Elena's POV
My mouth opened before my brain could finish building the lie, and somehow the right words came out anyway.
"Is there any reason why I should tell you about my private life now?" I replied and even managed a small, tired laugh, the kind that suggested this whole conversation was mildly annoying wasting both of our time.
"I hope you will refrain from asking questions that do not relate with this project. Thank you."
Adrian watched me for a long moment, his gray eyes moving over my face like he was reading it.
I stood perfectly still and let him look, because flinching would have told him everything I was trying to hide.
Something in his expression showed that he knew I was hiding something, but he nodded, slow and unconvinced.
"Of course," he said. "Good to see you Elena."
I didn't answer. Because it was the way round for me.
I simply walked out with my back straight and my head up, the way I had trained myself to walk out of every hard room.
I didn't allow my face to crack until I was inside the elevator with the doors sliding shut. My reflection in the polished steel looked calm. But my hands, pressed flat against my thighs, were shaking so hard I had to grip the strap of my bag just to make them stop.
Instead of going to my office, I went straight to the car garage and entered my car before I could breathe properly.
I placed my both hands on the steering wheel, my forehead resting against the cool leather as I counted one to ten.
After six years of careful planning, six years of distance and silence, building something safe. Now just one meeting had nearly knocked it all down in under an hour.
I pulled out my phone with my shaky fingers and called the only person who might understand without needing the whole story first.
Daniel answered on the second ring, already asking questions about how the meeting went but stopped the second he heard my breathing.
"Is everything okay? Why are you breathing like that? What happened?"
"Nothing. Just that I didn't expect the meeting to be that long." My voice cracked slightly on the second word.
"Elena. It's me. Try again. You know that your lies don't work on me."
I signed. Nothing really passes through him.
"Fine. Something came up at the meeting but we will talk about everything tonight when you come back, I promise."
I heard his hesitation sigh on the other end, weighing whether to push or not.
"I'm really okay, Daniel.”
"You don't sound okay. You sound like you're about to throw up in your car."
"I might." And that, at least, was true, and it came out with a small, watery laugh that surprised both of us. "Tonight. I'll explain tonight, I swear."
“Fine… But just know if you try to play smart with me, I'm going to end this friendship without second thought.”
Hearing this, a smile unexpectedly appeared on my lips, making me a little bit better.
“You won't have to do that,” I replied before hanging up the call.
I drove home silently, my mind racing through every version of a future where Adrian Kane found out the truth before I was ready for him to. By the time I pulled into my driveway, my hands had stopped shaking, mostly because I had nothing left to shake with.
Later in the afternoon, I went to pick up Leo at school. Before we even got to the car, he was already talking about a kid in his classroom who claimed to have seen a real live dinosaur bone in his backyard, and the sound of his voice did something to my chest that no amount of deep breathing had managed all day.
I kept nodding throughout our ride home, allowing him to finish the whole story and for that moment, Adrian Kane didn't seem to exist anywhere in the world.
"Can we have the orange chicken?" Leo asked, already climbing onto a kitchen stool the moment we stepped into the house. "The one with the crunchy part."
"Of course darling, we can have the crunchy orange chicken."
After the whole time of preparation we sat down and ate at the counter instead of the table, because that was our Monday tradition, and he told me about his rock collection expanding by two new members while I only half-listened and fully watched his face.
He had Adrian's exact eyes. I'd known that for six years, and had already made my peace with it somewhere around two years ago, but tonight it hit me differently, sharp and strange, like I'm seeing it for the very first time.
I placed him into his bed an hour later with three books instead of the usual two, not ready to let the day end yet.
"You're squishing me mum," Leo mumbled into his pillow, half asleep, as I hugged him one more time than necessary.
"I'm allowed to squish you. I'm your mom."
"That's not an excuse."
"Well, it's my favorite excuse."
He was asleep before I finished the sentence, and I sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, staring at him and listening to him breathe.
Just as I was about to leave his room, my phone rang and an unknown number flashed on the screen.
“Hello.”
I picked it up on the second ring, already wondering who the caller was. But instead of getting an answer, there was an eerie silence on the other end.
Finally a deep voice came through and said, “You should have stayed hidden forever.”
