surgical focus.
“Because we can’t, baby.”
“Did we make Mr. Serious Boss sad?”
The question slips between my ribs. “It’s complicated.”
“You always say that when you don’t want to explain.” She doesn’t look up—just states it with six-year-old precision.
Maya appears with coffee—rescue in a mug. “Hey, Aria-bear, want to help me make pancakes?”
Aria bolts for the kitchen. I mouth thanks. The apartment fills with their clatter and chatter—Maya’s patient answers, Aria’s questions—the normalcy I should be providing and can’t.
My phone buzzes. Another email from Caspian.
Subject: Q3 Integration Timeline
Serena, need your sign-off on the attached projections. Please review by EOD.
Professional. Sterile. Like we didn't spend two weeks living in the same space. Like his hand didn't cover mine on the couch while our daughter slept between us. Like he didn't file legal papers that felt like war.
I delete it without responding. He can wait.
Work has become a cold war. We communicate only through emails—brief, clinical, stripped of anything resembling warmth. In hallways, we avoid each other with the precision of trained operatives.
When forced into the same meeting, we speak only when necessary, our words careful weapons that draw no blood but leave bruises anyway.
It's easier this way. Safer.
Except it's killing me.
I throw myself into the integration audit with the kind of obsessive focus that used to win me debate championships. If I'm working, I'm not thinking about the way Caspian looked when I walked out. The way he didn't try to stop me.
The discrepancy appears on a Tuesday.
I'm three layers deep into Rothwell Industries' financial records—the access he gave me when he offered the position, back when I thought he might actually respect me—when I see it.
Revenue projections that don't match expenditures. Contracts with subsidiary companies that create circular dependencies. Nothing illegal, but messy enough that if the board saw it, if the shareholders caught wind, the merger would stall. Maybe collapse entirely.
I should tell him. It's my job to flag problems, to protect both companies from disasters that could metastasize.
Instead, I save the file to a secure folder. Encrypted. Hidden.
A weapon in reserve.
The thought makes my stomach turn, but I can't let go of it. Can't release the one piece of leverage I have in a situation where he holds all the power. His money. His lawyers. His legal right to a daughter he abandoned before he knew she existed.
This—this information that could destroy what he's building—is the only thing that makes me feel less helpless.
Even if holding it makes me exactly the kind of person I've always hated.
The email comes Wednesday morning.
From: Sebastian Rothwell
Subject: Coffee?
Ms. Vale, I'd appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. Nothing formal. Just coffee. Tomorrow, 10 AM, if you're available. I'll send a car.
I stare at it for ten minutes. Suspicious. Wary. Certain this is some kind of trap.
But curiosity wins. Or maybe it's the exhaustion of living in Maya's apartment, sleeping on an air mattress, pretending everything is fine when Aria asks why we can't go home.
I respond with a single word: Where?
The coffee shop is neutral territory. Upscale enough to signal this isn't casual, public enough that he can't corner me. Sebastian is already there when I arrive—older than Caspian, sharper somehow, with the kind of presence that suggests he was born knowing he mattered.
"Ms. Vale." He stands when I approach. "Thank you for coming."
"I'm not sure why I did."
"Curiosity?" He gestures to the seat across from him. "Or maybe you're hoping I'll say something that makes sense of my brother's behavior."
I sit because standing feels like conceding something worse. "If this is about the custody filing—"
"It's not." He cuts me off, not unkindly. "I'm not here as his lawyer or his representative. I'm here as someone who knows him better than he knows himself."
"Then you know he's trying to use legal force to take what he wants."
"I know he's terrified."
The word doesn't fit. Doesn't match the Caspian I know—controlled, calculated, always three moves ahead.
Sebastian must see something in my face because he continues: "He filed those papers because he's afraid. Not of losing in court. Of being the kind of father our dad was. Of failing her before he even starts."
The confession hits wrong. Like he's speaking a truth I'm not ready to hear.
"Your father—"
"Made his love transactional." Sebastian's voice is flat. Matter-of-fact. "Everything we did was measured, weighed, judged. Affection was currency we earned through achievement. Revoked when we disappointed him."
I think of Caspian at Columbia. The way he worked himself to exhaustion for every accolade. The desperate edge underneath his arrogance, like he was constantly proving something to an invisible judge.
"Caspian doesn't know how to love without conditions," Sebastian continues. "How to be present without expecting something in return. He's afraid he'll look at Aria and see an obligation instead of a daughter. That he'll damage her the way we were damaged."
My throat tightens. Because this makes him human in ways I've been trying not to see. Makes his legal filing look less like a power play and more like a drowning man grabbing for something solid.
"So he files for custody?" The words come out sharper than intended. "That's his solution to fear?"
"No. He files for legitimacy." Sebastian leans forward. "He's trying to make himself real. To create a structure that forces him to show up even when he's terrified. Even when his instinct is to run."
Like he ran that graduation night. Leaving me alone with nothing but champagne regret and a medallion I didn't understand for seven years.
"He should have talked to me first."
"Would you have listened?" The question is gentle but cuts deep. "Or would you have heard it as a threat?"
I don't answer. Can't. Because we both know the truth.
Sebastian pulls out his phone, shows me a photo. It's Aria—from the family day, covered in face paint, grinning at someone off-camera. The someone is obviously Caspian based on her expression, the way she's lit up.
"He's had this as his phone background since that day," Sebastian says quietly. "Stares at it when he thinks no one's watching. He's so afraid of failing her that he's paralyzed. And instead of admitting that, he did what he always does—tried to control the situation through legal structures and careful planning."
My chest aches. Actually physically aches with the weight of understanding I don't want.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because someone needs to." He pockets his phone. "And because that little girl deserves better than two adults too scared to be honest with each other."
He leaves cash on the table and stands. "For what it's worth, Ms. Vale, he talks about you the same way he talks about her. Like you're both miracles he doesn't deserve and catastrophes he can't survive."
Then he's gone, leaving me alone with cold coffee and the ruins of every assumption I've been using to protect myself.
That night, lying on Maya's air mattress while Aria sleeps beside me, I pull up the encrypted file. The discrepancies that could destroy Caspian's merger. The weapon I've been holding like armor.
My finger hovers over the delete button.
Instead, I close the laptop and stare at the ceiling, Sebastian's words echoing: He's so afraid of failing her that he's paralyzed.
I see it, sharp and ugly: I’ve been wielding the same fear. Keeping him at arm’s length. Using Aria as shield and sword. Punishing him for leaving then, refusing to let him stay now.
The air mattress sighs as I shift; Aria murmurs, her small hand finding mine. I hold on.
Tomorrow I’ll decide what to do. How to co-parent with someone whose fear mirrors mine.
Tonight I admit what Sebastian exposed: maybe Caspian’s filing wasn’t about power—maybe it was a man terrified of vanishing again.