Chapter 89 CHAPTER 89
After the Fall
They drank until the edge of the night blurred into something soft and stupid. The garden lamps threw down pools of yellow that made everyone look a little kinder than they felt. Bottles sat half buried in the grass, empty and dusty with fingerprints. Chairs had been dragged into a loose ring.
Someone—Julian, most likely had hauled a speaker out and set it on a low table, it thumped a careless beat into the dark as though sound could steady the tilt of the evening.
Ares had a glass in his hand and no intention of slowing down. The cold in his chest had been watered down by cheap whiskey and something thinner, sharper, like adrenaline. Julian lounged against the stone fountain, one ankle over the other, an amused scowl at the corner of his mouth.
Chloe perched on the arm of a chair, legs bare, hair falling loose from whatever impulse had tied it up earlier. Tessa sat straighter than the others, but the veil she’d worn earlier was gone, her hair showed dark and severe in the lamplight.and there was a tremor to the jaw that said she was trying to hold herself in.
They moved through confessions the way drunk people move through rooms, reckless, honest only when the alcohol made the truth feel small and manageable.
“I didn’t mean to—” Ares started, then laughed at himself and let the sentence go. He took another drink. “I should never have taken them. I should have—” He stopped. The sentence hit the rim and fell away. He set the glass down too hard and it rang.
“No,” Tessa said, voice steady enough to cut through the music. “I should have fought better. I should have been louder. I shouldn't have taken you to court or teamed up with your mother. I put you in a position that made you think you could slip them away.”
Ares blinked, trying to parse the apology. It was clumsy and late and everything he’d expect from a woman he'd never understood, but it was an apology nonetheless. He reached for it the way men reach for truce flags.
“It wasn’t just you who made choices,” Julian offered from his perch with the barbed politeness that was Julian’s default. “We’re all messy. Tonight’s proof. Look at us.”
Chloe made a small sound, half laugh, half cough. “I should say sorry too,” she said, because the bottle at her side gave permission to say things that might have been unsayable sober. “For everything that looks like me and every lie that points to me. For hating on you Tessa. For convincing you to leave the kids and run. For telling a kidnapping gang to take you when you tried to go back to your kids. I am sorri for hating your kids.”
Tessa’s eyes found Chloe. For a second the flash of their fight earlier came back into the light, hair tugged, sleeves stained, the rawness of knuckles on skin. For a heartbeat the memory of blood and shouting hung between them like a third person.
"I scammed Ayisha and took everything we had... for myself." Tessa said, scoffing. "I hate myself for doing that...but I had to run after the kids."
“You scammed your best friend?” Ares asked. His words were rough around the edges but there was a genuine, stunned curiosity to them. “You tracked us down with a scam?”
Tessa looked at him as if he’d asked whether the sky was blue. “I did what I had to. I had to know where my children were. The court dragged me into a circus and you fled with them. I had to play the con to learn of them. I’d do it again. I lied to my friend, I lied to strangers. I took chances—stupid ones. I can't let them stay away.”
The way she said it, matter of fact, without flourish, felt worse than any theatrics. It was the kind of truth that demanded something like respect, and also a kind of pity that would have choked him if he let it.
Ares swallowed and the glass shook in his hand. “I put you through court,” he said, voice low. “I dragged names into that room, I let lawyers and cameras flash over you. I—I should have just ignored you...I” He stopped himself again, a habit now, because each sentence that started there ended with discovered anger and shame.
Tessa shook her head. “You thought you were doing right by the kids. You thought you could control the world around you. So did I. Different forms, same arrogance.” Her laugh was sudden, a short bark. “We’re both idiots.”
Chloe’s confession came loose like something dropped—light, but impossible to pick up without bleeding. “Lady Bianca got me out,” she said. “She paid for what I needed. She—” She broke off, fingers worrying at the cuff of her sleeve. “I had people helping me. I escaped prison because someone else opened a door. I didn’t mastermind anything. I was… I was surviving.” She looked up. There was pleading in her eyes now, a rawness that didn’t suit the way she’d tried to use people earlier. “I didn’t take the kids. I swear on whatever’s left of me. I just came to live a new life in Japan. Without y'all being part of it."
A silence hovered over them, filled only by the music and the hum of insects. The apologies had landed like small stones and would settle into the night and into memory. There was something like tiredness to the group now, an exhausted truce that comes when people out of options decide to stop swinging.
Julian, who’d been watching them with that half smirk, reached for the speaker and turned up the music. It was a ridiculous pop song, one that belonged to less complicated lives. The loudness made the conversation frivolous and dangerous in equal measure. The alcohol wrapped itself around the edges of what had been said and smoothed them.
They laughed then, too loud, too quick. It was the laugh of people who had been near violence and wanted to prove they could still enjoy themselves. Ares laughed because he had to and because the whiskey had opened a hinge and something wanted to move. Chloe laughed because the beat made her body remember rhythm rather than fear. Tessa laughed because it was easier than sobbing.
At some point the laughter slid into touching easier than it should have. Ares was closer to Tessa than the rest of them, and closeness in that state felt like consent from the world. He said something, words smeared by drink and leaned in. Tessa didn’t pull away. In the fragmented logic of the night, proximity became permission. No one pushed them apart. The music was loud. Julian’s hand strayed over the keys of his phone and he danced a little on his feet, indifferent or encouraging. Chloe watched, a strange mix of something like hunger and a look that might have been resignation.
Later, how much later, none of them could tell—Ares bent Tessa over a low stone bench. The description of what followed is not for the telling, the important thing is this, the world narrowed for them in that moment to two people and a mistake, and afterward there was a thin, brittle silence as though the music had finally been turned off and the night had been handed back to them. Ares and Tessa made love twice that night and Chloe watched in jealousy.
After Tessa fell asleep, Chloe came for hers. Ares did the same with Chloe. He bent her over and stayed thirty minutes while clapping her ass. The sex was clumsy and intimate in the way drunk things can be—hands fumbling, breath too loud, the low hum of the garden filling the space where shame or sense would usually live. They weren’t careful, they were not violent. They were people who had given up on having moral edges for the evening and let everything slide into something else.
No one spoke in the immediate wake. The absence of words had weight. Laughter had been replaced with a heavy, embarrassed quiet. Julian eventually staggered to his feet and clapped them on shoulders the way a man claps the back of a horse after a race. “Well,” he said. “We’re doing things properly tonight.”
That too was a lie meant to be funny and to smooth the awkwardness, and for a while the lie worked. They drank a little more to close the space that had opened up between them and pooled again in the center of the circle like spilled water.
When they fell into sleep, it was without ceremony. Someone—Julian, because he always thought himself practical, tucked a jacket over Tessa’s knees where the breeze found her. Chloe curled up on the lawn with her head on Ares’ thigh for a while, until she shifted and found another seat, and Ares, who never slept well, surrendered without protest. Bottles lay in a random constellation around them, half-hidden by grass. The music wound down to a hiccup and then stopped. The night swallowed the last hooks of sound.
Morning came sudden and flat.
The garden looked smaller in daylight. The lamp posts that were romantic at night were just metal poles. The fountain was a lump of stone that had no particular dignity. The air tasted of cut grass and old smoke. The laughter from the night felt like someone else’s memory.