A Smile I Didn't Know I Neede
Aubrey's POV
That question has been living in the back of my mind for hours.
Quiet but persistent — the way a pulse lives beneath chaos, steady and unannounced, present whether you attend to it or not. It has been a week since I last saw even a shadow of her. Seven days that I have been counting without admitting, even to myself, that I am counting them.
The office was a mess.
Papers scattered across my desk in the particular disorder of work that has been started and abandoned and started again — half-finished lyrics buried under financial reports, coffee cups I had no memory of filling or emptying. Michael stood a few steps ahead of me, his voice sharp and clean as he issued instructions to people who moved around us like currents — faces I recognized, others I didn't, different teams and different companies all converging for the same reason, filling the corridors with the specific energy of an occasion everyone has prepared for, and no one is certain about.
The executives were arriving today. Artists from several labels were scheduled to meet us as well — violinists, painters, digital creators, people who had built their lives around the same things I had built mine around and somehow arrived at entirely different conclusions about what that meant. With each passing minute, the certainty settled more firmly into my chest: I was going to spend the foreseeable future with a violin under my jaw, performing on command for rooms full of people who wanted the version of me that was useful to them. The painting — the quiet, private, entirely mine part of what I did — felt further away with each meeting scheduled, each contract drafted, each signature that committed me more fully to what the Ardel name required.
Nothing felt normal today.
People came and went in waves. Meetings assembled and dissolved. Artists were escorted from one room to another with the careful management of people who are valuable and know it. I should have been focused on the schedule, the contracts, the presentations — all the things that had my name attached to them and expected my full attention.
But all I could think about was her.
Michael noticed my distraction. He always does — it is one of the things I have never decided whether to be grateful for or irritated by. He asked if I was alright. I said yes. It wasn't true, but it was sufficient — enough to redirect his attention back to the chaos where it was actually needed.
I stared at the papers on my desk without processing a single line.
And then, without asking my permission, it was time.
I pushed back from my desk and stood, the quiet scrape of the chair almost swallowed by the noise outside. Michael was already a step ahead — he always is — and I fell into pace beside him as we walked toward the elevator. The hallway felt colder than usual, or perhaps that was simply the nerves tightening beneath my ribs, finding the gaps between composure and filling them. We waited in silence until the elevator arrived with a soft chime, and when the doors opened, the chrome interior reflected back two men who were both, in their different ways, preparing themselves for something.
Inside, I was aware of every heartbeat. My fingers kept drifting to the cuffs of my coat, smoothing the fabric with the repetitive precision of someone whose hands need something to do when the mind is elsewhere. I was dressed sharply — black coat and matching tie, a clean white shirt beneath, creating the contrast I had learned to wear like a second skin. Dark trousers, dark shoes, the palette deliberate and precise. My socks matched the shirt: a detail no one in that room would notice or care about, which was exactly why it mattered to me. The glasses perched on my nose weren't vanity — hours of reading reports and drafting responses had left my eyes strained past the point where pretending otherwise was practical.
The mirrored elevator walls caught my reflection. Tired. Composed. More nervous than I was willing to show anyone who might be paying attention.
Michael's pale finger pressed the button for the eighth floor — the floor reserved solely for the CEO's office. My father's office.
"Are you nervous?" he asked. His voice was low, pitched carefully beneath the ambient hum of the elevator — casual on the surface, though I could hear the tension underneath it, the same tension I was carrying.
"What do you think?"
"I think you're as nervous as me," he said, glancing at me from the corner of his eye.
I shook my head slightly. "Way more than you."
He huffed a quiet breath — something close to a laugh, the closest he usually gets in situations like this. "Everything is going to be fine," he said. "You have me. And I have you."
I gave a small nod. Not confident exactly. But honest.
The elevator hummed beneath our feet as we ascended, the silence between us carrying the weight of a shared understanding that didn't need to be articulated. Some things don't need words when they've been understood long enough.
Ding.
The doors opened on the eighth floor with a soft, final jolt.
We stepped out into rows of security guards lining the corridor — their presence unsurprising given the calibre of people assembled today, but no less imposing for being expected. The meeting room was located in the far left corner of the floor, connected to my father's office by a short corridor that had always felt, to me, like the distance between two different countries.
As we passed his office, my eyes landed — unavoidably, as they always did — on the polished golden nameplate fixed beside the door.
Arthur Ardel, CEO.
My father's name gleamed back at me under the fluorescent lights, sharp and entirely unambiguous about what it expected from anyone reading it.
The meeting room was already full.
Men in black suits occupied most of the table — some older, decades carved into the lines of their faces, the kind of men who had spent long enough shaping the music industry that they had started to resemble it. Others were young, polished, rising with the particular velocity of people who have decided they will arrive somewhere significant and have not yet encountered a reason to revise that plan. A handful of new artists lingered near the edges of the room — stiff, careful, still learning that in a room like this, even breathing can be done wrong.
The atmosphere was suffocating in the specific way that rooms full of power always are. The air carried expensive cologne, polished leather, and the particular smell of ambition when it has been concentrated too long in an enclosed space. This was a room where every exchange had a price attached to it, where authority was not assumed but performed, and where the performance had to be flawless because the audience was as predatory as the speaker.
If you didn't radiate something — confidence, authority, the dangerous ease of someone who has never had reason to doubt their place in the room — you would be assessed and found insufficient. The industry didn't grant exceptions, and it didn't grant them to its own people with any greater generosity than it granted them to anyone else.
My seat was near my father's. Of course it was.
He sat at the head of the long glass table — the position that could only be occupied by someone like Arthur Ardel, someone who treated it less as a seat and more as a fact of nature. On either side of him stood two bodyguards, both built with the specific economy of men whose purpose is to be immovable — hands clasped, eyes active, present in the way of people who have trained themselves to notice everything.
I lowered myself into my chair, keeping my posture straight despite the tightness in my chest. Michael settled quietly into the seat beside mine, his sleeve briefly brushing my arm — a small, deliberate contact. A reminder. The projector hummed at the front of the room, casting its cold blue light across my father's features, sharpening them further.
Every few minutes, eyes moved in my direction. Evaluating. Curious. Perhaps expectant. It was always like this when I sat near him — I wasn't simply Aubrey Ardel here, I was Arthur Ardel's son, and that designation carried a gravity I had spent years learning to wear without letting it show that it weighed anything.
The meeting was long and suffocating.
Voices layered over each other — sharp disagreements that were never called disagreements, forced compromises presented as consensus, thinly veiled insults coated in the vocabulary of professional respect. Then, inevitably, the solutions arrived. Sealed with rehearsed smiles. Anchored by heavy, deliberate nods. By the time the final deal had been drafted and was ready for signatures, everyone in the room had the look of people who had maintained their composure through considerable effort and were privately exhausted by it.
The paper made its way around the table. Pen strokes. Signatures. Loops of ink committing people to things they had already decided before they arrived, the signatures themselves just the ceremony of it. When it reached me, I stared at the line with my name printed above it. My fingers hovered for a moment — long enough, perhaps, for someone watching closely to notice. Eventually, I signed.
I always do.
As the meeting adjourned, suits shuffled toward the exit, offering my father the shallow pleasantries that powerful rooms always generate on their way out — compliments he didn't need, alliances he didn't trust, respect he believed he was simply owed. He returned the nods with his customary stiffness. No warmth offered. Loyalty is expected regardless.
I had just taken a breath — the specific, private breath of someone preparing to leave a room that has been depleting them — when his voice cut through the fading chatter.
"Aubrey. My office."
I followed him.
My footsteps measured the corridor between where I had been and where I was going, between duty and the particular dread that lives in spaces adjacent to it. One of his assistants pushed the heavy wooden doors open — doors that looked as though they had been built specifically to separate people who mattered from people who didn't, to make the crossing of the threshold feel like a statement about which category you fell into.
The assistant remained outside. The doors closed behind me with a low, heavy sound — final in the way of doors that don't apologize for closing.
My father's office was exactly as it had always been.
Grand. Cold. Meticulously arranged — not the tidiness of someone who values order, but the arrangement of someone who understands that environments communicate power before a single word is spoken, and who has designed this one accordingly. Floor-to-ceiling windows opened the entire New York City skyline to view — a million lit windows, a city that looked endless from anywhere except here, from behind this glass, from this particular vantage point where it looked almost small. Almost insignificant. Measured against what occupied the room.
His oak desk stretched across the space like a barricade. Behind it, the black leather chair sat in perfect alignment, as though it were waiting — as though everything in this room was perpetually in a state of readiness, prepared for the next thing to be decided within it.
But none of that pulled my attention.
It never did.
It was the portrait.
Alex.
It dominated the far wall — a massive black-and-white photograph that had captured him in a moment of genuine softness, the kind he wore so naturally that you forgot, sometimes, that it was a rarity in men like us. His smile was easy and gentle and the particular kind of warm that made you feel, looking at it, that things would eventually resolve into something survivable. His dark hair caught the breeze of some afternoon I had not been present for. The sun filtered over him in a way that made the monochrome feel almost living — as though colour had been removed not to make the image colder, but because the warmth was already too much for any palette to contain.
My breath caught.
Just briefly. Just for a second.
Even now — even like this, reduced to photograph and memory and the space his absence had permanently opened in everything — my brother managed to steal the room without being in it.
My father stood before his desk, hands clasped behind his back, posture rigid with the specific discipline of a man who has never permitted himself the luxury of visible uncertainty. He didn't look at the portrait.
He never did.
He didn't have to.
I did. Every. Single. Time.
And every time I did, I felt the same thing alongside the grief — something smaller and uglier that I despised myself for feeling but had never managed to stop. There was not a single photograph of me in this office. Not one. Alex's face dominated the far wall, frozen in light and warmth and the specific softness that had always come so easily to him, while I stood here — alive, present, breathing, here — invisible on every surface.
I hated the twist in my chest. The bitterness curling underneath the grief, making it complicated, making it shameful. I was envious of my brother, and I despised myself for being jealous of someone who had died, as though loss had not already taken everything it was owed.
My father lowered himself into his chair with the authority of someone who has never needed to question whether the chair would hold him. I remained standing — he hadn't told me to sit, and sitting felt like accepting something I hadn't yet decided to accept.
He steepled his fingers. The faintest exhale escaped him — controlled, just barely audible.
"Aubrey," he said. "Listen, son." A pause in which the word son seemed to find its way out of him with some difficulty, the way words do when they're unfamiliar in the mouth. "I am really proud of you."
The words landed strangely.
He said it the way someone says something in a language they've studied but never fully inhabited — technically correct, but carrying the slight hesitation of someone who is not certain of the accent.
"And I will let it slide," he continued, his voice settling back into its customary evenness. "What happened that day?"
My lungs tightened around a breath I hadn't quite finished taking.
That day. He said it the way you refer to a minor miscalculation — a temporary deviation from an otherwise acceptable trajectory. Something to be noted, assessed, and moved past. But to me, that day was not a miscalculation. It was a fracture. The kind that doesn't heal into the original shape — that knits together into something functional but permanently altered, something that aches in certain weather and always will.
"I know you are still grieving your brother," he said, his voice impossibly even — the evenness of a man who has made his own private accommodations with grief and expects others to reach similar conclusions through similar means. "And that you are stuck in the days when there were two of you."
He wasn't wrong.
It was true — I was stuck there. Before. In the version of our family that still contained enough air for everyone to breathe without having to calculate their share. In the world where Alex's laughter filled the halls, and my father looked at me as though I were simply myself — not a stand-in, not a replacement, not someone who occupied the space left behind by a person who had been more naturally suited to it.
"I know it hurts to move on," my father said, in the tone of someone who understands the concept of hurt without having recently had direct experience of it. "But one must find a reason. Otherwise—" His jaw tightened, the slight shift visible even in his stillness. "Otherwise, the people in that room — people exactly like them — will walk all over you."
The words hung in the air between us. Heavy. Cold. Precise in the way of true things without being kind.
People like them.
Power wearing the costume of professionalism. Ambition that had learned to look like civility. Predators who had spent decades refining the performance of being harmless.
He believed that without forward momentum — without learning to exist in the after rather than the before — I would be consumed by the room I'd just left. He wasn't wrong about the room. He was, perhaps, wrong about what it was I was actually afraid of.
I was not afraid of them.
I was afraid of a life without my brother in it. Of a future that Alex would never occupy. Of becoming the person this office expected me to be, without anyone who had known me before this office existed to confirm that I was still, underneath everything, myself.
But even that fear — the one I had been carrying alone, in the specific way you carry things when there is no one you've decided to put them down with — had been interrupted lately.
By someone who had no business interrupting it.
A café worker. A girl in a small, warm place tucked between crowded streets — someone who did not know the world I came from, who hadn't sought me out or positioned herself or performed anything for my benefit. She had simply been there — occupying her corner of the city with a completeness that made everything around her feel more solid — and I had walked into it without being invited and found, to my considerable surprise, that I didn't want to leave.
The thought of her slipped into my mind, soft and uninvited, settling between my ribs with the particular warmth of something that belongs there.
And — without my permission, without any decision on my part — I felt my lips curve.
Faintly. Barely.
But enough.
My father noticed.
His brows lifted — his eyes widening for half a second in an expression I had seen perhaps three times in my life. Something shockingly, briefly, unguardedly human in a face that usually kept itself too well controlled to reveal anything it hadn't chosen to reveal.
And then — he smiled.
Small. Fleeting. Real.
Something inside me — something that had been wound tight for so long it had forgotten what unwound felt like — simply loosened. Released. Settled into something that wasn't quite peace but was adjacent to it in a way I hadn't been adjacent to it for a long time.
I didn't know what it was. Relief, maybe. Or longing for more of it — for the version of my father that existed behind that brief, unguarded expression. Or the simple, ancient desperation of a son who has been waiting to be seen by the one person whose seeing would have meant the most.
"Yes, Dad," I said quietly. Almost reverently, the word arrived from somewhere younger than the rest of me. "I won't disappoint you."
The words tasted complicated as I said them.
Was I so hungry for his acknowledgment that I would accept the smallest offering of it and hold it like it was everything? Was what I wanted freedom — or approval — or simply space to breathe without having to justify the air I was using? Was I so deeply, irrevocably in love with someone I barely knew that nothing else had retained the weight it used to have?
I didn't have answers. The questions followed me like shadows as I placed my hand on the heavy door and pushed it open, stepping through and out into the corridor on the other side.
The door closed behind me with a low, final sound.
The air felt lighter immediately — the specific relief of a room you've been holding yourself carefully in, finally releasing you. But the weight in my chest didn't leave with it. It shifted instead, moving somewhere deeper, somewhere closer to the truth I hadn't yet summoned the courage to face directly.
I walked down the hall.
My footsteps echoed against the polished floor. My father's words still present somewhere behind my sternum, neither fully accepted nor fully dismissed. The questions still circling, patient and unhurried.
And beneath all of it — underneath the grief and the performance and the signatures and the portraits and the suffocating rooms full of people performing power at each other —
the memory of her smile.
Settling into the places grief had frozen over.
Warming them with the quiet, unreasonable, entirely unearned certainty of something that has decided it belongs there.
And for the first time in longer than I could accurately measure —
I didn't feel entirely alone.