Page 121 of Angels Are Falling

“The internship isn’t practical with three kids. The office manager position offers health insurance for five,” he said, the way another man would read out a sentence handed down from a bench. “Six months ago, I had a portfolio and a ticket out of that town. Now I’ve got a parking spot.”

“Sorry, man.” Sean nodded at Amelie. “At least you’ve got her.”

Stefan looked out at Amelie, at the tan coat down in the snow, and for one second, something crossed his face that might have been the truth. “Yeah, I’ve got her,” he said. Then it was gone, and he drank.

Over the years, I had thought of a great many ways to end this man. I had been creative with my imagination. But I had never wanted to end him as badly as in that moment. Not for touching her, though God knew that was its own private hell, but for standing inside the one life I had envied and finding it small.

I had vowed to find a way to end their relationship once she graduated from college. I’d lined up Stefan’s dream job, though he could never trace it back to me. The job should have carried him outside the country and away from her, which had been the only and entire point of it. Instead, he’d deferred the opportunity until she graduated from college. It turned out that he’d planned on taking her with him. I started scrambling to prevent that from happening, but then his parents died—our parents died—and he dragged Amelie to the courthouse. The only reason I couldn’t stop it was because I’d been distracted by my own grief.

Across the garden, Stefan drained his cup.

His life would now be forever entwined with Amelie. She was about to assume guardianship of his siblings while he stood in the snow, mourning his ‘ticket out of that town.’

I would have given my left arm to stand where that man was standing, and he had the gall to look unhappy. I’d have laid it on the table without a flicker and called it the best deal I ever made.

He didn’t know what he had. That was the part I couldn’t forgive. He had her loyalty, the kind she handed over without ever weighing it, and he stood in the full pour of it, and he had the audacity to complain.

I rummaged through my pockets for the small bag of white powder. It wasn’t in either pocket. Frustrated, I peeled off the jacket and searched the lining until I found the mini clear packet.

I used whenever I saw her with him.

Then I used to stop myself from hunting him down.

It was a vicious cycle.

I threw the jacket on the ground and used my key to snort the white powder, which wouldn’t bring me bliss but would let me tolerate the scene unfolding before me. The euphoria rushed through my bloodstream, numbing my insides. It was just what I had needed.

“You’re going to freeze to death,” a voice said at my shoulder, dry as paper, “and I am going to be the one made to explain to a room full of lawyers why you were here in the first place.”

I didn’t startle. There was perhaps one man alive who could have come up on me unheard, and that was because Caden Maxwell moved like me. He took up a place at the railing, a deliberate arm’s length off, facing the garden and not me.

“Maxwell.”

“Your parents are in a drawer, Cavendish,” he said. A pause, perfectly weighted. “There’s no date set for the funeral, and there are people waiting on your signal to organize the service. They called me to see if I could track you down.” His eyes went over the bottle, over the packet of cocaine, over the rest of me, and took it all in without batting an eye. “I’m only here to see if you’ve lost your mind.”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s what your assistant told me you said. Yesterday. And the day before.” He did not raise his voice; he never did. “Put the bottle down. Throw away the drugs. Then bury your parents.”

I should have. But I was incapable of seeing reason. Not because I’d just lost my parents, though that grief didn’t help. But because she fucking married him.

As I’d said, I was a terrible son. Instead of organizing my parents’ funeral, I was mourning what could’ve been with Amelie. At the back of my mind, I’d always assumed they weren’t permanent, and if I could make her see me just once, I could change her mind. All those plans I’d made to separate them after college were now obsolete. Coming from a broken family, Amelie would go to any lengths to make sure her marriage lasted forever. It was the one thing my money couldn’t buy—her heart.

Across the garden, the girl in the tan coat was trying to keep it all together, and I felt myself do the one thing I had never let myself do—I looked at her in front of another living soul. Just looked, the way I’d been all night, uncaring if he noticed.

It took Maxwell less than a second to spot her. He missed nothing, it was the one thing he and I had ever truly shared. I felt his attention running the line of my stare. Felt the small, exact recalculation move through the man beside me. And when he spoke again, there was something in his voice I had not heard before—disbelief.

“Amelie?”

The name went into me like a blade going in clean, no resistance at all. The drugs had my pulse flying already, the shock finished the job. “How do you know Amelie?”

“She is one of my students.” His voice was quiet. “Or she was, until last week.” His jaw worked, once. “She lives with Rose.”

A beat, while I studied his face.

He would never know such trivial information about one of his students, not unless he had a vested interest in them. For some time now, I had watched him quietly lose his mind and felt nothing but a remote, clinical pity, because I had experienced the same for years. The unraveling had been unlike him. Going silent and iron-jawed in the middle of events we both attended. I’d recognized it for what it was—an obsession.

I’d already assumed there was a woman. It had not crossed my mind, for one instant, that it would turn out to be Amelie’s best friend. I’d seen Rose with Amelie around their college campus. She was a quiet girl, painfully shy, and not at all the kind of person I expected Caden Maxwell to stumble over himself for.