“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Now people probably think—”
“They’ll think something new tomorrow.”
“You sound very sure.”
“I’ve had practice.”
There was loneliness in the words.
Not self-pity.
Just fact.
I thought about the exhausted man on the plane.
The one who had let a stranger sleep against his shoulder for two hours because waking her seemed unnecessarily cruel.
“Is that why you wanted people to stop filming?”
“Partly.”
“What’s the other part?”
He looked at me.
For a moment, I thought he would dismiss the question.
Instead he sat in the desk chair.
“My sister died three years ago.”
The room seemed to become quieter.
“I’m sorry.”
“She was thirty-four. Her name was Caroline.”
I waited.
“She hated photographs,” he continued. “Which was unfortunate, because once my company became successful, photographers developed an interest in everyone related to me.”
His fingers tightened slightly.
“A month before she died, someone followed her from a restaurant. The pictures ended up online. People speculated about why she looked tired. Why she had lost weight.”
I felt a chill.
“She was sick?”
“Leukemia.”
“Oh.”
“She hadn’t told anyone publicly.”
His voice remained steady.
But his eyes did not.
“Two days later, a website published that she was dying before some of our relatives even knew she was ill.”
I looked at him.
“That’s horrible.”
“Yes.”
No dramatic speech.
No bitterness.
Just the word.
“Yes.”
He stood.
“Since then, I don’t particularly enjoy being photographed.”
Now I understood the exhaustion in his eyes.
Not all of it.
But some.
“You could have just told me that on the plane.”
“I could have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because asking a stranger to pretend to sleep on my shoulder was already strange enough.”
I smiled.
“That’s true.”
He moved toward the door.
“I should let you rest.”
“Adrian?”
He turned.
“Thank you.”
“You booked the hotel.”
“For not making me feel ridiculous.”
His expression softened.
“You’re not ridiculous, Elena.”
The certainty in his voice unsettled me in ways I wasn’t prepared to examine.
He opened the door.
