Chapter 5 The Voice Through the Wall

Olivia POV

The network was bad, and I couldn’t hear anything from the hospital, so I didn’t bother calling back. What’s the worst they can say? That the embryo failed again, the way Damian already proclaimed it would.

I’m on my knees in the closet we shared—his now, if the papers on the kitchen counter mean anything—two hours after I signed away five years of my life. Three suitcases sit open around me. I never asked for most of what filled this closet.

Mira knocks once and waits.

“Mr. Sterling asked me to check if you needed help packing,” she says, eyes fixed somewhere past my shoulder.

Even now he’s managing me through someone else. “I’m fine, Mira. Thank you.”

She hesitates at the door like she wants to say something more, some kindness she isn't sure she's allowed to offer a woman on her way out of a house that was never really mine, and then just nods and pulls it shut behind her.

The second the latch clicks, my composure goes with it. I fold forward over my knees and the sob that comes out is loud and ugly. My shoulders shake. I press both hands over my mouth so the sound doesn’t carry. For a full minute I don’t try to stop any of it. There’s no one left to perform composure for.

When it finally slows, I wipe my face and keep packing.

My phone rings. My father’s name lights the screen, my mother’s icon under it.

For one small, foolish second, something in me still hopes it might mean concern doubled instead of the same worry twice.

"Olivia, Richard's office called an hour ago," my father says, voice fast, nothing soft in it, no hello, no how are you, straight into the only thing that's ever really mattered to him. "Tell me this isn't true."

"It's true, Dad. I signed the papers yesterday."

"Do you understand what happens to us if Richard calls in the debt now that his son isn't married to you?" His voice climbs, panic dressed up as anger, and I can hear him already pacing, already calculating, already three moves ahead into a version of this conversation that has nothing to do with me at all.

"Olivia, honey…" My mother's voice cuts in, softer, and for one breath I actually let myself hope, actually let my shoulders drop half an inch, waiting for her to ask if I'm all right, whether I'm safe, whether I've eaten. "…your father's right, we need to think clearly about this. Did Richard's people say anything about a timeline? We should call your father's lawyer before he calls his."

The half inch my shoulders had dropped comes right back up.

"That's what you're both worried about?" My chest goes tight in a whole new way, something colder than grief. "I signed away five years of my life this morning, standing in a kitchen while eggs went cold in a pan. And in this entire phone call, neither one of you has asked me how I'm feeling."

"Of course we care how you're feeling," my mother says, quickly and something about the reflexive politeness of it — care recited like a line she nearly forgot — hurts worse than if she'd said nothing at all. "But you have to understand the position this puts your father in."

"The position it puts him in." My voice comes out flat, stripped of the last thing in it that was still hoping for something different. "I'm the one standing in a closet packing five years of my life into suitcases, and I'm still, somehow, the one who's supposed to manage everyone else's feelings about it."

I hang up before either of them can answer.

I go back to the closet. The bottom drawer sticks the way it always has. Inside sits a small velvet box—the cufflinks I bought him for our third anniversary. Tissue paper still folded exactly the way the jeweler left it. He never opened the box.

“Five years,” I whisper, “and you couldn’t even open it.”

I carry it into the bedroom and set it dead center on his pillow. I take a card from the nightstand and write four plain lines through blurred vision—the truest sentences I’ve written in this house in five years.

Back in the closet a photograph slides loose. Our wedding day. His mouth doing the thing I spent five years calling almost a smile.

I hold it under the light and really look. It isn’t almost a smile. It’s a man enduring a photograph, jaw set, eyes already somewhere else. I wonder how long I’ve been doing that—taking whatever small thing he gave me and renaming it into something bigger than it ever was.

“I kept you like proof,” I say, and the sob breaks through. “Proof that it was real once.”

I set it face-down in the suitcase.

Packing should take an hour. It takes the whole day. By four in the morning I’m too hollowed out to cry anymore. He never came back to tell me to leave. He never came back at all. I don’t know if I simply fell asleep against the closet wall or if I collapsed there, one hand still resting flat against my stomach out of habit.

I wake to thin gray light. Dawn. It all comes back at once—the papers, the ninth floor, my parents’ voices circling the debt. I am still on the floor. I finish the last suitcase around 10 AM. When the final zipper closes, the sound feels enormous in the quiet room.

I stand, press my palms flat against the doorframe, and breathe, telling myself the worst of it is over.

Then I hear his voice through the wall.

Low. Warm. Coming from the study.

“I told you I wouldn’t leave you facing this alone,” Damian says.

I go still, gripping the suitcase handle hard enough to hurt.

A pause, then his laugh—soft, easy, unguarded—the exact sound I spent five years trying to earn and never once did. It lands somewhere just beneath my ribs.

“I know I have to tell her,” he says. “Not this morning. This morning I just want to hear your voice a little longer.”

My hand tightens around the suitcase handle.

Whoever is on the other side of that door, Damian isn’t talking to her like a man who is simply ending a marriage.

And then I hear the woman answer.