Chapter 263 The End.
Chapter 263 The End.
Epilogue
Crestmont spread itself in the spring morning below her, the river catching the light on its southern bend, the boulevard blossoms doing their excessive pink work, the city going about the ordinary business of being a city.
Aria thought about Elara Vaughn.
She did this sometimes, in the quiet of the chairman’s office, with the city below and the documentation of the company around her.
She thought about the woman she had been in the specific way that one thought about a person they had known very well, from the inside, the most intimate possible acquaintance.
She thought about what Elara Vaughn would have made of this.
Of the office and the company and the spring morning and the phone call from a man who wanted to come to a construction site in his good suit.
She thought that Elara Vaughn would have had a lot to say about all of it.
She thought she would have been pleased.
She thought: I am you. I am you and I am also this. I am both of these things and they are not in contradiction and I am alive and the window is full of light and the coffee is exactly the right temperature and in four hours I am going to a construction site with my husband who is going to ruin his suit.”
She thought: “This is enough. This is more than enough. This is everything.”
She turned back to her desk.
Picking up her pen, she went back to work.
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The Graves Empire shareholder meeting that confirmed Lucian’s chairmanship was covered by every major business outlet in Crestmont and several national ones.
The coverage used words like "dynasty" and "restoration" and the return of the Graves name, and the photographs that accompanied the coverage were taken outside Graves Tower at the conclusion of the meeting, the new chairman and his wife on the front steps with the city behind them.
She was in charcoal grey. He was in the suit he had worn to the construction site, which did, in fact, have a very small amount of concrete dust on the left cuff, which she had noticed and had said nothing about because she found it disproportionately endearing.
The photographs showed them side by side.
Not performing for the cameras. Not doing the specific thing that public figures did when cameras were present, the managed presentation of a version of themselves. They were standing together and they were talking, clearly mid-conversation, clearly in the middle of disagreeing about something, given the specific angle of her chin and the specific expression on his face.
The internet found this photograph compelling for reasons it spent considerable time articulating.
"The concrete dust on his cuff. I need to know the full story."
"They are clearly arguing in this photo and it is the most romantic thing I have ever seen."
"The most powerful couple in Crestmont is standing on the steps of the Graves Empire having what appears to be a disagreement about something and they both look completely unbothered by the cameras. Icons."
"Aria Beaumont-Graves runs the Vaughn Empire and the Beaumont Empire and is apparently also the person who took down Kurt Eugene and Vera Hale and rebuilt an entire corporate legacy in eighteen months. And she is twenty-eight. I need to lie down."
"Whatever they’re arguing about in this photo I guarantee she’s right."
"He knows she’s right too. Look at his face."
"The city of Crestmont does not deserve these two people."
Aria saw the photograph the following morning on her phone over breakfast.
She showed it to Lucian.
He looked at it.
“We were not arguing,” he said.
“We were absolutely arguing,” she said.
“We were having a discussion,” he said.
“About what?” she asked then, tilting her head playfully to the side
“The Caldwell secondary figures,” he said.
“Which I was right about,” she said.
He looked at the photograph again.
Then he looked at her, and sighed
“The concrete dust on the cuff,” he said.
“I didn’t say anything about the concrete dust,” she said.
“You are thinking about it,” he said.
She was quiet for a moment.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“It’s not fine,” he said. “You have been not saying something about it since yesterday afternoon.”
“I have not—”
“Aria.”
She looked at him.
She thought about the photograph and the steps of the Graves Tower and the spring morning and the concrete dust and the twelve months since she had sat in a hospital bed being told to rest, and the twelve months before that in which she had built two companies and taken down several people who had needed taking down and found her way back to herself.
She thought about this man sitting across the breakfast table from her.
“The dust suits you,” she said.
He looked at her.
“It makes you look like someone who actually does things,” she said. “Instead of someone who reads reports about things.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“I went to the construction site,” he said.
“You did,” she agreed.
“Because you were going to the construction site,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
The breakfast table was quiet.
Outside the window, Crestmont was starting its day in the spring light, unremarkable and continuous and full of the ordinary extraordinary life of a city that had been there before either of them and would be there after.
She poured his coffee.
He reached across the table and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear.
She let him.
“Graves,” she said.
“Yes.”
“We have a nine o’clock.”
“I know,” he said.
“And an eleven.”
“I know,” he said.
“And the Beaumont quarterly review at three.”
“I will be there at three,” he said.
She looked at him.
He looked back at her.
She thought about the warehouse and the reincarnation and the car on the road and the cold forest and the hut in the rain and the boardrooms and the prison visiting room and all the long, circuitous, improbable distance between the beginning of this and the breakfast table on a spring morning.
She thought: "Two lifetimes. He loved me through two lifetimes without knowing he was doing it."
She thought: "I am going to love him through every one that comes after."
She picked up her coffee.
“Don’t be late,” she said.
He smiled.
It was a small smile, the specific one that she had learned to recognize as the genuine version, the one that was not performed for anyone and appeared only when he was not thinking about how he looked.
“I won’t be late,” he said.
She believed him.
THE END
Hey Loves,
Thank you so much for reading “THE SECOND LIFE OF ELARA VAUGHN,” This is the end of Lucian and Aria’s (Elara) story. Thank you so much for your love and support so far, even putting up with my tardy ass. I promise to do better in my next story. It’s going to be as splendid as this, so sit tight, my loves. Bye. 😘😘