Chapter 90 CHAPTER 90
Regrets
Ares woke with his mouth filled with dust and regret, the sun stabbing through the thin fabric of a shirt he did not remember fastening. His head throbbed like a drum.
He blinked, disoriented, and the facts of last night came back in fits: the confessions, the music, the fight in the grass, the way Tessa had looked at him as though they’d shared a small, terrible truce. Then further back and deeper, he remembered Tessa on the bench and Chloe at his side. For a couple of slow seconds the floor dropped out and he felt like a man who had fallen and was still falling.
Tessa stirred next to him, and when she opened her eyes, Ares saw fatigue drawn deep into the angles of her face. There was no triumphant glow, only the precise, exhausted look of someone who’d traded one crisis for another and came away uncertain which was worse.
Chloe was on the other side of the garden, wrapped in one of Julian’s scarves, eyes raw but awake. She sat up slowly, fingers rubbing at her temples as if to dislodge the stubborn cobwebs of last night. Julian was the last to come into anything resembling consciousness, grumbling, complaining about a headache he would later call poetic.
They all looked at each other like people who had agreed to a thing with no plan for the aftermath. The silence was thick and full of questions.
“What happened?” Chloe asked first, then, immediately, as if she didn’t have the right to demand answers, “No—what do we remember?”
Tessa’s jaw worked. “I remember the fight in the grass.” Her voice was hoarse. “I remember you—Ares—telling me you were sorry.”
Ares heard the words and they were simple like armor. He cleared his throat. “I apologized. For taking them. For everything. I meant it.”
“And you?” Tessa asked him. She had the look of someone measuring the distance between a man’s mouth and his heart. “Do you mean it enough to go to the police? To face what you did?”
The question hung heavy between them. Ares’ mind scampered for the safe answer and didn’t find it. He had the sense that the confession in the garden had not been an absolution but the start of something more dangerous: the demand for consequence.
“I meant it,” he said finally, because saying it was easier than doing the work of proving it. “I don’t know—” He stopped. The truth was rotten with complications. “I don’t know if apologies fix the damage. But I mean what I said.”
Chloe stood, swaying as if the garden itself were a ship and she had to find her balance. “Lady Bianca helped me,” she said, and the way she said it had the same tone as the night before, a mix of gratitude and fear. “She opened doors. But she didn’t tell me what to do with your kids. I don’t— I didn’t have anything to do with taking them.”
Tessa watched her carefully, then looked at Ares. “If she did help you,” she said, “why would you be here? Why this moment? Why last night?”
Chloe’s laugh was brittle. “Because I was tired. Because I wanted to be part of something that wasn’t running. Because i didn't know I'll find y'all here.”
Julian, who’d been pretending to be asleep but clearly hadn’t been, pushed himself up and shrugged, the motion ostentatious. “We’re all a collection of bad choices,” he said, the sort of deflection he used when real feeling crept too close. “Some of them just line up badly.”
The morning air made Ares feel small in a way the night had not. The reckoning that would come would not be softened by the whiskey or the music. The kids were still out there, the very thought yanked at him with a physical ache. He had slept with the women who were connected, in different ways, to the theft of those children. The fact sat in his stomach like a stone.
He looked at Tessa. “We can talk to a lawyer,” he said, the words mechanized by habit. “We can make it right. We should...shared custody."
"The kids are still missing." Tessa’s expression didn’t change much. She folded her hands into her lap like someone holding a fragile relic. “Making it right means more than lawyers and statements,” she said. “It means you admitting what you did and letting that be the thing that costs you something. It means not hiding behind your name.”
Chloe’s eyes filled, and she blinked it away because she couldn’t afford to fall apart in this moment. “I’m sorry,” she said again, as if the apology could be a talisman. “I’m sorry to everyone. To the kids. To you.” She looked at Tessa, and for a second there was something like shame, or maybe a plea. “I didn’t intend...”
Ares stood then, abruptly, and the motion made everyone else still. He felt hollowed by sleep and by the morning’s starkness. “We’ll find them,” he said. The words were raw and maybe too simple, but they were what he had. “We’ll get them back. That’s the only thing that matters.”
For a moment there was quiet. It was the kind of silence that sometimes means the first step toward action. Outside, a car went by, the sound was flat and ordinary and made a small, obscene contrast to the knot of their morning.
They began, clumsy and slow, to reconstruct the night in more than fragments. Names were dropped again—Lady Bianca, lawyers, favors bought in dark corners. Ares made calls with hands that shook. Julian muttered about alibis and calendars. Chloe kept rubbing at her temples, trying to smooth out the memory until it thinned.
None of them said the obvious next step aloud: that the truth would have to be louder than the laughter, that apologies couldn’t replace the missing small bodies, or that consequences would not respect the fragile truce of a drunken night.
But all of them knew it. The garden had been where confessions were drunk and mistakes made and suppressed. The day would be for making a plan and for paying for what had been done. The night was over; the hangover was not just in their heads. It was in the ache of responsible bones and in the fact that, for better or worse, nothing of what had happened could be unmade.
Ares avoided Tessa and Chloe's eyes. Guilt knowing he had sex with both of them.