Chapter 6 Heterochromia
Serena's POV
I was at the bathroom sink, running water over my hands, when I heard it — a sharp, hissed intake of breath from the bedroom, the kind that meant pain, not surprise.
I turned the faucet off and went to check.
Elliot was sitting up in bed with one hand pressed against his side, jaw tight, brow furrowed like he was trying to figure out what he'd done to deserve it. I crossed the room and pulled the hem of his shirt up without asking.
The bruise had spread overnight — a wide, ugly patch of purple and yellow along his lower ribs, the kind that looked worse than it felt but still felt bad enough. I knew exactly where it came from. I'd watched him hit the floor.
I should've caught him.
I didn't say that.
"Where did this come from?" he asked, voice still rough with sleep, staring down at it like it had appeared out of nowhere.
I let his shirt drop and sat back. "Your lover has some enthusiasm," I said. "Apparently that extends to throwing you off furniture."
He went quiet. I watched him process that — the careful way he didn't look at me, the slight tension around his mouth. He glanced down at himself, taking in the clean t-shirt, the sweatpants. Things he hadn't put on himself. His eyes came back up to my face, and something moved through them that I didn't want to name.
He opened his mouth.
I got up.
His hand came toward me — I felt the air shift before I saw the movement, that half-reach across the space between us. I was already turning, already standing, the motion so natural that there was nothing to react to. His fingers closed on nothing. I was at the foot of the bed, smoothing the front of my shirt, and he was still sitting there with his hand suspended in the air for a half-second before he let it drop.
It wasn't anger. I just already knew how that ended.
"Harold called this morning," I said, keeping my voice level. "Family dinner tonight. Seven o'clock at the estate." I picked up my phone from the nightstand and checked the time. "The divorce paperwork can wait until after."
He looked at me for a moment. "Okay."
One word. No argument, no follow-up questions. I didn't know if that was exhaustion or something else, and I didn't ask.
"I need to pick up something for Harold," I said. "You should get cleaned up."
We didn't talk much after that. The apartment was quiet in the way that meant both of us were moving around each other carefully, not because we were fighting but because there was nothing left to fight about right now.
I heard the shower run. I heard him moving through the kitchen. I sat at the vanity and did my makeup with the kind of focus that left no room for anything else — foundation first, then concealer, building it up in thin layers until the puffiness around my eyes disappeared entirely. By the time I was done, I looked like someone who had slept eight hours and woken up without a single problem in the world.
Good.
I'd ordered Harold's gift two weeks ago — a first-edition he'd mentioned once in passing at a dinner, the kind of offhand comment most people forgot and I had written down in my phone the moment I got home. It was wrapped and waiting in its bag by the door, ready to go.
When Elliot came out, he was in a clean shirt, hair still slightly damp. He looked at the gift bag and then at me, and I could see him doing the math — realizing I'd handled it, that there was nothing left for him to do. He didn't say thank you. I didn't expect him to.
We rode the elevator down in silence. The lobby doors opened onto the street, and the car was already there, the driver standing at the curb. I had the gift bag in one hand and was reaching for the door handle with the other when I heard it.
"Elliot."
A woman's voice. Coming from behind us, from the direction of the sidewalk.
I turned.
She was standing maybe twenty feet away, and the first thing I registered was that she was wrong. Not wrong in a way I could immediately explain — just that the person I was looking at didn't match the person I'd been carrying in my head for the past year.
Camille had always been vivid in my imagination, assembled from fragments: a name said too carefully, a photo glimpsed on a screen, the particular way Elliot's voice changed when he talked about her. The woman I'd constructed was bright, magnetic, the kind of person who took up space without trying.
This woman was pale gold and sharp edges. Her hair fell straight and smooth past her shoulders, catching the morning light in a way that should've looked effortless but instead looked calculated. The structured blazer she wore fit like it had been made for her, which it probably had been, but it hung differently than I'd imagined — less like confidence, more like armor someone had cinched too tight.
Then she stepped closer, and I saw her eyes.
Left eye: ice blue, flat and glassy in a way that didn't track movement quite right. Right eye: gray-green, clear and focused and slightly different in shade. Two completely different colors, sitting in the same face, watching me watch her.
I never noticed that. A year ago, I never noticed that.
I didn't know why it bothered me. It just did — this small, specific thing that I should have known and didn't, like finding a gap in a story I thought I'd already read all the way through. One eye that saw me and one that just stared.
Elliot moved.
I hadn't even registered that his arm was linked through mine until it wasn't anymore — until the warmth of him was gone and he was already three steps ahead of me, crossing the sidewalk toward her with something in his stride that I'd never seen directed at me. Not urgency exactly. More like relief. The kind of relief that meant he'd been holding his breath for a long time and had just been allowed to stop.
"Camille." His voice came out different. Lighter. "What are you doing here?"
She said something back, quiet enough that I didn't catch it. She was looking at him the way people looked at things they weren't sure were real yet — except only one eye was doing the looking. The other just reflected the light.
I stayed where I was.
The gift bag handle was cutting into my palm. I realized I'd been gripping it too hard and made myself loosen my fingers, then watched them curl back in anyway, slow and deliberate, until my hand was a fist at my side.
My face didn't move. I'd made sure of that years ago — the ability to stand perfectly still while something inside me went completely sideways. I was good at it. I was very, very good at it.
Don't. Not here. Not in front of her.
But underneath that, quieter and more honest: He ran to her. He actually ran.
