Updated Feb 23, 2026 • ~16 min read
POV: Valencia
This is their fifth public appearance together, and Valencia’s nerves are worse than the first time.
She’s gotten better at the gowns, at the small talk, at navigating champagne flutes and marble lobbies without looking like someone who learned which fork to use from a YouTube video. She’s gotten better at playing the part. What she hasn’t gotten better at is pretending that the almost-kiss three nights ago didn’t happen—that she doesn’t still feel the phantom warmth of Dominic standing inches away from her, close enough that she’d counted his breaths. That she hasn’t replayed it forty times since then, each time stopping exactly where reality stopped her.
So yes. Her nerves are worse tonight. Significantly worse.
Tonight’s gown is deep burgundy—borrowed again from the stylist Dominic’s team arranged, elegant and understated in the way only expensive things manage to be. Her hair is pinned at the nape of her neck, soft waves framing her face, and the woman in the mirror looks nothing like Valencia Rivera from the Philippines who once cried over a student loan statement in a bathroom stall at NYU. She looks like Dominic St. Clair’s girlfriend.
She feels like Dominic St. Clair’s girlfriend.
Acts like one too, which is the whole problem, because they still haven’t defined what they actually are. They’re still maintaining the fiction that this is fake. Still performing the careful choreography of two people who’ve agreed to pretend—except the pretending stopped feeling like pretending somewhere around the third week, and now every moment of it feels like pressure building behind glass.
The car is quiet. The city streams past outside in rivers of white and gold headlights, and Dominic sits beside her with his hand in hers, thumb tracing its usual slow circles against her palm. She’s learned that he does this without thinking—that it’s reflexive now, the small claiming gesture of it—and that knowledge alone is enough to make her chest ache.
“You okay?” she asks.
He glances at her. Something moves across his face, then settles back into careful stillness. “Yeah. Just—tired of these events.”
“We can stop doing them,” she says. “The plan worked. Society knows we’re together. We don’t need to keep appearing if you hate it.”
“I don’t hate it.” His thumb pauses for a beat. “I just—” He looks back at the window. “We’ll talk later.”
Later.
The word sits between them like a stone in still water. Valencia watches the ripples and says nothing.
The Metropolitan Museum at night is something out of a fever dream—white columns lit gold, the great steps crowded with people in silk and diamonds, the whole scene framed by the dark expanse of Central Park just across Fifth Avenue. Inside, it’s been transformed: enormous flower arrangements in shades of ivory and blush, a string quartet tucked into an alcove playing something that echoes beautifully off the marble. The ceiling soars above them. The crowd glitters.
Valencia has gotten used to this world, or she’s gotten used to faking that she has—she can’t always tell which anymore. She knows how to talk about last season’s exhibitions, about conservation projects and arts funding, about the particular causes that are fashionable this spring. She knows which of Dominic’s tech colleagues want to discuss AI ethics for forty-five minutes and which ones just want to be seen talking to him. She knows which board members he genuinely respects and which ones he tolerates with the pleasant blankness of a man who was raised with excellent manners.
She’s good at being his girlfriend. Fake or real, she’s good at it.
They move through the crowd together. Dominic introduces her to a museum board member, a pair of tech industry rivals who are somehow also golf partners, an old family friend who embraces Dominic and then assesses Valencia with sharp, kind eyes. The initial scandal of the billionaire dating his nanny has faded into something that no longer warrants a second glance. They’re just another couple now. Normal. Expected. Part of the social landscape.
But nothing about this feels normal to Valencia, especially not when Dominic’s hand settles at the small of her back, warm and steady, as he steers her away from a particularly tedious conversation about yacht insurance. Especially not when he leans close to murmur something dry about the couple in matching sapphire who’ve been photographed at seventeen events this season and seem to be running out of things to say to each other. Especially not when he laughs—quiet, genuine, just for her—and looks at her afterward like she’s the only interesting thing in the room.
Halfway through the evening, Valencia needs air.
It’s not one specific thing. It’s the accumulation of everything—the small talk layered over real silence, the smiling when she doesn’t feel like smiling, the weight of standing beside him in a burgundy gown and playing the part so convincingly that she’s no longer sure which parts are the performance. She sets her champagne flute on the tray of a passing server and touches Dominic’s arm.
“I’m going to step outside for a moment.”
He looks at her immediately, reading something in her face. “Want company?”
“No. I’m fine. Just need five minutes.”
She finds one of the museum’s side balconies through a set of heavy glass doors—a narrow stone terrace overlooking the park, mostly deserted at this hour. The air hits her like cool water: sharp with the particular smell of spring in the city, damp earth and exhaust and something flowering from the park below. She can hear the muffled sound of the string quartet through the walls and the softer, steadier sound of traffic on Fifth Avenue eight stories down.
Valencia leans against the stone railing and breathes.
This is getting unsustainable. She knows it the same way she knows the exact weight of a lie she’s been carrying too long—there’s a particular fatigue to it, a kind of bone-deep exhaustion that has nothing to do with the hours and everything to do with the effort of keeping herself separate from something she’s already lost herself in. The fake dating. The real feelings. The constant, precise maintenance of a border that doesn’t exist anymore in any honest sense.
She doesn’t know how much longer she can do this.
She doesn’t know how to be Dominic’s fake girlfriend when she is—undeniably, inconveniently, completely—in love with him.
“There you are.”
His voice comes from behind her, low and quiet, and she doesn’t startle because some part of her was already listening for it.
She turns. “I said I needed five minutes alone.”
“I know.” Dominic steps through the glass doors, letting them close softly behind him. He’s not holding a champagne flute. He didn’t stop for one on his way out. The look on his face is the one she’s been dreading for three days—the one that preceded everything on the library balcony, that still-unfinished moment she’s been avoiding by sleeping eight hours instead of her usual six, by keeping Jules between them like a small and innocent buffer. “But I needed to talk to you. Away from everyone. Privately.”
The night air feels charged in a way it didn’t a moment ago.
“About what?”
He crosses the balcony in a few slow steps, stopping close enough that she can see the exact shade of his eyes in the ambient light from the park. Gray and certain. “About this. Us. The fact that we’re still calling this fake when it’s not.”
“Dominic—”
“I can’t keep pretending.” He says it quietly, without anger, which somehow makes it worse than if he’d shouted it. “Can’t keep introducing you as my girlfriend while we maintain—whatever it is we’re maintaining at home. Can’t keep acting like this is just for show when every moment with you feels like the most real thing in my life.”
“We talked about this—”
“No,” he says. “You pulled away three nights ago. You decided we needed to be smart and practical and careful. But I’m done being careful.” A pause. The sound of the city rises and falls around them. “I love you, Valencia. Completely. And I think you love me too.”
Her breath catches. She tries to find the words she prepared in the three days since the library, the careful, reasonable argument she’s been rehearsing—but standing here, on this balcony, with the park spread out dark and silver below them and his voice saying her name like that, all of it dissolves.
“This isn’t the place—”
“This is exactly the place.” The certainty in his voice isn’t arrogance. It’s desperation, she realizes—the stripped-down desperation of someone who has been patient for as long as he can stand to be. “We’ve been performing for society for weeks. Let’s stop. Just us. Right now. Do you love me?”
He’s looking at her with such intensity that she feels it physically, a warmth that starts in her sternum and radiates outward.
She could lie.
She’s been lying—not in words, exactly, but in the careful way she’s kept herself from finishing sentences, from letting silences become what they wanted to become. She could deflect, could say something true-but-small that doesn’t cost her anything. She could maintain the safety of the arrangement they agreed to, the clean professional distance of fake.
Or she could tell the truth.
“Yes,” Valencia whispers. Her voice is barely audible over the wind off the park. “Yes, I love you. I’ve loved you for weeks. Maybe months. Maybe since you defended me to your mother without hesitating, or since you sat with me at two in the morning because you knew I was homesick, or since I watched you look at Jules like being his father is the best thing you have ever done in your life.” She exhales unsteadily. “I love you completely and it terrifies me.”
Something in his face opens—relief and longing and something so unguarded it almost hurts to look at. He closes the distance between them slowly, deliberately, giving her time to step back.
She doesn’t step back.
His hands come up to cup her face, gentle and certain, and he looks at her the way she’s been pretending she doesn’t notice him looking at her. “Don’t be terrified. Be with me. Really. No more fake dating. No more public-only. A real relationship—us, together, not for anyone else.”
“The complications—”
“We’ll figure them out. Together. That’s what together means.” He searches her face. “I can’t keep doing this halfway. I want all of you. I want real. Please.”
Valencia is trembling—not from the cold, the air is mild tonight, but from the sheer effort of standing at the edge of something and not knowing whether it’s a cliff or a door. This is the moment. She can feel it with the same clarity she felt it three nights ago, the same precipice, the same pull toward him that is almost gravitational.
“I’m scared,” she admits.
“I know. Me too.” He says it without embarrassment, which is somehow the most undoing thing of all. “But I’m more scared of losing you. Of wasting time pretending when we could have real. Please, Valencia. Choose this. Choose us.”
And looking into his eyes—seeing the love there, the desperation, the absolute certainty of a man who has decided—Valencia almost says yes.
Almost.
But the city is down there, eight floors below, with its cameras and its columns and its need to make stories out of people. And her mother’s voice is in her head, the way it always is when she’s about to do something that will cost her. And the word nanny is still in the air between them, the professional distance they began with, the fundamental fact of their situation.
Reality crashes in all at once, cold as the wind off the park.
“We can’t,” she whispers, and pulls back.
His hands drop. “Valencia—”
“I work for you, Dominic.” She hates that her voice is steady. She hates that she’s saying this at all. “I’m your employee. You’re my employer. There’s a power dynamic between us that doesn’t disappear because we have feelings. It doesn’t disappear because we want it to.”
“Then quit.” He says it urgently, leaning toward her. “Be with me for real—”
“And live on what?” The question comes out sharper than she intends, because she’s been trying not to say it for weeks and it’s been sitting there, getting sharp edges. “I send money home every month. My family depends on my income—my mother’s medication, my brother’s tuition, my father’s bad seasons. I can’t just quit.”
“I would help—”
“That’s exactly the problem.” She steps back, and the balcony railing is cold against her spine. “Any money you give me makes me dependent on you. Makes this relationship unequal in a way that never goes away, that taints everything. I won’t be your kept woman.”
“That’s not what I’m proposing—”
“But that’s how it would look.” Her throat is tight. “The nanny who slept with her boss. The gold-digger who trapped the billionaire. Those aren’t just stories other people tell—they become the story I have to live with, every time someone looks at me. I have dignity, Dominic. I have pride. I can’t—”
She steps back again, physical distance the only thing she can manage right now.
“I’m sorry. We can’t.”
“Valencia, please—”
“I need to go back inside.”
She turns before he can say anything else, because if he says one more thing in that voice she will say yes to something she isn’t able to live with—or she’ll start crying in front of the string quartet and eight hundred of New York’s most observant people—and she pushes back through the glass doors with her chin up and her face composed.
She leaves him on the balcony.
Almost. They almost kissed. Almost became something real and acknowledged. Almost chose each other out loud, in the open, with the park as witness. But reality is cold and specific and doesn’t bend to want, and it stopped her the way it always does—not cruelly, just firmly. The way a lock sounds when it catches.
She can’t be with him.
Not like this. Not while the architecture of power between them is so built-in, so structural, that any attempt to bridge it just recreates the imbalance in a new shape. Not when everything that society would see when it looked at them would be: the nanny, the billionaire, the oldest story in the world.
Valencia returns to the gala wearing her composure like a second gown. She finds people she recognizes, makes conversation about things she doesn’t care about, laughs at the right moments. She does it all correctly and she does it alone and she does not look toward the balcony doors.
Dominic comes back inside a few minutes later.
They don’t speak for the rest of the evening. They move through the same rooms, smile at the same people, accept congratulations from a board member who calls them a lovely couple and means it entirely. But they don’t look at each other—not directly, not once. The fake dating has never felt more fake or more costly than it does right now, with real love in the air between them like smoke from something that almost caught fire.
In the car going home, silence holds the space where the music was. Dominic sits on his side of the seat and looks out at the city, his profile cut sharp against the passing lights. Valencia keeps her eyes on her hands in her lap, her fingers still where they usually curl into his.
Both miserable. Both present with the specific misery of loving someone they cannot figure out how to have.
At the penthouse, the elevator opens and Valencia moves toward the hallway. She hears him say her name behind her—quiet, careful, like he’s trying not to startle a bird—and she stops walking without turning around.
“Goodnight, Mr. St. Clair.”
The words cost her something. She feels it leave her as she says it, the small warmth she’s been carrying around since she stopped thinking of him that way. Back to formal. Back to employer and employee, with all the clean, safe distance that implies.
She hears him go still behind her.
She walks to her room and closes the door and locks it, and the click of the lock sounds like punctuation at the end of a sentence she didn’t want to finish.
Then she sits on the edge of her bed and cries.
She cries for the balcony and the way he said please and the feeling of his hands on her face. She cries because she loves him and because she can’t have him, not on terms that leave her intact. She cries because the world they live in makes those two facts coexist without resolution, and there’s nothing romantic about that—it’s just the weight of circumstance, ordinary and relentless.
Down the hall, Dominic sits on the edge of his own bed in the dark.
He doesn’t turn on a lamp. The room fills slowly with the ambient light of the city through floor-to-ceiling glass—that particular Manhattan luminescence that is neither night nor day, that belongs entirely to this city. He sits in it and thinks about the kiss that didn’t happen. About the relationship they can’t have. About the woman three doors away who told him she loved him and then walked away from him in the same breath.
He thinks about what she said. About the power dynamic that is built into the very structure of their lives, that can’t be wished away or negotiated around. About the way she said I have dignity like it was something she’d fought for and would fight to keep.
He thinks: I know. I know you do.
And somehow, impossibly, that’s not enough. He loves her. She loves him. And they are standing on either side of something that love alone cannot bridge.
The city glows outside his window, indifferent and enormous. Dominic sits in the almost-dark and doesn’t know how to fix it.
But he knows this: almost is the cruelest word he’s ever known.
Not almost didn’t happen. Almost is worse than didn’t happen. Almost is: it was right there, within reach, and you know exactly what it felt like against your fingertips before it was gone.
He sits with that.
He sits with it for a very long time.
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