Vesper’s POV
Last night, we ended up doing nothing and just went back to our rooms to sleep.
Or at least, that was the lie I kept telling myself.
“Hide and seek,” she announced at breakfast, completely unprompted, pointing her spoon at me.
“You and me.”
That was how I ended up crouched behind the living room curtains.
I shifted further behind the fabric and held my breath.
The villa was large, but I snuck upstairs after her, planning to double back to the kitchen.
Except when I slipped past the master bedroom and headed toward the hallway, I nearly collided with Sunny barreling out of Jaxon’s room with her arms stretched wide.
“FOUND YOU!”
I followed her back into Jaxon’s room to reset the game.
He was at training for the morning, and the room was quiet, the sun coming in through the half-open curtains and casting everything in pale gold.
Sunny immediately disappeared into the walk-in closet to hide, and I stepped inside to pull her out.
The closet was long.
Jaxon’s clothes were organized on one side, mostly dark and structured.
Jerseys hung at the far end.
On the upper shelves, boxes were stacked in neat rows.
Sunny suddenly backed out from under the hanging jackets, tripping over my feet.
I stumbled backward to keep my balance, my heel catching the edge of the lowest shelf.
My arm flailed, accidentally striking an old cardboard box sitting at the back.
It crashed onto the floor.
The old lid popped clean off, sliding away.
Items were scattered across the hardwood.
I froze, my breath catching in my throat.
I hadn’t meant to snoop, but there it was, wide open.
The first thing I saw was a small photograph, face down.
Beside it, folded tissue paper had unraveled from the impact, revealing something small and rectangular.
The bottle was small.
It’s perfume.
Dark glass with a gold cap.
Soir de Minuit.
My breath stopped.
I knew that bottle.
I knew it because I had owned one, years ago — a gift from Chloe on my twenty-first birthday, found at a small boutique that had since closed.
The brand discontinued the scent two years later.
I’d stretched my last bottle so thin I was practically using it drop by drop until it ran out entirely.
I hadn’t thought about it in years. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
I turned the bottle over in my hands.
It was unopened.
Still sealed.
The kind of thing you kept not to use but to keep.
My chest did something strange and uncomfortable.
Suddenly, the kitchen from last night rushed back to me.
“It has always been you.
I’m not joking.
”
My brain offered several explanations all at once, and I turned all of them down because none of them made sense except the one I didn’t want to think about.
“Vesper, it’s your turn to hide!”
Sunny’s voice came from somewhere outside the closet.
I stood up too quickly and almost hit the shelf.
Carefully, I placed the photograph back the way I found it.
Set the bottle back in its tissue.
Put the lid back on the box.
My hands were steady.
The rest of me wasn’t.
Jaxon came back just before noon.
I heard the front door, heard him greet Sunny, heard her immediately launch into a full recap of our game, including what she considered her own strategic genius.
I stayed in the kitchen with a glass of water I wasn’t drinking, staring at the countertop.
When he walked in, he looked relaxed.
Bag over one shoulder, hair slightly damp from the rink.
He opened the fridge without looking at me.
“How’d the morning go?”
”Fine,” I said.
He pulled out a bottle of water.
Still not looking at me.
I should have left it.
I knew that.
The smart version of me, the professional strategic version, would have filed it away and said nothing.
Would have treated it as information and not something personal.
“I found something,” I said instead.
Jaxon turned around then, his expression still easy.
“Found what?”
”In your closet.
We were playing hide and seek, and I went in to get Sunny, and I wasn’t snooping.”
”Okay.”
”There was a box on the lower shelf.”
His face didn’t move.
But something in it changed — that controlled stillness he wore when he was working to keep something in place.
“I opened it,” I continued.
“I know I shouldn’t have.”
He crossed the kitchen slowly and set his water down on the counter. This story is hosted at g.com.
His expression was unreadable now and completely flat.
“Where’s Sunny?” he asked.
“Living room.”
He walked past me without another word, went upstairs, and came back down three minutes later with the box.
He set it on the counter between us and looked at me in a way that made me feel like I’d reached into something that was never meant for me.
“It’s not what you’re making it into,” he said.
I kept my voice even.
“I didn’t say anything.”
”You didn’t have to.”
That stung more than it should have.
I looked at the box and then back at him.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“I just— I used to wear that perfume, so I was surprised.”
”Lots of people wore it.”
”It was discontinued, Jaxon.”
Silence.
He picked the box up off the counter with one hand, and his jaw was set now, that quiet kind of tension he carried when a conversation was getting too close to something real.
“Drop it,” he said.
“I’m not trying to make it into anything,” I replied.
“I just want to understand why..”
”There’s nothing to understand.”
I opened my mouth and closed it.
Because the hard truth was that I didn’t have a right to ask.
Whatever this was — whatever that box meant, whoever those things had been kept for.
I wasn’t his real wife.
I was a contract and a strategy.
I had no standing to press him on the contents of his own closet, no matter what was inside it.
And he knew that.
The fact that he wasn’t even defending himself told me he knew it too.
I looked away first.
“The schedule for next week,” I said, forcing my tone into something strictly professional.
“We have several media confirmations to handle by tomorrow.”
A beat of silence.
Then Jaxon set the box down and leaned against the counter, watching me shift gears in real time.
“Fine,” he said.
“I’ll email you the updated calendar so you can review the details.”
”Vesper.”
His voice wasn’t cold anymore.
Just quiet.
I kept my eyes on the counter.
“What?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
When I finally looked up, he was watching me with an expression I didn’t know how to name, something between frustration and something softer that he wasn’t quite willing to show.
“Just send it over,” he said finally.
“I’ll look at it.”
He took the box and left the kitchen.
And I stood there with a glass of water I still hadn’t touched, thinking about a bottle of perfume that had been sealed and saved and kept like something too important to use.