Page 7 of Angels Are Falling

“Ruby Sarafina, the red-headed singer?” Kai glanced at Amelie’s dark hair. “I didn’t take you for a redhead man.”

Amelie rolled her eyes. “Don’t change the subject. If you can’t think of a celebrity, think of someone from real life. No one ever caught your eye?”

“If you must know, there was a woman.”

“Was?” I asked, realizing too late that perhaps he was referring to a dead wife or girlfriend, and we had invited some unpleasant memories. I closed my eyes. “Sorry. That’s none of my business.”

“Don’t be, it was years ago.” He took a long, slow sip of his Manhattan as if biding his time. “My company used to recruit new hires at universities. I was invited to give the keynote address at her campus when I first saw her. I was immediately a goner. She was one of a kind, the type that could stop traffic but also looked like the girl next door.”

His eyes slid to Amelie’s face, briefly, just for a fraction of a second. I was looking at him when it happened. By the time I registered it, he’d already looked away.

“What happened to her?” Amelie asked tentatively, also unsure whether he was recounting a dead lover.

He chuckled at her apprehensive glance. “Don’t look so horrified. She’s alive and well.”

“Oh. So⁠—”

“I didn’t pursue her. Back then, we had too big an age gap. She was barely a college freshman, and I was the CEO of a thriving company. The optics were bad, and the media would have had a field day if they thought I was preying on a young, impressionable female student.”

Amelie appeared unconvinced and called him out. “I don’t believe you,” she announced decisively. “What’s the real reason you stayed away from her?”

He gave her a crooked smile as if expecting the very reaction. “She seemed skittish around strangers and men in general.”

“Every woman is wary of strange men,” she asserted. That was the thing about Amelie. She looked like Little Miss Sunshine—bright and optimistic—so no one caught on to her shrewd nature. She never let people off the hook if she saw through their bullshit.

Kai lifted a shoulder. “I couldn’t predict how she’d react to a grown man and didn’t want to start on the wrong foot. I wanted to learn about her first and approach her in a way that wouldn’t scare her off.”

“And did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Learn about her?”

He dwelled on the thought before nodding. “There’s something to the power of observation. You’ll be surprised by how much you can learn despite never having a proper conversation with someone. I watched her interact, and soon, I knew her like the back of my hand. Cheerful but a straight shooter, hardheaded yet reasonable, compassionate but not a pushover. Fiercely loyal.”

Amelie’s glass had been halfway to her lips for what seemed like a full minute. She hadn’t sipped. She was very still, that specific stillness she had when she was thinking hard about something and trying not to show it.

I watched her instead of Kai. She looked absorbed in the story, I told myself.

“Her moral compass was based on her situation rather than predetermined values,” Kai continued. “She didn’t stick to something simply because that’s how she was raised. She adapted to her circumstances. I loved her flexibility because people either died with their archaic values or didn’t have them to begin with.”

That was how I saw my wife. I glanced at Amelie. She was leaning forward, chin resting lightly on her knuckles, too absorbed in Kai’s story to notice that every word he used could have been lifted from a letter written about her.

“This is all so romantic,” Amelie awed. “I can’t believe she left such an impression on you that you’re still thinking about her after all this time.”

I beamed at her. My lovely wife romanticized things. Even if Kai had told her it was a simple crush, Amelie would have turned it into a Disney fairy tale. But she was on the money in this instance. Kai seemed smitten with this mystery woman.

“Did you ever tell her how you felt?” she asked.

He tilted his head. “She was all I thought about, every second of every day until it became unbearable. I decided it was time to approach her. But that was before⁠—”

“Before?”

“Before I saw her with her boyfriend.”

I blinked, finding it impossible that there was a woman Kai Cavendish couldn’t get. “What happened then?” I asked, wrapped up in the story.

Kai glanced at Amelie. I thought, and not for the first time, that he hadn’t looked at me during the conversation. “She got married,” he replied, voice devoid of emotion.