The Outcast Son-In-Law: Rise From Ashes

CHAPTER 4: A DINNER ALONE, THE BEGINNING OF A BROKEN HEART

Alexander remembered college.

Third year. A small cut on his palm from broken glass in the campus cafeteria. Nothing serious.

But Aurelia had gone pale the moment she saw it. She grabbed her bag and ran three streets to the nearest pharmacy. She came back with antiseptic, cotton pads, and three different sizes of band-aids.

"Don't let it touch water for three days," she had told him, wrapping his hand with more focus than the situation deserved.

Tonight, glass had torn across his arm from elbow to wrist and soaked through his sleeve.

She hadn't looked back once.

Now he could be bleeding openly, and it still wouldn't compare to a twisted ankle. The other man's twisted ankle.

Alexander limped out of Stellar Grand into the cool night air. The ankle had happened somewhere in the rush to pull Aurelia away from the falling rack. Not serious. Just enough to remind him with every step that it was there.

He didn't flag down a cab. He just walked.

He almost laughed at himself. Bleeding on an anniversary.

He didn't have an answer. He just walked home through streets that didn't care either way.

When he finally got home,the candles had burned down to stubs.

Alexander stood in the doorway of the dining room and looked at all of it.

The food. The melted wax pooled on the tablecloth. The cake on the counter had their faces drawn in white frosting and "Happy Anniversary, Aurelia" written above them.

Six batches ruined to get that cake right. He had never baked anything before this. He had wanted it to be worth something.

He sat down at the table alone.

He lit what was left of the candles. Not because she was coming. He knew she wasn't coming.

He lit them because he had planned this for weeks and he was going to finish what he started even if he was the only one there to see it.

He closed his eyes.

Happy anniversary, Aurelia. I hope we stay together forever.

He blew them out.

Then he ate the dinner by himself in a quiet room, the three gifts still untouched at the corner of the table.

Was this what marriage always became? Does it always take something that was once good and wear it down until you can't recognize what's left?

He sat with that question for a long time. No answer came.

The room got darker. He didn't turn on any more lights. The quiet settled around him and eventually, exhausted in a way that went past his body and into something deeper, Alexander finally drifted off to sleep in the chair.

The front door opened past midnight.

Her footsteps were uneven, one heel landing slightly harder than the other.

She was drunk. Not heavily, but just enough.

Aurelia stopped in the dining room entrance and looked at the table. Her eyes went from the candles to the food to the cake on the counter with her name on it.

Something shifted in her face. Her lips pressed together and the thing that crossed her expression looked like guilt before she set her bag down quietly.

He made a cake, she thought. He learned how to bake just to make this cake and I scolded him in front of everyone.

That was too much, even she could admit that.

She sat down and reached for the gifts. She took the black folder first.

She opened it and read the top line.

Harbr International.

She kept reading. No expiry, no restrictions, full overseas access. An unlimited partnership with the one company she had been chasing for nearly a year.

She read it three times.

Then she walked into the bedroom and shook Alexander awake. It was 3 a.m.

"Alexander. Wake up, now."

He stirred slowly, still heavy with the sleep he had barely managed to find.

"What's wrong?"

She held the contract in front of his face.

"Why did you give me a fake contract? Are you trying to make me look like a fool?"

"That contract is real," he said, his voice rough with sleep. "I put a lot of work into getting it."

"Real!" She pulled it back. "Nobody gets an unlimited contract from Harbr International. No time limit, no clauses. That doesn't happen."

"Call their CEO yourself if you don't believe me," he said.

Aurelia didn't call the CEO. She called Nah instead. He confirmed through his uncle Marcus at Harbr that no such contract had been signed. She hung up and walked back into the bedroom.

"It's fake," she said flatly. "A manager at Harbr confirmed it."

"I'm very disappointed in you. You just need to take care of the house. Why would you trick me with something like this?"

"I'm meeting the Harbr CEO next Wednesday. If I walk in with a forged document, he'll never take me seriously."

"Can't you just stay home and do your part?"

She threw the contract at him. Pages scattered across the sheets.

She tore what remained and dropped the pieces on the floor.

Then she picked up the velvet box without opening it and tossed it toward the wall.

It hit the floor near the baseboard with a small dull sound.

She turned to leave.

Alexander sat on the edge of the bed. He leaned down slowly and started picking up the torn pieces one by one, cupping them carefully in his palm.

It didn't feel like paper being torn. It felt like something else entirely.

He was still holding the pieces when Aurelia appeared in the doorway one more time.

"Tomorrow morning I'm taking you to see Nah. You'll apologize to him. He just got back to the country and you embarrassed him last night. I'm very disappointed in you."

He looked up at her. Something that had been bending inside him for a very long time reached its limit.

"Apologize," he said, low and quiet. "You want me to apologize to him."

"Yes."

"Aurelia."

His voice dropped further.

"Do you remember whose wife you are? You had your hands on him in a room full of people.You acted like I wasn't standing right there. If the two of you had been somewhere more private, what would have happened?"

She exploded.

"Alexander! I have told you again and again, we are just colleagues! Don't let me hear this again!"

"Otherwise I won't give you any money..."

She suddenly stopped. She had never given him money, not once in three years of marriage. The threat had nowhere to land.

She switched without pausing. "Otherwise you can move out of my house."

Alexander was stunned.

"Aurelia, have you been bewitched by him? What's so good about him? Haven't I been here every single day?"

"What use is that kind of good? He has real connections, real power. He can actually help me in ways you never could."

She straightened. "Tomorrow morning, you will come with me, you will apologize, and you'd better behave yourself."

She left.

The front door clicked shut.

Alexander sat alone in the dark with torn pieces of paper in his hands and a house that had never really felt like his sitting silent all around him.

He did not sleep again. Not one minute of the whole night.

By the time the sun came up, two things were clear in his mind.

He was not going to apologize.

And this marriage was already over.

He just hadn't said it out loud yet.