“The conditions are real enough,” he said. “But I’m not. As for the rest——”
He stopped again. Longer this time.
I thought he might finally say something human.
“If you have to call it me playing you,” he said, his tone flat, “then fine. Call it that.”
“And Gabriella?”
The name finally moved something in his face.
“She has nothing to do with this,” he said.
“You wired her fifty million for her birthday.”
“I have money.”
“So your feelings for her are real. Mine were fake.”
This time he didn’t answer.
But sometimes not answering is an answer.
I looked down at my hands.
A full day of packing had left grime in the creases of my knuckles. There was a small cut on the web of my right thumb, sliced open by the corner of some box, I couldn’t say which.
I asked him my last question.
“In these five years, was there even one single day you imagined spending your whole life with me?”
Caleb looked at me.
That look told me the answer.
Someone knocked outside.
I opened the door.
A woman stood there.
White cashmere coat, hair loosely pinned up, a pair of tiny diamond studs in her ears. She looked too clean to be real.
She saw me and smiled.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Gabriella Henson.”
I said nothing.
Her gaze went past my shoulder into the apartment, landing somewhere behind me, then drew back and settled on me again.
Top to bottom, bottom to top.
“So you’re the one who bought the place with him?”
She went on. “Do you know what the first thing he said to me when he came back was?”
“He said, that girl’s hands are covered in dirt.”
She paused, as if she found the joke delightful.
My hands had in fact been covered in dirt.
A full day of packing. Black under my nails, a dried scab next to that cut on my thumb.
She glanced down at my hands. Just once. Then lifted her eyes to mine.
“You must be exhausted,” she said. “Playing house with a pauper for five whole years.”
Footsteps came from behind me.
Caleb walked out of the apartment and stopped half a step behind me.
Gabriella looked at him, her tone shifting into something coaxing. “You never told me. If I’d known you were living in a place like this, I’d have just had the driver wait downstairs.”
Caleb said nothing.
Gabriella turned back to me, then leaned in a little closer and dropped her voice. But that low voice carried every word, crisp and clear.
“You didn’t actually think he loved you, did you?”
I gripped the doorknob tight.
“He told me,” she said, soft and unhurried, “that you were just too sweet. You’d believe anything he said. He spent five years pretending to be poor right in front of you, and you never once caught on. Every time he told me that part, he could barely stop laughing.”
She tilted her head, watching for my reaction.
That was when Caleb laughed.
In all the time I’d known him, I had never once heard him make a sound like that.
Gabriella was laughing too.
The two of them laughed at each other, with me standing in between.
Gabriella pulled her coat tighter and looked at Caleb. “How much longer? The driver’s waiting downstairs.”
Caleb said, “Five minutes.”
He was still standing behind me when he said it, but his voice was aimed toward the door.
I stepped aside.
Gabriella glanced at me, didn’t come in, and turned toward the elevator.
Her heels touched down on the tile, soft, each step landing steady.
At the elevator she looked back once.
