Sweet Romance10 min read
"You Saved Her, Not Me" — A Slow-Mending Heart
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I woke up to the smell of disinfectant and a light that was almost cruel, bright and indifferent. I opened my eyes and saw Cason Collins standing at the foot of the bed like a statue, all composed lines and the kind of certainty he'd worn since we were children. His face had its shadows — too many late nights, the odd five o'clock stubble — but his voice when he found me moving was thin with something like relief.
"Franziska," he said. "You're awake."
I let myself study him. "You were at the fire," I said.
He laughed once, brittle. "Of course. I was here."
"I heard you say you'd come back," I said. "I heard you say you'd come back for me."
He took a breath. He always took long, precise breaths when he meant to steady himself. "I did everything I could."
"I know." I traced the raw bandage at my temple with the tip of a finger. The nurses had told me later the ceiling light had fallen, the smoke had been blinding. "Who rescued Caroline?"
Cason's jaw tightened. He looked guilty in a way that was almost theatrical. "Caroline Keller? I got her out."
"I saw the smoke," I said. "I heard a voice tell me not to be afraid. It wasn't your voice."
He reached toward my hand. I let it hover and then moved mine away. "Why are you doing this?" I asked. "Why did you leave me there?"
He blinked, like I had slapped him. "Franziska, don't—"
"Don't what?" I cut him off. "Tell me I don't understand? Tell me I don't know what you're capable of being sure about?"
He said nothing. He never liked being at a loss for words.
This wasn't the first time I'd wanted to pull back the curtain on Cason's certainty.
When he first came into my life as a boy with a book under his arm, I thought he was simply someone who smiled differently at me. My father had decided once, in the way fathers do, that Cason was convenient. "He'll look after you," my father told me. "He has good sense." That was how a boy became tied to me: a deal masked as kindness.
High school shifted things. A new girl, Caroline, arrived like sunlight. She laughed easily; she was warm and reckless and effortless. Cason's smile changed. It wasn't a huge change—just a small tilt of his lips that made it easy for others to imagine a different future for him.
"You're going to be okay," Cason told me in the hospital bed, voice hoarse. "You'll be fine. We'll marry."
"I don't want to marry you," I said, and I said it slow enough that the words felt like stones. The bandage on my head protested when I moved. "I don't want to marry you after what you did."
"That's not fair," he said. "You don't know the whole—"
"I know enough." I could feel my anger like a cold thing in my chest, not a fire but something steady. "You saved her. You chose her."
He broke. Not immediately. There was the first reaction — a surge of denial. "I didn't choose anyone—"
"There's footage," I said. "People saw. You left me."
He slumped. He tried to make his eyes loyal and pleading. "Franziska, I had to—my mother—"
I closed my eyes. The memory of the smoke, the heat, the way a voice had cut through the chaos and told me we would be alright, did not belong to him. That voice belonged to Remy Tariq. He was twenty-two and looked younger than his courage. He had a quiet sturdiness. He had no interest in our family fortune and no reason to perform devotion. He only stood where he could do something real.
"You saved me," I told the man in front of me, and my words had the odd ferocity of a person who had been left behind again and again. "You lied to me for years and then would leave me."
Cason's face went through the motions of refusing to believe, then the small, desperate movements of someone who had been caught.
"I did it for your mother," he said finally, a weak defense.
"Did you ever honestly consider my side?" I asked. "Or was there always someone else? Was there always anyone else whose name made you look away?"
He looked away.
The days after the hospital were liminal. People gave me polite, worried smiles. My father, Emanuel Berry, folded his worry into a different shape — rage at the man who had been his son-in-law by arrangement, then not. "He'll be dealt with," my father promised in low tones. "Don't worry, Franziska. I can make it uncomfortable."
"I don't want him punished like punishment," I told my father. "I just want him out of my life."
He sighed and patted my hand, as if the hand belonged to a child. "You deserve better."
But I did not want to be softened into better by anyone who loved me because it was expected. I wanted someone who chose me freely. I wanted the quiet warmth that Remy offered without calculating future returns.
Remy and I had a simple exchange in the hospital one afternoon.
"Hey," he said, shifting in his chair. "How are you... really?"
I tried to be light. "My temple is a fashionable new accessory."
He smiled. "That white bandage is not fashionable."
We laughed. He told me things in a way that let me breathe. He'd never say grand things; his strength wasn't in words, it was in the fact he showed up.
"Will you see me again?" he asked after a long silence. "As a friend."
"I think I'd like that," I said.
Two weeks later Cason's betrayal would be punished in a way he never expected — not by law, not by courtroom drama, but by truth and exposure in front of everything he cherished: his status, the company events, the people who watched him as if he were safe.
It happened at a charity gala at my father's foundation — the same gala where he had once stood beside me to announce our engagement in a photograph that would later feel like a lie. Journalists, board members, donors, and socialites circled the ballroom. The chandeliers threw polite light on everyone. Cason had come wearing the practiced smile of a man who believed his certainty made him untouchable.
"You're sure about this?" Giovanni Duran asked me in a low voice as we crossed the marble floor. Giovanni had been an old family friend, someone whose presence had the calm steadiness of a harbor. He had been with me through therapy appointments, long nights, and awkward lunches. He was not flashy; his warmth was durable. He'd been patient in a way that did not press.
"I'm not sure about anything," I said. "But I know what it's like to be left. Tonight I'm not giving him that stage."
"Good," Giovanni said softly. "Then we'll be ready."
The gala had speeches and toasts and a segment where photos and footage from the recent community fire safety drive would be shown. It was meant to be upbeat — commendation for the firefighters, a happy moment of corporate philanthropy. I watched the screen with guarded curiosity. They rolled footage: volunteers, drills, a clip of the rescue. The camera had caught more than was planned. For three long minutes the ballroom went quiet as the monitor replayed the rescue.
There was Cason at the foot of a doorway, sleeves dark with ash. There was Caroline kneeling into the frame like a doll. And there, unmistakably, filming from the corner of the stairwell, was Remy Tariq, arms wrapped around a trembling woman — not Caroline but me — guiding me out. The footage of me being guided by Remy, eyes glassy with smoke but steadied by his voice, was there for everyone to see.
A murmur ran through the crowd. The mayor at the dais looked surprised. Donors shifted. Cason's polite smile had already started to splinter.
"Remy?" someone in the crowd asked, voice sharp.
The projection cut to a clip of Remy again, this time focused on carrying Caroline out as the smoke banked. The edit was clumsy but it told an ugly truth: Cason had not been the only one caught between lives in that moment. He was one of several, and the way the footage stitched together made it painfully clear he had prioritized Caroline earlier in the blaze.
Cason's face changed color. He looked like someone whose script had been torn from his hands.
"This isn't—" he started.
"—a montage of chaos," a board member said, with the coldness of someone pointing to an inconvenient mirror. "It's evidence. The house burned, people ran in and out. Everyone made choices."
Caroline, sitting at a table nearby with a companion, stood in slow motion like someone stepping off a curb and into a life that would never be quiet again. Her eyes met Cason's; there was no shame there, only the raw, embarrassed candor of a person who had been saved and knew who had saved her. Her mouth twitched into something almost like a sheepish apology and also something like triumph.
The first reaction was laughter — the thin, nervous kind. Then whispers. Phones came up. Someone near the center clapped slowly. Others shook their heads. A woman at a table started recording.
"Do you want to explain?" my father asked, voice leveled and public, turning to Cason as the room turned its focus into a tide.
Cason opened his mouth. He looked like a man trying to remember the lines to a play he had rehearsed all his life.
"I—" he said. He tried another approach. "I was doing what had to be done."
"Which was?" my father demanded. "Choosing her over the woman you were meant to marry?"
There was a sound like a pin dropping.
Cason's affect flicked through stages: first defiant, then frantic, then a hollow attempt at control. "Emanuel, it's not like that," he said. "Franziska, please. Please."
"Please what?" I asked. My voice did not tremble. "For you to save face? For me to accept a version of us that never existed?"
"Cason—" Giovanni began, quietly.
"Stop," I said. "Let him say it."
The crowd leaned forward as if this were theater and they had their pit of choice seats. I felt an odd detachment, like someone observing a disease in a glass jar. Cason tried to explain, to frame himself as a man who had been torn by loyalty. He said things that once might have sounded noble about not abandoning someone who had been his world. He tried to make his leaving me look like an act of compassion toward Caroline's history, a narrative that implied nobility.
The crowd's reaction was merciless.
"That's not honesty," said a woman at our table, voice rough with betrayal. "That's a story."
"How could you even—" another donor began, then stopped.
Cameras shifted closer. A reporter in the front row rose and pointed his microphone with the mechanical certainty of a predator. "So you admit you left Franziska?"
"There are more complexities than you understand," Cason said. It was small comfort to no one. His certainty, once a kind of armor, now looked like brittle glass. People who once admired him looked on with the slow cruelty of people realizing that their hero was human.
He tried to reach for me then, the old reflex of possession, as if the engagement had been a contract that the world should honor. My hand lifted in reflex, but Giovanni's back was like a wall between us. He put a gentle hand on my shoulder and I felt steady.
"Leave her alone," Giovanni said, to the room and to Cason. "You don't get to stage-manage this."
"How dare you?" Cason spat.
"How dare I?" Giovanni's voice was low but it had the kind of steadiness that came from seeing someone you love hurt. "You left her. You lied with your looks for years. Tonight, you answered for it."
Cason's face collapsed in a way that made people gasp. He went through the stages of exposure: first indignation, then frantic denial, then bargaining, and then the ugly slide into pleading as the crowd's opinion hardened. Friends who had clustered near him backed away. A patron he'd hoped would shield him turned their head. People that had sponsored his projects began to murmur about loyalty and integrity. Cell phones captured him in high definition as his world constricted.
He sank into a chair as if someone had deflated him. "I didn't mean—"
"Meaning is not an excuse," my father said sharply, before anyone else could. "We don't excuse the person who chooses according to convenience when we asked him to choose otherwise."
"You're making a scene," Cason mumbled, face wet.
"You're making your consequences," said Caroline, unexpectedly steady. Her tone had no triumphant edge; it was simply truth. "You made choices."
The room's atmosphere had transformed. Sympathy evaporated. The same people who had once smiled on his engagement photo now watched him with a mix of disgust and curiosity. His shame was no longer private; it was a social verdict. People whispered about rescinding donations tied to him. Contracts, introductions, status — the quiet infrastructure of his life — trembled under the weight of the public gaze.
Cason's reaction changed visibly. After the initial outrage he crumpled into denial. He tried pleading, then bargaining. "I'll fix it," he said, voice thin. "I'll make it right."
"How?" someone asked. "How do you fix what you chose?"
"By being honest," I said. "By not using people for exit strategies. By admitting you preferred someone else and dealing with what that means like an adult."
He laughed then, the laugh of someone who had nothing left. "And what, you forgive me?"
"Forgiveness isn't a free pass," I said. "You must answer to those you've hurt. Not with silence, not with excuses, but with humility. That's what you avoided tonight."
There were different reactions among the crowd. Some whispered with pity. Others openly mocked him. Someone posted a video with an ugly caption that would spread by morning. Friends who had planned to stand with him slipped away in small groups. The spectacle of his unmaking was not violent; it was procedural — ordinary people watching the public unmasking of a private hypocrisy.
Cason tried to leave but found the doors too narrow. Board members spoke in clipped tones about the optics. A philanthropist who had once toasted him stood up and left with exaggerated deliberateness. Cameras flashed. The man who had always believed himself above reproach realized that there was nowhere to hide.
He left the gala that night with less than he had arrived with. Not because I had orchestrated his ruin, but because truth had floats its own currents. The sympathy that had buffered him was gone. He felt, in a clean and shaming way, the cost of his choices: the shrinkage of influence, the retreat of friends, the cooling of a business world that traded on perception.
Later, when people talked about it, they'd say: he had been publicly exposed. They would recount the footage and the looks; they'd laugh about how brittle certainty had been, how it shattered when observed. For me, it was less satisfying than I'd imagined. There's a peculiar fatigue that follows watching someone you once believed in fall into a gullied valley of their own making.
"Good riddance," my father murmured as we left, but his voice had no triumph. It had ache.
Cason's self-defense had failed publicly. His mask had been removed in the glitter and the lamps. He had nowhere to retreat to but a smaller, lonelier life. The crowd dispersed with the delighted cruelty of people who enjoy being witnesses. Phones and feeds would make the scene last long after the chandeliers dimmed.
I walked out into the cold night with Giovanni at my side and Remy waiting on the curb down below, quiet and unassuming as ever. Remy met my eyes and simply nodded. He didn't celebrate Cason's ruin. He had no appetite for spectacle. He had done what was necessary when I was in danger. For him, there was no performance in courage, only the steady business of response.
"Are you okay?" Remy asked in a voice that belonged to someone who'd risked burning but had come home intact.
"I'm fine," I lied, because the word felt cleaner than the rib of pain that still threaded my nights.
Giovanni's hand found mine.
"Then let's go home," he said.
I didn't know then how slowly things might mend, or how often I would be pulled backward into older depths. I only knew that for the first time in a very long while, I felt the possibility of being chosen in a way that did not feel like a transaction.
The End
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