Chapter 10: The Ones We Stay For

Night had long since draped itself over the city, but Caspian remained unmoving on the edge of the hotel bed, back straight, shoulders tense. The suite around him was silent, save for the low, mechanical hum of the minibar fridge and the occasional creak of wood contracting under the air conditioning.

He hadn't turned on the lights.

He didn't need to.

The dark felt more honest.

It cloaked the lies. The choices. The people he became and the people he left behind. The man he was now bore little resemblance to the boy who once believed that love alone could be enough. That love— real, messy, stupid love— could anchor you to something worth staying for.

Elbows on his knees, hands clasped loosely together, he stared at the gleaming wedding ring on his finger. Gold. Heavy. Cold.

Selene.

Isolde.

He mouthed their names without sound, as if he were testing the sharpness of a blade he kept hidden in his throat.

Two names. Two lives. Two versions of himself.

He had chosen Selene. Or maybe, more truthfully, he had surrendered to her— surrendered to the life that made the most sense when everything else stopped making any. Selene was logical. Controlled. She knew the rules of the game and played them better than anyone else. A queen on the board who never asked to be loved, only respected.

Isolde was not.

She had been a breach in his structure. A wild note in the melody of his perfectly arranged life. She was the girl who laughed too loudly, cried too easily, forgave too quickly. Earnest. Unapologetically messy. She didn't fit anywhere— least of all beside someone like him.

But she had felt like home.

And then she was gone. Not in anger. Not in cruelty. Not even in cowardice.

She vanished.

Quietly.

Like mist burning off under the morning sun. One day she was there, tugging at his hand as they dashed across a rain-slicked street. And the next— gone. No note. No explanation. Just silence so thick it drowned everything else.

He had searched. For days at first. Then weeks. Months. Until his hope began to feel like humiliation. Until the people around him started to ask if he was alright with the kind of careful concern that told him they thought he should be over it by now.

Eventually, he stopped asking questions no one would answer.

He buried her absence with a ring.

With Selene.

Their marriage became a headline. Then an empire. They turned their union into a brand. Two legacies merging like kingdoms. It looked seamless. Calculated. Perfect.

He never asked her for love.

And she never asked if he was still in love with someone else.

Still, she gave it to him— in quiet, constant ways. In the second cup of coffee she made every morning without asking. In the way she stood between him and the press when his exhaustion showed. In the way she pretended not to notice that he always slept facing the window.

And Caspian?

He had never really seen her.

Not in the way she deserved. Not in the way a man sees the woman who has chosen him, every day, despite the ghosts in his bed.

They shared one room. One bed.

But always with distance between them.

She never asked why.

He never explained.

Some nights, she would lie awake beside him, both of them staring in opposite directions, their breaths syncing out of habit more than affection. And in those moments, he would wonder: Is this what it means to survive love?

To outlive it, but never outrun it.

He rose stiffly and walked to the mirror, the full-length one that made the room feel larger than it was. The man who stared back had everything— wealth, respect, power.

But his eyes were tired. Hollow. Like he had been holding his breath for years.

His fingers brushed the ring again.

He didn't know if staying had been brave or just easier.

But he had stayed.

Surely that had to mean something.

Didn't it?

Or had he simply mistaken endurance for love?

He turned from the mirror, but the question didn't leave. It hung in the corners of the room, in the quiet between his heartbeat and the rain beginning to whisper against the windows.

The city sparkled below, indifferent and alive, its chaos muffled behind the glass. And in the blur of motion and neon, memory surged.

Isolde's voice.

Her laugh— soft, surprised, free.

The feel of her hand in his. The way she would link their fingers without asking, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

And then, the last thing she ever gave him:

Nothing.

He remembered the static of unanswered calls. The quiet sting of no replies. The empty bookstore. The abandoned apartment. The ache of absence that didn't even have the decency to explain itself.

And worse— he didn't know if she left him.

Or if something had happened.

That not-knowing, it unraveled him more than the loss.

He buried that ache in structure. In corporate victories and strategic silence. In a marriage built more on shared purpose than shared hearts.

Grief did not obey logic.

Hers came back in the smallest ways. When he opened a book and found a pressed flower inside. When he saw someone wearing her scent. When he wrote her name in the margins of a board meeting notepad.

He didn't know how long it had been.

But time had not erased her.

It had only made her harder to reach.

He returned to the bed, standing for a long while before sitting again, this time further from the center— his usual spot, always facing away.

Three soft knocks came from the bathroom door that connected their two halves of the suite. Selene's signal.

A pause.

He didn't answer.

A moment later, he heard her footsteps retreating. Not angry. Not hurt. Just routine. She would leave a note in the morning, just like always.

Conference at eight. Forecast says rain. Bring your black umbrella.

She cared in ways that didn't demand to be acknowledged.

And Caspian respected her for it. Maybe even admired her for it. For choosing him when he had given her so little in return.

Sometimes he wished he could love her back.

But love wasn't something you built from survival.

It was something that either grew wild— or not at all.

He lowered himself to the floor this time, hands in his hair, the silence louder now than it had been all night.

He wasn't waiting for Isolde to return.

He didn't believe in that anymore.

But he was still waiting.

For the version of himself who didn't flinch when memories hit.

The one who could finally face the mirror without asking what might have been.

That man hadn't arrived.

And tonight, he wasn't sure he ever would.

Outside, the city blinked on.

Inside, Caspian sat in the dark, his ring gleaming in the glow of everything he had chosen—

— and everything he lost because of it.