Chapter 20 Alone
After Julian left, the house felt too quiet. At first, Adeline walked from room to room without knowing what she was looking for. She checked her phone, she opened the fridge even though she was not hungry, and she even tried to lie down for a while, but her eyes stayed open, staring at the ceiling. The silence pressed in on her, and she realized very quickly that doing nothing was not going to work.
So she did something she had never done for more than half an hour in her life. She opened a movie on her phone.
She stretched out on the couch, pulled a blanket over her legs, and pressed play. At first, she only half paid attention. Her mind kept drifting, but after a few minutes, the story on the screen pulled her in. The characters were loud and dramatic in ways that did not feel personal to her, their problems were simple, and their jokes were silly.
She reached for a pack of cookies she had found in one of the kitchen cabinets and opened it without much thought. One cookie became two, and two became three. Crumbs fell onto the blanket, but she did not care.
At one point, she laughed out loud, and the sound of her own laugh surprised her. It felt strange in the quiet house, almost like it did not belong there. She could not remember the last time she had laughed without forcing it and without pretending.
When the first movie ended, she did not hesitate to start another. It felt easier to sit there and let someone else’s story fill her head than to sit with her own thoughts. Hours passed without her noticing. The light outside the windows slowly shifted from bright afternoon to soft orange, then to gray.
She did not notice any of it. She laughed again at something stupid, shook her head at a dramatic confession scene, and reached for another cookie only to realize the pack was almost empty.
By the time the second movie ended, the room was dark except for the glow of her phone screen. She blinked at it for a moment before glancing toward the window. The sky outside was nearly black.
She sat up slowly. “Great,” she muttered to herself.
Instead of starting another movie, she locked her phone and let it rest on her chest. The sudden silence felt heavy, and without the voices from the screen, the house seemed to grow larger again.
She leaned her head back against the couch and closed her eyes. Maybe if she stayed still long enough, she would fall asleep. Maybe her mind would finally slow down.
For most of the day, she had done her best not to think about Julian. Every time her thoughts drifted toward him, she had turned the volume up on the movie or reached for another cookie. It had worked for the most part, but now there was nothing to drown him out.
Her mind replayed small moments from the morning. The way he had rolled his eyes at her in the kitchen, the way he had said she was a big girl, and the small wink he had given her before leaving.
She frowned slightly, even though no one was there to see it.
This was exactly what she had wanted to avoid. Thinking about him meant he was starting to matter, even if only a little, and she did not like that.
She opened her eyes and stared at the dark ceiling as the truth sat heavy in her chest. She could not afford to let Julian Hale become someone important to her, not in any way that counted.
Yes, there had been a scandal. Yes, it had been her fault. She had made reckless choices. She had let things spiral out of control, and now there was a possibility, one she tried not to say out loud, that she might end up marrying him.
The thought made her stomach twist.
Marriage was not something she believed in the way other people did. To her, it had always looked like a trap, a contract that wasn't exactly necessary but somehow required, and a way to tie someone down and slowly strip them of who they were.
She turned onto her side and pulled the blanket tighter around herself.
Julian was not as crazy cruel as she expected him to be, especially given that he could easily have thrown her under the bus and would have gotten away with it, and the fact that he was like that almost made it worse.
If he were awful, it would be easy. She could hate him. She could build her walls higher and never question it, but he was being extremely patient and calm with her in a way that annoyed her, and he also treated her like she had a choice in things, and that was dangerous.
Getting comfortable with him would mean lowering her guard. It would mean trusting that he would not use her weaknesses against her. It would mean believing that she could lean on someone without being pushed aside later.
She had seen what happened to women who leaned too hard on men. She had watched her mother shrink herself to keep the peace. She had listened to her father talk about marriage like it was ownership.
Adeline had promised herself years ago that she would never be that woman. Never the one who got taken down because she let someone else become her center.
She sat up again, restless. The dark room felt too small now, and she reached for her phone, tempted to start another movie just to silence her thoughts again.
Instead, she opened her messages.
There was nothing new from Julian, but she still stared at his name for a moment longer than she meant to before locking the phone again and tossing it onto the couch.
“This is ridiculous,” she whispered.
He was just a man, not some life-altering force, and not someone who could undo her, and yet, the fact that she was even arguing with herself about it proved that something had shifted.