Sweet Romance19 min read
The Antidote Contract
ButterPicks14 views
I remember the slap as if it were a clock striking a terrible hour.
"Why are you still fighting?" he hissed, his hand reeking of anger and something colder. "I could strip you naked right now and wait for Mr. Collier to return."
I used the shock to my advantage. I bit hard on my lip until taste of blood sharpened my mind. I counted the man's breaths and drove my knee upward into his left lower abdomen—hard, precise, the way I'd learned in a dozen desperate nights when my life was all instinct. He cursed and crumpled, clutching himself.
I crawled for the door, throat raw, senses fuzzed by whatever they'd slipped into me. The hallway blurred; I slammed into a door that I convinced myself led to the stairwell. I fell to my knees.
"Antidote?" a voice asked, low and smooth, full of an odd pain and temptation all at once.
I froze. The tone alone could have betrayed a prayer. Whoever said it had a voice that could light a fire from a single word.
"Who are you?" I muttered under my breath, fingers fumbling with the lock.
He only answered with the same cool, sharp words. "Same illness. Then we'll be each other's cure."
I bolted the lock and stumbled into the dark. I pretended not to notice that the scent of him—like rain on summer stone—had already threaded into the room. Even then, with the drug fog blurring my edges, his presence did something to me that scared me more than any man with a threat: it made my chest ache in a way I couldn't name.
He was supposed to be the kind of man who made headlines: a high and lonely summit of power and cold. Six years later, the man I saw every morning in the study of the Collier family house was no different on paper. But that night, the image he kept for strangers shattered around my gloved hands. His name—Emanuel Collier—was unfamiliar to me then, yet somehow his voice had carved a mark I could not erase.
"You're the kind who ruins my image," he had murmured in the dark then. "You make me human when I promised not to be."
I ran. I promised myself I would never be taken like that again.
Six years passed. The memory of that night threaded through my days like a stubborn seam.
Now I stand in Emanuel Collier's high-ceilinged study, clutching the hands of two little people who change my whole weather. My son tugged on my fingers with the stubborn authority of his five-year-old declarations.
"Mom," West said in that small, grave voice he used when something mattered—when all the tiny marbles of the world needed lining up. "That house owner is dangerous. We are pretending. What if he hides something and hurts you?"
His hair was the color of late autumn, and he wore a tiny white shirt and dark suspenders like a miniature marquis. If you looked quickly, you might think he was too serious for his age. If you looked longer, you would see a boy who'd learned how to take care of his mother because she once had to be taken care of.
Isabelle, his sister, sat with a unicorn plush on her lap, pink cheeks and a grin that could disarm a barricade. She bounced and announced the obvious.
"Emanuel sir, your phone fell behind you!" she chirped, pointing like a sunbeam.
Emanuel, behind his massive oak desk, watched us with a gaze that could flatten gossip and knuckle into truth. He wore a purple suit that made the room colder in the best possible way. When he smiled, the line was faint and rare—someone saved for rare payment.
"Miss Bolton," Connor Dixon said from behind us, a blend of nervousness and professional insistence, "Mr. Collier is ready. Please remember—do not get close. He has, ah, an aversion to women. It's clinical."
"I know," I said.
We had an agreement. A contract. I would pretend to be his wife for the sake of his grandfather's happiness. I would bring the twins into the Collier house for a season. In return, the Collier family would give my children a roof and me a name by their hearth. The reasons were practical, not romantic.
Emanuel's voice softened when he spoke to me. "The contract is here. Sign where indicated."
He pushed a folder towards me. The paper felt ordinary, and I could not help staring at his hands—long, firm, the kind used to making things happen.
I signed. The ink was a promise and a protection. I kept thinking of the two small faces on the sofa behind me and how easily the world could blow them away. We had to be strong, even when it meant becoming actors on someone else's stage.
"West," I prompted afterward, to peel the weight of the moment off his shoulders, "say hello."
West stepped forward like a small diplomat. "Sir Collier, we have come as guests and will obey the rules so that this—" he nodded at the contract in my hands "—is kept. We like quiet. We like books. We like chocolate favorite."
"Isabelle, do you want to say hello?" I whispered.
"My name is Isabelle," she replied melodically. "I'm five. I'm a princess. I brush my teeth morning and night. Can I call you Daddy?"
Emanuel's jaw tightened—so slight it might have been imaginery—yet he answered in a tone that no one else heard.
"If you wish to, you may."
After the meeting, Isabelle made a discovery. She found a jar of red candy on the desk, one of those decorative things that are never meant to be touched. She reached for it with the irresistible conviction of the young.
"Isabelle—" I started, but it was too late.
She hopped, plump feet taking her the last step like a tiny climber in a jungle.
Emanuel moved as if compelled by physics to remove three meters of distance. He bent to stop her. He stepped back to prevent touching her. He looked like a man whose bones had air in them and who needed to tuck away.
When she fell, he reflexively moved to kick out and missed. She grinned, climbed his leg like a child scaling a statue, and chirped into his face, "Daddy, daddy, I love you!"
Everything about it—her small, sticky kiss, the sugar-sweet honesty—made Emanuel go still as stone. From somewhere inside, he produced a red candy bean and held it out with trembling fingers. "Here," he said. "Take it."
She threw herself into his arms and swallowed the candy like treasure.
I could not stop laughing, a breath of release I had not known I was holding.
"You're right," I told him, hand on my hip. "Candy and looks—those are powerful."
He looked at me as if I had suggested splitting an atom. His eyes then slid sideways, and a small, almost embarrassed smile twitched at his mouth. "Stay the course," he said. "We will be professional."
But in private moments small and stubborn, he was not all stone. When we later walked through the soft-spoked corridor lined with old family portraits, I watched him in the reflection of the glass: a man being re-formed in strange ways. He was concerned about his grandfather—so concerned he had been willing to risk appearances. He had a kind of quiet I seldom found in the men who made decisions on other people's lives.
"Tell me," I asked once when we were alone in his office, the hush wrapped around us like velvet, "why five-year-old parents? Why select mothers with children specifically?"
He looked away, eyelids drawn down. "If I had children," he said flatly, "they would be five years old this year."
His voice, when he said it, came armed with the thinnest slice of regret. It was not a long wound, but it was long enough.
My thoughts slid back to that night. The one in which I had fled, the drugs, the men who smelled like old money, and the man who had said we should be each other's antidote. I kept the memory coiled and silent.
The days unfurled like careful petals. I learned the household by the small economies: how to fold a napkin on a table that had seen too many anniversaries. I met the staff: Edison Lehmann, the steward with the permanent trench in his brow; Connor Dixon, who winked at me like a man who knew when to move and when to keep his distance. Lenore Kristensen, a woman whose smile was the kind that could slice paper, moved through the rooms as if current. She had a way of turning everything into a test.
"You're new to this house," Lenore said once, blade-sharp and velvety. "You think it will be easy?"
I gave a polite smile. "I think it's a job, Miss Kristensen."
"You'd better learn to do it by heart," she said. "There's no room for—" she looked at my hands "—waste in this house."
There was a glint—petty, hungry—behind her eyes.
"I'll manage," I said.
Little gestures multiplied into tenderness. Emanuel, despite his illness, learned to adjust. When Isabelle sneezed in the dining room, he took off his blazer and laid it over her like a temporary mantle. When West refused to call him "Daddy" to save face, Emanuel found ways to meet him in private, reading tales of faraway ships and long-lost knights, his voice soft and oddly patient.
Sometimes he would catch me in the hall and say with a dry smile, "Keep him from being too proud." I would reply, "Keep yourself from being too cruel." His mouth would curl once—an approximation of laughter—and then he would go to handle whatever matter required a certain hardness I did not have.
As the days led into the last weeks before the late patriarch's eightieth birthday, tensions creaked into the house like winter wind. There was a line of people who thought lineage could be measured by the weight of flowers at a table. Lenore found ways to cut at me every time the servants gathered. She claimed our plan to cut the budget for the feast was sacrilege.
"You want us to serve fewer flowers?" she asked, aghast, in front of the staff. "What kind of servant would cut such corners for an honor of that scale?"
"Do you think throwing away half of everything is the path to honor?" I countered. "Do you think your gilded trash is the right face for our family?"
Edison cleared his throat, torn between tradition and ledger. "The matriarch wants the event to be impressive," he said. "But—"
"But we are the house that built the city," I said. "We are the house that raises families. Wasting has never been the way we keep a family strong. If we squander what our people worked to bring to us, then what do we have left?"
There was a silence that felt almost physical, followed by murmurs of assent. Lenore's smile tightened into a mask.
"You are naive," she whispered later when the staff split like waves. "You are shaking the branches of a tree whose roots you cannot see."
"I prefer branches that bear fruit," I replied, and I walked away.
That night Emanuel found me by the window, looking like someone trying to stitch the seams of a life.
"You took them down," he said, referring to Lenore's plan to outspend common sense. "You put your foot down."
"Its waste scandalized me," I said. "We are not the sort of people to throw away half the world to buy respect."
He looked at me as if I had pressed a quiet chord inside his bones and the music had surprised him. "You are dangerous like that," he said.
"But maybe dangerous is necessary," I replied.
We worked through the details for the patriarch's arrival. The old man arrived in a whirl of crimson silk and authority, clutching a walking stick like a scepter and a grin that carved into everyone. He embraced his grandchildren like treasure and then reached out to me in a way that made my whole chest hot.
"How good to see you, child," he said. "Your hands are busy, and that is what I like. My little great-grandchildren—bring them here."
He then shuffled through his pockets and produced things: not the expected jewelry or fanfare, but deeds. Two deeds of islands—small specks of land they called the Dragon and Phoenix Isles—and a share certificate representing ten percent of the family holdings.
"Money funds love," he said with a wink. "But treasure can buy you a voice."
I held them like they were warming coals. They were terrifying and liquid and brilliant. Later, when the gossipers would call me a fortune hunter, I would think of his hand on my shoulder and the warmth in his voice. He had given everything a name: a child's weight. "A woman should have strength," he said. "You were wise to come."
The banquet began with suspicion and a thousand tiny cameras. Old jealousies whispered like insects. People who lived to gossip had already written themselves into lines of comment and condemnation.
Lenore started a rumor, as efficient as a poison: "She is a hanger-on," she whispered into the forked ears of the wealthy, "Here one day, gone the next. She sells flowers and saves pennies. How fitting a bride for our Emanuel."
The crowd loved the shape of scandal. But in the hall where light softened into the soft sheen of silk, we unveiled a piece of work the critics could not easily swipe away.
They called it the "Lifelines Scroll"—a long panel covered in handwriting and small, imperfect "寿" characters. On it were the names and blessings written by dozens—no, hundreds—of hands. Children with bright uneven loops, elders whose calligraphy trembled with age, sturdy palms of people who had learned to live with other people's losses. These people were not the "right faces" of high society; they were the hands of ordinary lives.
I had used funds to hire a charitable project: to give disabled artisans work and voice. They made the paper blossoms; they wrote the characters. We arranged the blossoms into a single vast mandala—a project that took months and the toil of many who seldom found coin in their pockets. It was a refusal of waste and a celebration of craft.
"These are from my friends," I told the guests as I walked the stage with the scroll unfurled. "They are someone else's hands. Each one wrote and offered a blessing. We chose to honor that work as a family should."
The room had a stretch of silence the way a bow stretches before it sings. People shifted, uncomfortable and then softened. Old prejudices have trouble against the weight of something crafted by real, tender hands.
"How meaningful," the patriarch said, and I felt his eyes like a blessing. Lenore's face drained color.
The press ate their handhelds, trying to translate. The donations poured in later, and the stories multiplied: Collier's philanthropic feast; Collier honors local artisans. Mercy had a much stronger headline than rumor.
But Lenore was not to be undone so easily. When she could not cut me by gossip, she set a trap as petty as it was deliberate. She staged a misstep—an apparent accident—that showed her as injured and me as careless. The room saw it and gasped, a chorus in the wrong key. She cried soft and fragile, eyes damp like pearls, and the crowd leaned in.
"She nearly hit me with hot tea!" she wailed.
I felt a fury rising, not for myself but for the way people love to presume.
I walked to the stage. The lights made us both look as if we were two characters and our feud was a scene written in someone else's script.
"Lenore," I said, and my voice was quiet but steadied. "You are a guest of the Collier household. If you have an issue with me, bring it up. Do not stain a celebration with your acting."
She opened her mouth and launched into a shrill reply, but the crowd had eyes and phones and an appetite for spectacle. I laid out the truth in a single movement—how the flowers were made, who had worked on them, the charity logs, the bank transfers. The truth is not loud; it is solid.
Then, because the house has rules and I had promised the family I would keep them, I asked Emanuel for something that felt like justice.
"Emanuel," I said, "if you agree, let's invite Lenore to speak, with us listening."
He gave me a look I could not read. The old patriarch nodded. The room held its breath.
Lenore smiled that cut smile and took the microphone like a woman who'd rehearsed a dozen endings. "I am only a humble—" she began, but the mouths around the room had already curled with knowing.
I stood and put my hand on the microphone stand. "We will hear you, Lenore. Tell the room why you think you are more Collier than the others. Tell the room whose son should have what."
She started to sputter her tale—how she'd served the family, how someone should be punished, how we were all impostors. The guests leaned in, some with pity, some with malice. Then I pressed the next point.
"Tonight," I said, "we asked our guests to bring a small pledge—not of money but of testimony. I called certain friends of the household who told me of a pattern of behavior—of how you slandered other people to further your own ends. Those who worked here, and those who were hurt by your lies, will step forward now."
The next hour became a measured, public unmasking. It was not bloodthirsty. It did not need to be. It was careful, deliberate. One by one, people testified: a maid who had been made to spread rumors and then punished; a supplier who had been excluded for refusing to be part of a scheme; a former friend who had been isolated by Lenore's steady poison.
We did not scream. We presented proof—bank transfers, messages, witnesses. The room watched with knives of surprise and the lingering hunger of those who like to see the high and mighty topple. Lenore's face shifted through stages: calm to disbelief, then denial, then a small, sharp panic. She began to sputter and deny.
"I didn't—" she snapped. "You have it wrong. You—"
"Why did you tell Mrs. Jensen to spread the rumor about Mrs. Collins?" I asked.
Lenore looked as if someone had struck her with a cold hand. Her composure cracked.
"You can't—" she said.
People who had watched her all these years, who had seen her smiles and coldness, stepped forward. Some simply turned their backs, withdrawing the affection she had relied upon as a currency.
"It was to secure me a seat," she finally said, voice smaller than I expected.
"You destroyed reputations," Edison said, voice even. "You profit from small cruelties. Those you have used will not stand with you. We have evidence. The house does not grant kindness to those who earn their bread on slander."
She went through an arc I had seen on some screens and worse places—denial, anger, the faint hope of bargaining. "If I apologize, will you all forgive me?" she pleaded.
The room murmured. Forgiveness is an act. It is not always owed.
The patriarch rose then, slower than he had walked earlier, and walked to the center of the room. He held out his hand, not to Lenore, but to the people who had been hurt. "We do not excuse cruelty," he said, with that voice of his that had been a stamp on decisions for decades. "We restore peace. We will not reward malice."
They asked Lenore, in a public way, to leave the main table and to make amends: a public apology, restitution to those harmed, and a year of service volunteering at a charity the Colliers would support. She sank into a chair as if the legs beneath her had been removed. The crowd watched the scene take shape: Lenore's forced apologies, the cold eyes of previously friendly families now turned away, the snapping of social ties like brittle rope.
She began small then large—first a quiet promise to the maid she had blamed, then a more public apology that sounded like paper unrolled and flapping in indifferent wind.
Her last plea was for pity, the kind that never came. Instead, cameras caught her being turned away by people who had once toasted her at weddings. People recorded her pleading, but we did not cry out for more shame. We asked for accountability, for repair. The room buzzed with cheap satisfaction, but something else settled on me: the weight of what I'd helped start.
It was more than revenge. It was a reordering.
After, the atmosphere softened. The patriarch squeezed my hand and said, "You did well." Emanuel's face showed a thousand unread things: pride, relief, unease. He took off his suit jacket and stood near the table where West and Isabelle played with simple wooden toys. For the first time, people who had seen him as cold began to see a man who could be fierce about what he valued.
Then came a complication that rattled the floorboards: another woman arrived—Ivanna Burke—claiming the single thing I had most feared. She said she was the one from the hotel that night six years ago. Her brother—Bernardo Coulter—stood like a gate, eyes hard, a soldier's loyalty visible in his jaw.
Emanuel's body went taut like a string pulled too far. "You are night family," I heard him murmur to himself, a name he seemed to have rehearsed for years. He had been searching for the woman who had once changed the direction of his life, and now she stood in the doorway, the stakes sudden and terrible.
They'd found her after years. She had been picked from a list—the clues narrowing by a thread—and here she was, fragile and fierce as a reed in wind.
"I didn't plan to find you," Ivanna said, voice trembling. "But it's true. That night—I was there."
"Emanuel," I whispered.
He looked at me with a certain variability of ache. "I am not going to be hurried," he said. "I will not let the past assault the present without reason."
I watched his hand tighten around a fork. I saw old fear coil and throb in his skin. The things we think we have buried sometimes push back up, demanding to be reckoned with. Ivanna told her version: a night of missteps, drugs, confusion; a life pivoting around a single dark mistake.
Emanuel listened. He did not explode. He did not fling accusation blithely as if a single day could explain decades. He had told the family to let the evidence speak. If there was any justice to be done, it must be careful—and he was careful.
"She says she didn't mean—" Ivanna tried.
"Emanuel," Bernardo said, "we came for truth, not to make trouble. My sister never wanted to cause a stir."
"I understand," he said. "If there is truth, it must be found fairly. We will confirm this. You will talk to the investigators. We will not act in haste."
Ivanna bowed and left, her brother beside her. Out in the corridor, she turned to me.
"I am sorry if my coming hurts you," she said softly.
My first reflex was to smile—a small, protective curve. "You don't know me," I said. "But I have two small people waiting for me to be brave."
She nodded, eyes clear with something like regret. "Then be brave," she said. "You deserve that."
Investigations followed. Emanuel's team combed records, dug through hotel logs, compared timetables. When the details came back, they said Ivanna had been in a different hotel that night. The piece of clothing found then—a school uniform—matched an entirely different list, not mine. Somehow, a lie had attached itself to the truth like burr.
Relief should have been all sweetness. Instead, a new tension tightened: the implication that I might be the woman from that night—not because of anything I had done but because coincidence and petty lies can be powerful. Emanuel's face clouded. His skin reacted physically when he let suspicion in, a rash of tension rising like a fever.
He was furious because he had wanted to be angry—because the ancient bone inside him that remembers pride wanted to shout—but he had also wanted to be fair.
"Just in case," he told me one night when we were alone, he had made his team confirm our children's DNA as a precaution. "Not because I mistrust you. Because my life is a harsh place to be careless."
It was the most human thing he'd said. I could see the tiny cracks in the hard surfaces and the things he tried not to look at. The tests came back: West and Isabelle were ours—my children were mine and Emanuel's if the blood said it. The result cleared me, inconveniently enough—for both of us.
The world is messy, and truth does not always land as cleanly as we'd like. Ivanna's claim did not stick to any one person for long. The night that had been a scar across Emanuel's life remained a thorn he had not yet found the stem to remove. He had been looking in wrong directions for years, and the discovery that Ivanna was not the woman he had looked for left him with something like emptiness.
"Who was she?" he asked one evening, not to me but to the empty air. "Who was the woman I hunted all these years?"
"I don't know," I said honestly. "But you have two people here who need you present."
He looked at West and Isabelle slow like a man trying on a rare coat. "I don't like the idea of anyone else possessing what is mine. I have a base instinct that hates the unknown."
"That's human," I said.
Time braided our days into something new. He learned to hold hands—awkwardly, as if touching us might set off something. He learned to sleep a foot away when there were elders in the house who might be suspicious. He took an antihistamine more out of ritual than cure, and sometimes he took my hand in public without flinching.
We had tender moments that felt like treasure. Once, when Isabelle wanted to climb on his lap and he froze for half a breath, West sulked and then asked, "Daddy, do you like being hugged by me?" Emanuel answered slowly, and the word he used was small and enormous all at once: "Yes."
There were nights when he tried to be lordly in the old-fashioned way, and there were nights when he tried clumsy tenderness. One night, when we both had been too stubborn for words, we fell into something that neither of us had dared voice: he kissed me in the quiet. It was startling, unexpected. It was not a triumph: it was a question. The world around that kiss trembled and shifted. It frightened me and filled me with a strange, delicious fear.
"Tonight is enough," Emanuel said afterward, voice rasped like gravel. "We will continue tomorrow."
"We will?" I asked, cheeks burning.
"Yes," he said simply. "Tonight and tomorrow. Do not think I do not keep count."
We made a pact of a sort: we would be honest, but we would not let the past unspool our children. We would play house until the day the house had no need for masks. I had the wild hope that somewhere beyond the contract, we were building something stronger than a paper fold.
Then came the day that would change everything. The heir of a rival house—the night house—arrived with a lawyer and a sliver of accusation. They claimed interest, ownership of old favors. Night family pushed for leverage: perhaps a better marriage for the girl who had not been taken but who had once been entangled by circumstances.
Emanuel balked. Bernardo, the brother, was big and straightforward. "We only want what is fair," he said when he entered the room where Emanuel had assembled his closest. "If the Colliers treat us preposterously, the night family will not stand for it."
Emanuel did not rise to the bait. He held his ground like rocks in ocean, unshowy but immovable. "We do not trade in old favors," he said. "We treat what is real fairly and what is false with the caution it demands."
When the rival family left, Emanuel closed the door and unlatched the place in himself that had been shut for so long. He looked at me and said, "If I fight for what's mine, will you stand with me?"
"Yes," I said. "But we fight for the small people too."
His jaw worked. "Good," he said. "Because the world is a dangerous place."
An hour later, Damian—no, Lenore—attempted one more plot. She leaked a private letter to a popular magazine, an ugly thing meant to show me as a mercenary and Emanuel as a man trapped in someone else's nets. The article said many things; the article took no care for truth.
My heart went heavy and cold.
Emanuel had the choice to dismiss it—some scandals fade with a wave—or make it a spectacle. He chose spectacle with the only thing that could silence gossip: public truth and public restitution. He called a press conference. He brought out records of the charity, the names of the artisans and their testimonies, the receipts, the contracts. He did not yell. He did not threaten. He simply showed.
When Lenore tried to speak over the evidence, the cameras turned. The public watched her unravel: the petty lies, the little sells, the mean chain of favors traded like currency for status. People who thought themselves above the fray saw her for what she had been: a navigator of small cruelties.
That afternoon, with the cameras rolling, her social world changed. A string of people left her circle: old friends, colleagues, patrons. They walked away with the slow dignity of those who suddenly realize their own self-preservation requires distance.
People filmed, but not for the entertainment of cruelty. They filmed because this was a rare moment when a house used its power to protect people who were smaller than themselves—people who never had a voice. Lenore faced public humiliation, yes, but it was done with order and the chance to make repair. She had to apologize in the largest hall, and she had to serve those she'd wronged for a year—no theatrics, only labor and restitution. She left with fewer allies and with a knowledge of what happens when a small cruelty becomes a public pattern. Her face when the crowd turned a measured shoulder was the face of someone who had miscalculated.
A week later, the rival family returned, but not for themselves. Bernardo came to the house with Ivanna. He nodded at Emanuel with a soldier's respect.
"You stood firm," he said. "That counts for something."
Emanuel only replied, "We will not let old ghosts break our children's mornings."
In the months that followed, small things knitted us quieter. We took the children to gardens. We watched them argue about whether dragons or phoenixes were more noble. West began to call him "Dad" sometimes, softly, like a secret between his teeth. Emanuel laughed once when Isabelle painted polka dots on his tie with the unbridled concentration of a young artist.
I would not call it easy. There were nights of doubt where the past tugged at his sleeve and nights where I feared the house's court of judgment would turn on us. But there were also nights in which Emanuel read to the children, softening in the spaces that belonged to them, and I felt a life coalesce—stubborn, imperfect, but real as breath.
"How am I supposed to keep being strong?" I asked him late one night as we walked the corridors that smelled of old paper and coffee sweat.
"Keep being you," he said. "You are enough. Brave enough, loud enough, tender enough."
"You are kind to say that."
He paused and looked at me sideways, eyes almost playful. "And you did keep my life honest. That counts for more than most things."
We did our parts. The world around us remained loud and hungry, and sometimes cruel. But in a house that had once been a bastion of coldness, a woman with two children and a scarred past had come to sit in the light. We were not perfect. We were not safe. But we were a little less broken than before.
And when the patriarch asked for a family portrait—children at his knees, me in a dress that smelled faintly of sea-sugar and Emanuel in a suit that sat heaver than usual—we smiled. Cameras flashed. The old man laughed like a person who had finally found what he loved.
He tapped the portrait frame on display later, and whispering so only I heard him, "You did good."
I pinned the noise of that day to my chest like a medal and thought of two small people sleeping in the next room, and of Emanuel—who had once been an antidote to a worse world for me—sleeping a few feet away. My life had filled in the spaces between us with honest things: late-night jokes over stale coffee, a tiny hand in the dark, the rustle of paperbacks when children fall asleep.
It had been hard. It had also been a remedy.
The End
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