Talia dropped her hand, her face crumpling.
“We love you, Andre. Both of us. We never wanted to hurt you. We never wanted to hurt Blake.”
“I know,” Andre said softly, the anger draining out of him, leaving only a profound, exhausting sadness. “I know you didn’t. But you did. We all did.”
He looked at her, at the woman who had been his friend, who had laughed with him in the cafe, who had taught him how to bake scones. The friendship was still there, buried beneath the wreckage, but it was tainted now, forever altered by the memory of that night.
“I need you to leave, Talia,” Andre said gently. “I cannot look at you right now. I cannot look at either of you.”
Talia nodded slowly, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “Okay. I understand.”
She walked to the door, stopping with her hand on the knob. She looked back at him, her dark eyes filled with sorrow. “Don’t give up on him, Andre,” she whispered. “Fight for him.”
She opened the door and walked out into the rain, leaving Andre alone in the cold, quiet studio.
He stood there for a long time after she left, listening to the sound of her footsteps fading down the stairwell. The studio felt cavernous and empty, the high ceilings amplifying every small sound — the drip of a faucet, the creak of the old building settling, the distant rumble of trains at Waterloo.
He walked back to the easel and looked at the half-finished painting of Blake’s backhand. It was technically accurate. The anatomy was correct, the proportions accurate, the light falling exactly as it should.
But it was dead. There was no life in it, no soul. It was a photograph rendered in oil, nothing more.
Andre picked up the canvas and threw it across the room. It hit the far wall with a hollow thud and clattered to the floor, joining the growing cemetery of failed attempts.
He sat down on the cot, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. The smell of raw canvas and mineral spirits surrounded him, the familiar scents of his creative life now tainted by association with this terrible, empty period.
He thought about Blake. He thought about the look on Blake’s face that morning in the living room — the way the light had drained from his blue eyes, the way his jaw had tightened, the way he had pulled away from Andre’s touch as if it burned him.
Andre had seen Blake hurt before. He had seen him lose brutal, heartbreaking matches, seen him face the cruelty of his father, seen him navigate the harsh, public exposure of their relationship to the world. But he hadnever seen Blake look at him with that expression — not anger, not even betrayal, but a kind of bewildered, bone-deep disappointment that was infinitely worse.
He reached for the small notebook he kept on the table beside the cot. He opened it to a fresh page and began to write. Not a letter — not yet. He wasn’t ready for that. But words, fragments, the raw material of an apology he didn’t yet know how to make.
I was supposed to be your safe place. I was supposed to be the one person in the world who would never hurt you. And I failed.
He wrote until his hand cramped, filling three pages with his small, precise script. Then he closed the notebook, lay down on the cot, and pulled the thin blanket over himself.
He didn’t sleep. He stared at the ceiling, listening to the rain, and waited for morning.
Blake was in Rome.
It was the middle of the clay-court season, the red dirt a stark contrast to the hard courts of Dubai. He was playing the best tennis of his life. He had won two tournaments in a row and was closing in on the top spot in the world with relentless ambition.
He was a machine again. The press praised his focus, his discipline, his unyielding mental toughness. They didn’t know that the focus was a survival mechanism, a way to keep the silence in his head at bay.
He was sitting in his hotel room, the television playing a match on mute, when there was a knock at the door.
It was Doug, holding a thick, cream-colored envelope.
“This came for you,” Doug said, handing it to him. “It was forwarded from the agency in London.”
Blake looked at the envelope. His name was written across the front in a familiar, elegant script. The handwriting was slightly shaky, the ink smudged in one corner, but he would recognize it anywhere.
It was from Andre.
Blake felt pain lancing through his chest, a physical ache that made him catch his breath. He stared at the envelope, his breath catching in his throat.
“Do you want me to throw it away?” Doug asked quietly, watching his face.
“No,” Blake said, his voice tight. “Leave it.”
