Chapter 309

[ 1,037 words ]

Katia’s POV

The boat dropped us at a strip of sand that should not have existed.

It rose out of the lagoon like something the ocean had only agreed to lend us for a few hours, a narrow crescent of pale white sand surrounded entirely by water on every side, with nothing else visible except the distant outline of our own island behind us and the endless blue stretching out in front.

The resort staff had been here earlier in the day. A single low table sat in the center of the sandbank, candles already planted in the sand around it, waiting for the dark to give them their purpose, and a woven blanket spread beneath it for us to sit on instead of chairs.

Julian helped me out of the boat himself.

The water was warm around my ankles, the sand soft and cool beneath it, and for a moment neither of us moved toward the table. We simply stood there, his hand still holding mine, looking at the strange, fragile beauty of a piece of land that the tide would erase by morning.

“It will be gone by tomorrow,” I said.

“I know,” Julian said.

“Doesn’t that bother you? Building something this beautiful somewhere that won’t exist in twelve hours p>

He looked at me for a long moment.

“No,” he said. “It means we get something nobody else will ever get to have. Tomorrow this exact sandbank will not exist, this exact light will not exist, and neither of us will ever stand in this precise place again. It only happens once.” He paused. “I find that I prefer things that only happen once p>

He pulled his phone from his pocket and took a single photograph of the table, the candles, and the water stretching out gold behind it, the whole fragile scene framed in the last of the light. He looked at it for a moment, then posted it without a caption, just the image, the kind of thing that would set half the financial press speculating about where exactly Julian Windsor had disappeared to and with whom.

Then he turned the phone toward me.

I expected him to ask me to pose. Instead, he simply lowered the phone slightly and took the photograph while I was still looking out at the water, unposed, my hair loose and moving in the wind off the lagoon.

“That one is not going anywhere,” he said when he caught me watching him do it.

“Where is it going then p>

“Nowhere,” he said. “It stays exactly where it is. With me p>

He took two more over the course of the evening, neither time asking me to smile or arrange myself for the camera, both times catching me mid-laugh or mid-thought, looking at something other than the lens. He did not post any of them. He simply slid the phone back into his pocket each time, as though the act of keeping something only for himself mattered more to him than anyone watching from the outside could understand.

We sat as the sun went down.

The staff had left a simple dinner under warming covers: fish caught that morning, rice scented with something fragrant I could not name, and fruit cut into shapes that seemed designed purely to be beautiful rather than practical. We ate slowly, the candles catching as the light around us faded, and for the first time since arriving on this trip the silence between us did not feel heavy. It felt like something we were sharing rather than something we were enduring.

“Tell me something you have never told anyone,” Julian said, when the plates had mostly emptied and the sky above us had turned the deep blue that came just before full dark.

I looked at him.

“That feels dangerous,” I said.

“Most honest things do p>

I thought about it for a long moment, turning the request over, trying to decide what version of myself I was willing to hand him on a strip of sand that would not exist by morning.

“I used to think I imagined the whole thing,” I said finally. “Vegas. The man I married there. Sometimes I genuinely believed I had invented him, because nobody that good, that present, that completely focused on me had any business existing in the real world, and certainly not for one single night that ended before I could ask him to stay.” I looked at the water, dark now, the candlelight flickering against it. “I have spent seven years wondering if I built him into something he never actually was. If the man I remember is real or if I simply needed him to be p>

Julian was very still.

“What do you think now?” he asked, his voice quieter than I had heard it in a long time.

“I think,” I said slowly, “that I have stopped needing the answer as much as I used to p>

He reached across the small table and took my hand.

We did not say anything else for a while. The waves moved against the edge of the sandbank in the dark, steady and constant, and somewhere above us the first stars had started to appear, sharper and more numerous than anything I had ever seen above the city.

When he stood and pulled me up with him, I went without hesitation.

He led me away from the table, away from the candles, to the edge of the water, where the sand was firmer and cooler beneath our feet. He turned to face me, the moonlight catching the line of his jaw, and reached up to brush a strand of hair back from my face with a gentleness that did not match the man who had pulled me out of Jude’s suite three nights ago.

“I want to ask you something,” he said. “And I want an honest answer p>

“Ask p>

“Are you happy here? Right now. Not thinking about what waits for us when we go back. Just here p>

I looked at him for a long moment, at the candlelight behind him and the dark water stretching endlessly past his shoulder, and felt something in my chest loosen that had been tight for longer than I could remember.

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