Truth surfacing
Aubrey's pov
Present
"Wait... stop."
Kais's voice drops mid-sentence, like someone has cut the power to it. He holds up a hand — not quite a gesture, more like a reflex — as if he needs the air between us to go still before he can process what I've just said.
"You're saying you made a deal with my sister?"
The word deal lands wrong in his mouth. I can hear it. The way it curls at the edges, disbelieving, almost offended by its own shape.
"My baby sister?"
I nod.
He stares at me for a beat too long, the kind of stare that isn't looking at you so much as looking through you — past the room, past the city outside, to some memory of a girl he probably still sees as sixteen, all quiet determination and enormous eyes.
"And she agreed?"
His voice has changed again. Quieter. Not softer — quieter, the way a room goes quiet before a storm decides what it wants to do. He already knows the answer. I can see it in the way his shoulders don't quite square the way they usually do, the way the certainty drains out of his posture, leaving something exposed in its place.
I nod again.
The exhale that leaves him is long and uneven — caught somewhere between disbelief and something that hasn't decided yet whether it wants to become grief. He looks away. His jaw tightens once, sharp as a door closing. Then he lets out a short, humourless laugh, the kind that has nothing to do with anything being funny.
"She really was in love with you," he says, and there's no accusation in it. Just recognition. The quiet devastation of a brother who understands his sister far better than he wishes he did right now. He turns back to me, his gaze sharp but distant, like a man watching something through glass. "Only someone in love would agree to a condition that stupid."
I roll my eyes.
"And she didn't question who you were," he continues, "when she saw you performing?"
"That confused me too," I say. "At the time, anyway." I pause, turning the memory over. "My face is everywhere in this city. Posters. Screens. Headlines. I thought she'd piece it together eventually."
A pause settles between us — the kind that doesn't feel empty so much as loaded, full of things neither of us is ready to name.
"I expected her to be the one to ask me."
The shift in my attention comes before I consciously decide to move it. Something in the room's periphery has been pulling at me — a stillness that doesn't fit.
I glance toward Michael.
He's been staring at his laptop for far too long. Not reading. Not working. Just staring, the screen's pale glow catching the angles of his face, his shoulders rigid, eyes fixed on something that isn't the screen at all. He has the look of a man holding a very heavy thing and deciding, finally, to set it down.
"Hey, Michael." My voice cuts gently through the quiet. "You've been staring at that thing forever."
He looks up slowly. First at me — a flicker of something, assessment maybe — then at Kais. And I watch it happen: a decision, settling through him like a stone sinking through still water. Quiet. Irreversible.
He exhales, long and tired, the breath of a man releasing something he's been carrying too carefully for too long. With deliberate, almost ceremonial care, he closes the laptop and sets it on the coffee table, as if granting himself one final moment of control before the words come out.
"Guys," he says quietly. "I need to tell you something."
A pause. Not for effect — for courage.
"Something I've been hiding for a while."
The room tightens around us, invisible walls drawing inward, the air thickening with the particular weight of a secret on the verge of becoming real.
So I'm not wrong after all.
I'd felt it for weeks. A hesitation in him. The way he'd start sentences and redirect them. The way his eyes would go somewhere else in the middle of conversations, somewhere private and conflicted. I hadn't pushed. But I'd felt it, the way you feel a change in weather before the sky shows you anything.
He has been hiding something.
And my instinct catches it long before he's ready to admit it. It always does.
"I had this offer," Michael says, his voice slower than usual, each word tested before it's released, like he's afraid of how they'll sound out in the open. "To teach business management at a university in Chicago."
I look at him then. The city lights outside the window catch his profile — sharp, distant, luminous — and for just a second he looks like a man who already has one foot somewhere else, who has been standing with one foot somewhere else for a long time, and only just noticed.
"But I don't know if I should take it." He turns his hands over in his lap — a small, restless gesture. "I'm happy here. I like my job." A beat. "Still, part of me keeps wondering what more there could be."
The silence that follows is not the silence of indifference. It's the silence of people who care deeply and are choosing their words accordingly.
I smile, shaking my head softly. Something settles warmly in my chest — the specific pride of watching someone you respect stand at the edge of becoming more.
"Michael." I lean forward, closing the space between us. "First of all — that's incredible." I hold his gaze. "You should take it. You owe yourself that chance."
He doesn't answer right away. He watches me with that careful, searching look he gets when he's trying to determine whether someone is telling him what he wants to hear or what is actually true.
"And second," I add, a grin breaking through the sincerity like sunlight through a curtain, "if Chicago doesn't feel like home, you can always come back." I lean back, easy and certain. "I'll still need a manager."
The laugh that escapes him is quiet, surprised, entirely genuine — the laugh of a man who didn't know he needed permission until someone gave it. The tension in the room doesn't disappear so much as breathe out, like a held note finally resolving, the future cracking open just enough to let light in.
Kais smiles too. It's a different kind of smile — slower, undefended, stripped of the careful composure he usually wears like armour. Pride moves through his features, unmistakable and real, as he looks at Michael with the open warmth of someone who genuinely, simply, wishes another person well.
"Oh — and Kais."
I turn toward him. Something in me already knows the shape of what needs to be said.
"There's no need to extend your stay." I keep my voice easy, but I mean it. "I could talk about Ayah all day. And neither of us needs that."
A pause lingers between us — thick, familiar, honest.
He nods once. Brief. Accepting. The nod of a man who understands exactly what is being spared, and is grateful for it without knowing how to say so.
I don't want to take up Kais's time. Not because I'm unaware of why he came — the interview, the professional distance — but because I can see what he's actually carrying, and it has nothing to do with me.
It reveals itself in the small things. The late-night calls — always in another room, always low-voiced, always ending too quickly. The sleeplessness that sits behind his eyes like a residue, like he's waiting for something that keeps refusing to arrive. The way he moves through spaces — restless, searching, never quite landing, as if the floor beneath him might shift without warning.
And the way he listens when I talk about Ayah.
Not politely. Not out of familial obligation. He listens the way someone listens when the story is too familiar, when each word lands like recognition, like yes, I know, like that's what it feels like. He listens as a man hearing his own experience narrated back to him by someone else.
That's when it clicks.
Once, I was exactly where he is now.
Head over heels for his sister. Lit from the inside by something I didn't yet know would cost me everything. Moving through rooms the same way he does — searching, restless, full of a feeling too large to contain and too fragile to name out loud.
And now here he is. Carrying that same quiet intensity. That same beautiful, exhausting weight.
I recognize it immediately, the way you recognize a song you haven't heard in years — not because you remember every note, but because something in your chest does.
It's three in the morning.
That thin, fragile hour when the night stops pretending it's going anywhere and simply sits with you. Sleep has long since given up trying. The unease in my chest is low but persistent, humming without reason or origin, the way certain feelings do when they have nowhere left to go.
I give in to it. Slip out of bed, let the quiet guide me, and drift toward the living room.
The lights are off. Shadows collect along the walls like dark water finding the lowest point in a room. The city outside the windows is still luminous, still awake, indifferent to the hour.
And then — a shape.
A tall silhouette near the window. Unmoving. Almost architectural. My heart lurches sideways, a spike of sharp, instinctive fear — someone is in the apartment — before the shape shifts and the darkness gives him back to me.
Kais.
A phone pressed to his ear. His back half-turned to the room, his posture carrying the careful, deliberate stillness of someone trying to take up as little space as possible while something enormous moves through them.
"I don't know when I'll be back," he says quietly.
His eyes are closed. One hand braced against his forehead, as if he's physically holding himself steady, as if without the pressure, he might come apart at the seams. The weight of the night has settled there — in the line of his arm, the tension running through his shoulders.
"Is she okay?"
He listens.
The silence stretches. Too long. The kind of long that tells you the answer is complicated, or painful, or both.
"You know it's impossible between us," he continues, his voice low and strained, worn smooth by repetition, like someone who has said this same sentence to himself a hundred times already and is still trying to make himself believe it. "It's better for both of us if we disappear from each other's lives."
He turns.
Our eyes meet.
Surprise flickers across his face — quick, unguarded, entirely real — and then, like a shutter closing, something more careful slides into place. The mask of composure reassembling itself with practised efficiency.
"I'll call you later," he says, ending the call.
The screen goes dark.
The room stays heavy, the air between us thick with everything that sentence contained. The silence that follows feels louder than anything he's said — the kind of silence that has weight and texture, that presses gently against the ribs.
"How much did you hear?" he asks. His voice is careful. A faint frown pulls at his brow — not anger. Something more exposed than anger.
"Enough to know you're in love."
The denial comes too fast. That alone tells me everything. "I'm not in love." He shakes his head, short and firm, like he's trying to convince the room as much as himself. "I can't be in love with her."
"Why?" I ask.
I don't press. I simply tilt my head and watch him — the way he holds himself, the way his hands shift restlessly at his sides, the way his breath has gone slightly uneven, a body betraying what a voice is trying to contain.
"Because we're not meant to be."
"But you love her," I say, quiet and steady. Not a question. Not an accusation. Just the truth, named plainly, set down gently between us.
He turns toward the window. The city stretches out below us, all distance and light — a hundred thousand lives going on without any knowledge of this moment, this room, this man trying to hold himself together in the dark.
"Yeah," he finally admits. The word is barely sound. More like an exhale. More like surrender.
"But she was never meant to be mine." His voice drops further, dropping like something too heavy to hold at full height. "She's promised to someone else. She's going to be engaged."
"But you can stop it," I say, my voice firming without my intending it to — something rising in me, something that remembers too well what it costs to not fight. "If the feelings are mutual, it's only right to fight for them."
He looks away. His jaw tightens, the muscle jumping once, twice — the body's way of holding back what the mouth refuses to say.
"You wouldn't understand."
The sound that leaves me is not quite a laugh. It's something brittler than that — a scoff with grief underneath it, the reaction of someone who has just been handed a mirror they didn't ask for.
"I wouldn't understand?" The words come out before I've decided to say them. "Me?"
I step closer before I realize I'm moving, pulled forward by something I don't entirely control.
"No." My voice is steady, but only just. "If there's anyone who understands, it's me."
His gaze flickers back to mine, uncertain now, the careful mask showing its first real crack.
"Your sister and I fought for each other," I say, and something inside me opens — not cleanly, not willingly, but inevitably, the way an old wound opens when the weather changes. "Not quietly. Not easily. We fought when the odds were cruel, when society stood in the way, when the world kept finding new reasons to say no." My voice wavers at the edges but holds. "We fought because we understood that if we didn't, we wouldn't just lose each other. We would lose ourselves. The parts of us that only existed because of each other."
The room feels smaller. The walls are closing. The night outside the window older.
"I lost things because of that fight," I continue, my throat tightening around the words, forcing them through one at a time. "Pieces of myself I'll never fully recover. And eventually — eventually — I lost her."
I swallow.
"So don't tell me I wouldn't understand. I live with the cost of loving someone every single day. I carry it the way you carry bones — it's just part of the structure now. Part of what holds me up."
The silence that follows is total. The kind that rings.
"I'm sorry," Kais says quietly. His voice has changed — the layers stripped away, nothing left but something genuine and tired and young. "I didn't mean it like that."
"I know," I say, softer now. "It's okay."
I look at him. Really look at him — past the composure, past the careful blankness, at the person underneath, the one who is standing at a window at three in the morning because sleep won't come to a man carrying this much.
"But Kais." My voice is gentle and unrelenting at once. "Don't fool yourself into thinking that letting go of the person you love is noble."
He stays very still.
"Don't dress fear up as sacrifice and call it love." I hold his gaze. "That's not what love looks like. That's what fear pretends love looks like when it doesn't want to be named."
Silence.
"If you love her," I say, "you fight for her. You fight with her. You don't leave her standing alone in the space you created — full of all the warmth you gave her, all the hope you let her build — and then walk away claiming it's for her own good."
My chest tightens. I don't stop.
"You can tell yourself she wouldn't understand. You can tell yourself it's better this way. You can repeat that sentence until you believe it." My voice drops — not softer, but lower, the way truth tends to lower itself when it's done being gentle. "But she will understand one thing very clearly."
I pause. Let it breathe.
"When she needed you most, you chose to leave. And there is no explanation in the world, no matter how elegant or well-intentioned, that can fully soften that."
The words settle between us.
Heavy. Irreversible. Honest in the way only three-in-the-morning things can be — the kind of honest that daylight will try to dilute but never quite erase.