Chapter Seven - Home

I make eight-figure calls before lunch without blinking. Restructuring? Routine. Hostile takeovers? A walk in the park. But the second this man mentioned heading back to his own place, I was glued to the couch like an amateur who'd forgotten how to think.

God, Sekar. Get it together.

Nikau stood by the door of Arga's room, laptop charger neatly coiled in his hand. The borrowed clothes he'd lived in for two weeks were folded on the mattress. He was actually packing to leave for the first time since my surgery.

"Doctor says you're okay on the stairs now," he said, though it sounded like he was convincing himself more than me. "Wiwin says your schedule is manageable this week. So..."

"So?"

"So maybe it's time I stop occupying your guest room like I'm homeless."

I sat up straighter, keeping my voice light. Breezy. Unbothered. "Occupying? You've been—" I choked on my own sentence. I didn't know how to label what he'd been these past two weeks. And a colder voice in my head added: neither does the contract.

"I've been what?" A slow grin as he waited.

I stared at the charger, at the folded laundry, and it hit me with full force: I did not want to watch those things go into his overnight bag.

"Stay," I blurted, before my brain could run the cost-benefit analysis — or ask which clause covered it.

His hands froze. "Sei—"

"It's not because I need taking care of," I cut in, salvaging my pride. "The doctor said I'm fine. I just..." I breathed out, and dropped the corporate shield. "I just don't want you to go. Simple as that."

Nikau slowly set the charger back on the desk. Every movement deliberate, as if a sudden twitch might spook me into taking it back.

"Sei." He sank onto the edge of the sofa to meet my eyes. "You know I'll stay the second you ask. But I need to be sure — is this because you want me around, or because you feel you owe it after all the helping?"

"I want you here. Trust me, I know the difference."

"Aite." His grin widened, warm and striking. "Just making sure."

That evening, for the first time since the hospital, I walked up to my own bedroom. I wanted him to see the real me — not Arga's high school time capsule down the hall.

Nikau drifted to my massive bookshelf, fingers skimming spines — Harry Potter crammed against Nietzsche, Murakami flanking local literature. On the top shelf, two political biographies still sealed in shrink-wrap.

"Haven't opened these ones," he noted, tilting one up.

"Gifts from people who clearly don't know me. The man is far too problematic for my taste." I shrugged. "But I have a rule against throwing away books."

He studied the shelves a moment longer, taking in the beautiful, chaotic mess of my mind.

"This is..." A low laugh, shaking his head. "To anyone else, this must look completely random."

"Guilty."

"It's so you, though," he said softly, sliding the biography back like it was made of glass. "Makes no sense to the world until you shed some light on it."

Then he stopped in front of the canvas hanging opposite my bed. "There's a story here."

"Bought on my first trip to Japan. I didn't even pick it — Arga did. He was nine."

He slid onto the mattress beside me, completely tuned in. I realized then how thoroughly my walls had crumbled — I was handing over pieces of my past without a second thought.

"It was our first solo adventure, just the two of us. We got separated at a Tokyo station during rush hour. He was stranded on the platform and the crowd swept me into the carriage. As the doors closed, I saw his little eyes filling with tears — 'Oh nooo... Mamaaa—'"

"Oh no." He sat up straight.

"I lost it entirely. Threw my weight against the doors, and by some miracle they reopened. I pulled him in, and my heart was pounding hard enough to crack a rib."

"And then?"

"Then we clung to each other the entire ride while a train full of polite Japanese commuters did their absolute best to look elsewhere." I laughed, the memory warm in my throat. "Next day at a souvenir shop, Arga pointed at that painting. He said, 'Ma, the colors look exactly like how it felt in the train yesterday.' I didn't entirely understand. I bought it on the spot."

Nikau looked back at the canvas, his expression turning deeply tender.

"That's heavy, and beautiful. I love hearing about you and Arga." He turned to face me fully. "Tell me more about him."

And the floodgates opened. Arga terrified of the dark, swearing he saw ghosts, running to my room every night. The surprisingly decent Japanese fruit sandwich from cooking class. The kitchen he nearly torched at twelve chasing a YouTube recipe. I talked with my hands, my voice bouncing off the walls. I never talked about my son like this — outside my circle, no one ever really cared to ask.

He never shifted his gaze. Head tilted, chuckling in the right places, asking the small questions that proved he was hanging on every word.

I caught myself. "Oh my god. I'm sorry, I've been going on and on—"

He didn't let me finish.

He kissed me — a deep, sudden pull, mid-sentence. When he finally let me breathe, he wore a soft smile I'd never seen on him.

"What was that for?"

"Because," he whispered, eyes dark and warm, "that's the first time I've watched you talk with pure joy."

This kiss wasn't like the first one, in the hallway three days after surgery — careful, both of us taped together. This one was slow, languid, full of heat, because we had all the time in the world. His hand slid to my waist, tracing the curve of my hip, steering clear of my scar without being told. For once I wasn't thinking about my healing body, my old heartbreaks, or what anyone would say about a fifty-one-year-old woman kissing a younger man like a teenager in her own bed.

We broke apart before the fire got loose. Not because we wanted to stop — because there was an unspoken line we hadn't crossed, and tonight wasn't the night to rush it.

"Stay here tonight?" I murmured as he shifted toward the guest room.

"Sei, if I stay in this bed—"

"I know exactly what I'm ready for, Nik. Just hold me."

He climbed under the sheets on the right side — instinctively claiming it — and pulled me against his chest like I was something precious.

For a long time, neither of us spoke. The room was dead quiet except for the hum of the air conditioner.

"It's too quiet up here, isn't it?" I murmured into the dark.

"The house?"

"Yes." A breath I didn't know I'd been holding. "When Arga left for Leeds, I told myself I'd love the peace. My whole day is a battlefield of noise — I thought a silent house would be a luxury." My fingers traced the hem of his shirt. "It wasn't. It felt hollow. Like the walls were echoing a life that had already moved on. Some nights I'd sit downstairs in the dark wondering who I was when I wasn't running a company or being someone's mother."

His grip tightened a fraction. "Must've been heavy, carrying that silence alone."

"It was. You spend your life building a fortress, and then everyone leaves, and you're just patrolling empty rooms." I looked up at him through the gloom. "But tonight, with you here — the quiet doesn't feel empty. It feels safe."

"I'm glad, Sei." His voice was low and sure. "You don't have to patrol anything tonight. I'm on watch."

A genuine smile broke across my face — immediately ruined by a massive, uncontrollable yawn.

He chuckled, warm and low, and pressed a kiss into the crown of my hair.

"I could listen to you all night, sayang. But you need to sleep."

I didn't have the energy to argue. I curled into his warmth, buried my face against his chest, and fell asleep faster than I had in years — without keeping one eye open against the world.

The next morning, I woke up to ice.

The right side of the bed was cold. I sat up, staring at the empty room, and a suffocating, familiar panic gripped my throat. No noise from the kitchen. No water running. Dead silence.

I snatched my phone. Blank. No texts.

Where is he? My brain scrambled to force the rationalist back in charge, to not feel like a discarded woman abandoned without a word. I walked down to the kitchen, praying. Empty. I sat on a barstool at the island, staring at my useless phone.

I didn't cry. But my chest went hollow in a way I recognized, because I had felt it in this exact house before.

Vino was a man who left without announcement. It was one of his smaller cruelties, so small I'd spent years telling myself it wasn't one. He'd be there at breakfast and simply not be there by the time I came downstairs from a shower — no note, no text, the coffee cup rinsed and upside down in the rack like punctuation. Sometimes it was work. Sometimes, I learned much later, it was her. But the mechanism was always the same: I would walk into a room expecting him and find only the evidence that he'd been there and chosen not to say goodbye.

I'd trained myself, over eighteen years, not to ask where he'd gone. Asking made me the anxious wife, the clinging one, the woman who couldn't hold a man's interest — and the surest way to lose whatever ground I had was to let him see it mattered. So I learned to walk into empty rooms and feel nothing on my face. To rinse the second cup myself. To never, ever ask why.

The day he left for good, there had been no scene. Just a suitcase already gone from the closet when I got home, and the same upside-down cup in the rack, and a silence I understood without a single word being said. He left the way he'd always left. The only difference was that this time he didn't come back to do it again.

So a cold bed and a blank phone and a quiet kitchen were not new information to my body. They were the oldest information I had. My nervous system knew this exact configuration of absence the way you know the smell of your childhood home — instantly, wordlessly, and all the way down.

I snatched my phone again. Still blank. And the old rule surfaced, automatic, before I could stop it: Don't ask where he went. Don't be that woman. Don't let it show that it matters.

I sat on the barstool at the island, staring at my useless phone, and practiced not feeling my own face.

Fifteen agonizing minutes later, a key turned in the front lock.

Nikau walked in carrying a paper bag from my favorite French bakery, hair a windswept mess. The bright look on his face evaporated the second he saw mine.

"Sei?" He dropped the bag and crossed the room fast. "Hey. You okay?"

"Why did you leave?" My voice came out tiny. Stripped of all authority.

Realization hit him, then a wave of pure guilt.

"I left a note," he said, his voice dropping soft. "On your nightstand. I—"

He bolted up the stairs. Seconds later he was back, holding a small square of neon paper. It must have blown off the table, carried under the bed by the draft of the AC.

Just grabbing us some breakfast, sayang.

I stared at the handwriting, then up at him. "I didn't see it," I whispered.

"I know. I'm sorry." He dropped to his knees in front of my stool, capturing both my trembling hands. "Sayang, I'm so sorry. I thought the note was enough. I didn't think it would set off the panic."

"It's fine," I lied, lungs still fighting for air.

"It's not fine," he said, refusing to let me hide. "I'm so sorry, sayang."

I couldn't reply, but the tears finally spilling over gave him his answer. Sayang. The word left his lips with such fierce, protective tenderness that it felt entirely real.

He pulled me down into his arms, my face against his solid chest.

"I'm never leaving this house again without waking you first," he murmured into my hair. "Five minutes or five hours — I wake you. Promise."

"You don't have to—"

"I do." Gentle, and completely non-negotiable. "You hate being left behind. I hear you, sayang. Never again."

He pulled back enough to press a kiss to my left cheek, then my right, then rested his forehead against mine. "Forgiven?"

"Only because you brought pastries from the good bakery." A weak smile, voice still thick.

"I brought one more thing." Visibly relieved, he stood and fished something from his jacket pocket.

A new charm. A solid gold miniature house, with tiny windows and a front door.

"For last night," he whispered, thumbs working it onto the chain beside the picnic basket. "The night you opened your real door and let me in."

I looked down at my wrist — compass, airplane, picnic basket, lucky cat, and now a little house. Five charms, each anchoring a moment I would never let slip.

"I love it," I breathed.

"Good," he whispered, and bent to kiss me, remarkably tender.