Something happened to him then. It was not visible in any grand way. No dramatic exhale, no crumbling posture. It was smaller than that and more devastating for it, a loosening, somewhere deep, of something he had been holding with both hands all night. He stepped back from Jokull. He crossed the distance between himself and Aine without another word he folded her into his arms, her face against his chest, his chin resting on the top of her head.
"Let's go home," he said.
She closed her eyes. "Sure."
A Week Later
Jokull's phone beeped. He drew it from his pocket and looked at the screen. A notification. Aine's birthday. Tomorrow.
He stayed with that for a moment, then opened his gallery and moved through the photographs slowly, one after the other. The two of them. Moments that had felt like something at the time. Moments he had built entire futures inside of. His chest tightened in a way he would not have admitted to anyone alive.
"Sir." Otz's voice cut through the quiet. "Are you really going to back off? Just like that?"
Jokull did not look up from the screen. "She said she is fine with Ravi. Technically there is nothing I can do."
"Do you still want her?" Otz leaned forward, dropping his voice. "Because if you do, purge Ravi. Remove him from the equation entirely and she will come back to you. You know she will."
A slow, unreadable smile moved across Jokull's face. He set the phone down.
"It's fine let her do all she want. After all I approached her first. I knew she really had nothing for me but I trusted the process. I knew we would have gone far."
"Sir, someone is here for you."
Ravi did not look up from what he was doing. "Let him in."
The door opened. Jokull stepped through it and the air in the room changed immediately, the way air changes before a storm, a drop in pressure, a stillness that is not peace.
"Good morning, Ravi."
Ravi looked up then. His expression did not shift by a single degree. "Such a bad omen to start the morning with."
Jokull moved further into the room as though he had been invited. "I want to meet Aine."
A beat of silence. Then Aine appeared in the doorway, drawn by the voice she recognised, her eyes moving between the two men with careful, measured calm.
"What is it?"
Jokull turned to her and something changed in his face. The performance fell away. What remained underneath it was rawer and more dangerous than anything he had worn walking in.
"I am sorry, Aine." His voice came out low, stripped of its usual armour. "I am truly sorry for everything and I mean every word of that. We were not supposed to end like this. You know that."
Aine looked at him without flinching. "You have a point in that."
"Then tell me." He took a step closer and the words began pouring out of him, urgent and unguarded in a way that sat uncomfortably on a man like Jokull. "Do you think I am incapable of giving you the love you deserve? Or did you simply never love me at all? Because I became this, all of this, because of you. The darkness I was still tangled in, I was pulling myself free of it, piece by piece, because of you. Everything I did, I did to find you. To get back to you." His jaw tightened. "So tell me the truth, Aine. Did you lie to me the night you were taken? Or was it because of what we shared?"
Aine glanced across the room at Ravi.
He was standing with his phone in hand, perfectly still. And in the long silence that followed Jokull's words she watched something happen to him, watched him draw a breath and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, stop. As though the air had become something he no longer knew how to take in.
She held that image for just a moment. Then she turned back to Jokull.
"Talk to me already," he said. Beneath the command was something that sounded dangerously close to begging.
Aine met his gaze and held it. When she spoke her voice was steady and quiet and entirely without cruelty, which somehow made it worse.
"I seriously did not have a thing for you. Not the way you mean. What I had was pleasure. A peace of mind. An attention that felt good at the time." She did not look away. "I am sorry. But I lied. Please move on."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Something moved through Jokull's face, a fracture, fast and deep, the kind that does not announce itself on the surface but changes the structure of everything beneath it. He stared at her as though the words were still arriving, still finding their way into him one by one.
"Move on." He repeated it slowly, turning the words over like something broken he was trying to make sense of. "You joked with my feelings, Aine." His voice dropped to barely above a whisper. "My little heart."
Aine looked at him for one long, still moment.
Then she turned toward Ravi, her eyes finding his across the room with the quiet ease of someone who has always known exactly where to look.
"Can I move closer to him?"
Ravi gave a gentle nod.
Aine crossed the room and took his hand, lacing her fingers through his, and held on.
She turned to look at Jokull one last time. "You have been more bad than good, you know that." There was no malice in it, just the plain, unhurried truth of someone who has finally stopped pretending. "But I love being around you because you are fun. Genuinely fun. I think I never quite understood that part of you the way I should have, and I am sorry for that." She paused. "I cannot change what happened between us. Neither of us can. So I think it is better we simply continue living and let the past stay where it belongs."
Jokull looked at her for a long moment. Then the corner of his mouth lifted.