Chapter 20: Best Model
As the shoot went on Nicole stood to one side with her lips pressed together, holding her phone up and photographing every single pose. She was not even trying to hide the fact that she was emotional about it.
Marcel, who had once stood in his own studio and told me to get out, watched from the entrance and could not find words. He approached me afterward and apologized directly and without qualification. He had been misled. He had been angry. He had reacted badly and he regretted it. It was a generous apology and I accepted it simply because holding onto it would have cost me more than letting it go.
After my makeup came off I returned to my usual composure, quiet and unhurried. The people around me were still buzzing with visible energy and the atmosphere in the room had shifted completely from how it had started when nobody had known quite what to make of me.
Nicole hurried over and draped a jacket across my shoulders. At the same time she held out my phone. "Liam is calling."
My expression did not change. My eyes darkened just slightly. I answered anyway. "Hello."
"Valerie." His voice was careful, testing the ground before putting any weight on it. "Have you seen the news?"
"Why?" I kept my tone completely neutral. "What happened?"
"Oh, nothing serious." He had convinced himself I had not seen anything yet since I was out of the city and away from the usual noise. Confident in that assumption he moved straight into his plan. "Valerie, how about I fly out to join you tomorrow? We could register our marriage there. Santa Fe is beautiful this time of year, the atmosphere is perfect. We could even make it a honeymoon." He wanted to lock everything down before anything could change.
I had not been born into an ordinary family. I was the daughter of a well established family with significant assets, but because of my years with Liam and the choices I had made for him, I had fallen out with my family so badly that all ties had practically been severed. Even so, I was still who I was. When the family elders passed on, I would still hold the right to contest whatever remained. Liam knew this. I was manageable, which he liked, but the inheritance was one of the primary reasons he had never fully let me go regardless of everything else.
The video of him and Amara was already everywhere and he was trying to move before I had time to process it and slip beyond his reach.
"Given the nature of your relationship with Amara," I said, keeping my voice completely flat, "I do not think marriage is something we should be discussing right now."
"There is truly nothing going on between Amara and me. Whatever you think you saw was a misunderstanding."
Something moved through me. Not anger exactly. Something older and quieter and far more tired than anger.
"A misunderstanding," I said. "The photos were a misunderstanding. The video was a misunderstanding. Liam, I am in Santa Fe, not on another planet. I have a phone. I have internet. Did you genuinely believe I would not see it?" I paused. "Or did you just count on me being too forgiving to bring it up even if I did? Is this how stupid I have been?"
He shifted tactics without hesitating. "Valerie, I never intended for any of this. You know me better than anyone. You know what kind of person I actually am underneath all of this." His voice took on that particular wounded tone he reached for whenever he needed sympathy, the one that had worked on me for five years. "Whatever she feels is one-sided. The person I have always loved is you."
I was quiet for a moment.
Then I said, "You loved me."
"Yes —"
"If you loved me, you would not have spent five years handing my jobs to your mistress and taking the money for yourself." My voice was steady but something underneath it had sharpened completely. "If you understood me the way you claim, you would never have looked at me standing in front of a hundred and sixty thousand people taking blame for something I did not do and thought that was fine. That was acceptable. That was just Valerie doing what Valerie does." I stopped. Took a breath.
"You have taken so much from me, Liam. My name. My opportunities. My confidence. My family. You let me starve myself into sample sizes that were never made for my body while you sat across from Amara at restaurants she chose and ordered whatever she wanted. You let people call me irrelevant for five years and said nothing. You stood by while she tried to humiliate me in a hospital bed on a live stream." My voice did not crack. I had decided it would not. "That is not love. That is management. You managed me. And I let you because I thought that was what love looked like."
Silence on his end.
"So do not tell me I am the one who understands you best," I said quietly. "Because if you understood what you actually did to me, you would not be on this phone right now trying to book a flight to Santa Fe."
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he might finally say something real. Then he said, "Valerie, I always thought you were the one who understood me most. Why are you forcing me into this position?"
Of course.
"If Amara stays at Xova," I said, "I leave. If I stay, she goes. Which would you choose?"
The pause that followed said everything his words could not. He did not want to lose either of us. Amara was his first love and she was carrying his child. I had the family name and the inheritance. He could not make a clean decision even under direct pressure because Liam had never in his life been willing to fully commit to anything that cost him something.
"Does it have to come to this?" he said, already calculating. He had half decided to let Amara go. Her background was ordinary and everything she had built had come through him. Compared to what I represented she was at most something temporary. "Give me a little time to speak with her. After that we can move forward with the wedding immediately."
"I will be waiting," I said.
