Chapter 192
Elara
The question hung in the air between us, heavy with unspoken implications, and I felt something inside me shift and settle, like a key finally turning in a lock I'd been trying to force open for three years. This was it—the moment I'd been both dreading and moving toward since the day I'd woken up in that bedroom with the impossible weight of two lifetimes pressing down on my chest.
I took a deep breath, steadying myself, then walked to his side. "Julian," I said quietly, my voice remarkably calm despite the way my hands were trembling. "I have something to tell you. About Lily. About me. About... us."
He turned then, and the expression on his face was almost painful to witness—hope and fear warring so openly in his eyes that I had to look away for a moment, gathering my courage. His shoulders sagged slightly, whether from exhaustion or the lingering pain of his injuries I couldn't tell, but he remained standing straight, waiting.
"I'm listening," he said, and there was something raw in those two words, a vulnerability I'd rarely heard from him.
I glanced around the exhibition space. Gallery staff were beginning to dismantle displays, a few stragglers still photographed my abandoned trophy on the stage, and the livestream cameras had finally powered down. Too many eyes, too many potential interruptions for what I needed to say.
"This isn't the right place," I said, meeting his gaze again. "Can we go somewhere private? Somewhere we won't be disturbed?"
Julian nodded immediately, no questions, no hesitation. "My car. No one will bother us there." He gestured toward the exit, and I fell into step beside him, acutely aware of the careful distance we maintained even as we moved through the thinning crowd together.
The parking garage was nearly empty, our footsteps echoing off concrete as we made our way to where the Maserati sat gleaming under fluorescent lights. Julian opened the passenger door for me with that automatic courtesy that had once made me feel cherished, and I slid into the leather seat, the familiar scent of expensive cologne and coffee wrapping around me.
He circled to the driver's side and settled behind the wheel, and for a long moment we just sat there in silence, the engine off, the world beyond the tinted windows reduced to distant shapes and muted sounds.
My fingers twisted together in my lap, betraying the nervousness I was trying so hard to keep from my voice. I'd made my decision—I would tell him everything, regardless of whether he believed me. This was the root of all my resistance, the wall I'd built between us, and if there was any hope of moving forward, he needed to understand why I'd spent months pushing him away.
I fixed my eyes on the dashboard, unable to look at him yet. "If I told you that I've lived another life before this one... would you believe me?"
The silence that followed felt impossibly long. Then Julian's voice, careful and measured: "You mean... rebirth? Actually rebirth, not metaphorical?"
I nodded slowly, still not looking at him. "Yes. In that life, my relationship with you was... very different. Very wrong."
I heard his sharp intake of breath, saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel in my peripheral vision, but I forced myself to continue before I lost my nerve.
"The night we attended the Kennedy family dinner, someone drugged me. I still don't know who—I never found out. But that night, you and I..." I swallowed hard, finally turning to meet his eyes. "We slept together."
Julian's pupils dilated, his knuckles going white where he gripped the wheel. He opened his mouth, closed it again, seemed to struggle with words before managing a strangled, "What happened after?"
"I discovered I was pregnant," I said, and my voice was steady now, detached, as if I were recounting someone else's tragedy. "I didn't get into college. Couldn't even take the SATs because everything fell apart so quickly. The family brought me back to Blackwood Estate, and I had a daughter. Lily."
Her name caught in my throat, the way it always did, but I pushed through. "She was the little girl whose hands are in my painting. She loved to watch me paint even though by then I could barely hold a brush."
The car had gone very quiet, filled only with the sound of Julian's ragged breathing and the distant hum of the garage ventilation system. When I glanced at him, his face had drained of all color, his jaw clenched so tightly I could see the muscle jumping beneath his skin.
I couldn't stop now. The words were pouring out like water through a broken dam, and I had to let them flow. "In that life, I was kept isolated. No freedom. Tristan said I had postpartum depression and forced me onto medication that made me... foggy. Compliant. Like a ghost in my own body."
My voice began to shake despite my efforts to control it. "Sloane used that state. She forced me to be her ghost painter, to create works she'd claim as her own. She threatened that if I didn't cooperate, I'd never see Lily again."
Tears were sliding down my cheeks now, hot and unstoppable. "I agreed. I agreed to everything, did everything they asked, as long as I could keep my daughter with me."
"But eventually I couldn't paint anymore—the drugs destroyed even that—so they took Lily away. Put her in foster care." I closed my eyes, but that only made the memories sharper, more vivid. "She died there, Julian. She had a severe peanut allergy, and the foster parents didn't know, and she ate something with nuts in it. She went into anaphylactic shock. By the time they called for help..." I couldn't finish that sentence. Didn't need to.
The silence that followed was absolute, suffocating. Then I heard a sound I'd never heard before—a broken, inhuman noise from Julian's throat, somewhere between a gasp and a sob. When I opened my eyes, he'd released the steering wheel and covered his face with both hands, and his shoulders had begun to shake.
I watched in stunned silence as tears leaked through his fingers, catching the dim garage light. Julian Vane was crying—actually crying—and the sight of it shattered something inside me that I'd thought was already broken beyond repair.
But I wasn't done. If I was going to do this, I had to finish it completely.
"The worst part," I forced myself to say, my voice barely above a whisper, "was that in that life, you never believed Lily was yours. You married Sloane instead. You had a son with her." I had to pause, had to breathe through the pain. "On your wedding day, I took an overdose of pills and walked into the ocean with Lily's ashes in my arms. And I drowned there, Julian. I killed myself because there was nothing left worth living for."
"Then I woke up," I finished quietly. "Back here. Back to before it all went wrong."
Julian dropped his hands from his face, and the devastation I saw there was so complete, so absolute, that for a moment I couldn't breathe. Tears still streamed down his cheeks, unchecked, and his entire body trembled as if he were fighting to hold himself together and failing.
"How..." he started, then had to stop, had to clear his throat roughly. "How is this possible? How can this be real?"