Updated Feb 23, 2026 • ~14 min read
POV: Valencia
The fake dating continues.
Awkwardly. Painfully. With the particular strained quality of something that used to be manageable and has since become something else entirely. They go to the cancer research gala—committed months ago, no canceling without causing talk—and they hold hands and smile for the cameras and navigate the evening without once looking directly at each other. Valencia wears a black gown and does the small talk on autopilot and thinks, this is what it would feel like to be a very well-dressed ghost.
In public they are a couple. In private they are two people maintaining careful, excruciating distance across a shared space, speaking only when necessity requires it and keeping the register of those exchanges professional, light, and entirely hollow.
Not speaking unless necessary.
Both miserable.
Both in love.
Both too stubborn, or too hurt, or too scared to bridge the gap that keeps widening between them every day they don’t.
Valencia hates the distance—the specific quality of it, the fact that it’s a silence she can feel rather than just observe. She hates pretending for cameras when the pretending has become its own kind of truth, inverted. She hates the way the penthouse feels wrong now, too large and too quiet in the hours when Jules is at school and Dominic is in his office and she’s sitting in the library with a book she hasn’t actually been reading for forty minutes. She hates the waste of it, the perfectly good love going nowhere.
But what she hates most is the awareness of what it’s doing to Jules.
Because Jules notices. Of course he does—he has always noticed things that people think are invisible to him, filed them away in his careful interior self and produced them later, precise and unnerving. He noticed three days into Valencia’s first week that she was homesick before she’d said a word about it. He noticed which of his father’s smiles were real and which were for appearances. He noticed the exact moment that Dominic started looking at Valencia differently, and he’d given her a small private nod about it, as if they were sharing a secret.
He notices now that something has broken, and he is watching both of them with the specific worried attention of a child who loves the adults in his life and understands intuitively that their happiness is somehow bound up with his own.
One afternoon Valencia is reading in the library—really reading, finally, in the late light that comes through the west windows and turns the room amber—when she hears small feet on the hardwood. Jules appears at the doorway, socked feet and a wrinkled sweater, elephant tucked under his arm. He surveys her for a moment with his gray eyes, which are so exactly like his father’s that it still catches her sometimes when the light is right.
Then he climbs onto the couch beside her, close enough that their shoulders touch, and looks up at her.
“Val?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Are you and Daddy fighting?”
Her chest tightens. She sets down her book. “What makes you think that?”
Jules is quiet for a moment, thinking about how to explain. “You don’t talk anymore. You look sad. Daddy looks sad. And you call him ‘Mr. St. Clair’ when you talk to him. Like you’re strangers. You never called him that before.”
Out of the mouths of babes—and the thing about Jules is that he notices not the large dramatic gestures but the small precise ones, the ones that people forget children can read.
“We’re working through something complicated,” Valencia says carefully.
“Is it because you love him?”
The question arrives without preamble, without warning, delivered in Jules’s particular straightforward way—the way he has of treating honesty as the obvious approach rather than the brave one.
“Jules—”
“I know you do.” He shifts closer to her. “You look at him the same way Mommy used to. Happy and sad at the same time. Like you’re glad he’s there but it hurts somehow.”
Valencia’s throat closes. “How do you remember that? You were so young when—”
“I remember some things,” Jules says simply. “Like how she smiled when he came home. Like you used to smile. Except now you don’t smile when you see him. You just look sad.”
Valencia puts her arm around him and he leans into her, and she breathes through the specific ache of this—of being seen this clearly by a five-year-old, of having Amelie St. Clair’s memory rise up in the room between them, gentle and unasked.
“Do you love him?” Jules presses.
How do you lie to a child asking the most honest question in the world, with his elephant under his arm and his father’s eyes looking up at you with the absolute expectation that you will tell him the truth?
You don’t.
“Yes,” Valencia says. “I do. But love is complicated.”
Jules considers this with a seriousness she recognizes—the same face Dominic makes when he’s working something out. “Mommy used to say love is simple,” he offers. “She said you just choose each other every day. That’s all it is.”
Amelie.
Through her son, through the memory of a woman Valencia never met, cutting straight and clean to the thing Valencia has been arguing herself around for weeks. You just choose each other every day.
“Your mommy was very wise,” Valencia says softly.
“So why don’t you choose Daddy? And why doesn’t he choose you?”
“Because there are obstacles. Things that make it complicated.”
“Like what?” Jules asks, with the reasonable impatience of someone who has been given an explanation that doesn’t explain anything.
“Like—I work for your dad. Which makes our relationship unequal in ways that are hard to explain.”
“You could quit!”
“I need money to send to my family. Every month. My mama needs medicine, and my brother is in school, and my dad’s work isn’t always steady. I can’t just stop having income.”
Jules absorbs this. “Daddy has lots of money.”
“I know.” Valencia feels the familiar ache of the irony of it. “That’s part of the problem.”
Jules looks at her with perfect bewilderment, the pure bewilderment of a child encountering an adult logic that genuinely makes no sense to him yet. “Having money is a problem?”
“When one person has a lot and the other person has a little, it creates an imbalance,” Valencia says. “It makes things unequal in ways that matter, even if both people love each other and want the same things.”
“But if you love each other, shouldn’t you just be together?” His voice is earnest, pressing the point with total conviction. “Isn’t that the main thing? Isn’t that what matters most?”
“In a perfect world, yes. The real world is messier than that.”
Jules is quiet. He’s looking at the elephant in his lap, turning it over slowly in his hands, and Valencia watches him and thinks: he’s processing something. Getting ready to say something he’s thought about before and hasn’t said out loud.
“Mommy died in the car,” he says. “I was there. I saw it.”
Valencia holds him tighter. “I know, baby. I’m so sorry.”
His voice is steady—not detached, not brave in the performed sense, just the quiet steadiness of a child who has lived with a thing long enough to be able to speak it. “I stopped talking after because I was scared. I thought if I said the wrong thing, more bad things would happen. Like if I talked, someone else I loved would go away.”
“Oh, sweetheart—”
“Like I had to be very still and very quiet to keep everyone safe.” He looks up at her. “But then you came. And you were nice. And you read to me and you didn’t make me talk. You just sat with me. And you kept coming back.”
Valencia is crying now, quietly, not trying to hide it.
“You just loved me anyway,” Jules says. “Even when I wouldn’t talk. You kept coming anyway.”
“I do love you. So much.”
“And one day I fell and hurt my knee and I was scared and crying and you came and you said ‘you’re so brave, Jules’ and I wanted to tell you I loved you back. So I said ‘Val.'” He looks up at her, remembering. “Remember that?”
“That was the best day I’ve had in years.”
“You know why I could talk again?”
She waits.
“Because I figured out that bad things happen even when you’re quiet. Being quiet didn’t keep Mommy safe. So there’s no point being quiet. But good things happen when you’re brave.” He looks at her with perfect gravity. “Choosing the people you love is brave. That’s what I think.”
Valencia cries in earnest then—no longer trying to keep it contained, not on top of this, not on top of this child sitting beside her with his stuffed elephant and his dead mother’s wisdom and his five-year-old’s complete and devastating clarity about the things that matter.
She holds him close and he lets her, patient and small and warmer than anything else in the penthouse.
“You’re so smart,” she manages eventually.
“So you and Daddy should be brave,” Jules says into her shoulder, pragmatic about it. “Choose each other. Even if it’s scary.”
“It’s not as simple as that—”
“Why not?”
“Because adults make things complicated.”
“Then uncomplicate them.” He pulls back to look at her, and the expression on his face is so purely reasonable that it almost breaks her. “That’s what you always tell me. You always say you can choose to make things harder or choose to make them easier. You said that.”
She did say that. She said it about building with blocks, about getting dressed in the morning, about whether to be afraid of the dark. She meant it for him and he has applied it to her and there is absolutely nothing she can say to that.
“I’ll try,” she says. “I promise I’ll try.”
“Good.” He settles back against her, apparently satisfied. “Because I want you to stay forever. Not just as my nanny. As my family. The real kind.”
“You’re already my family,” Valencia tells him. “No matter what happens with your dad. That part is real and it’s permanent. You’re mine. Okay?”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He hugs her—sudden and fierce, the way children hug when they mean it entirely—and then after a moment he tilts his head up with the expression of someone who has one more item on the agenda.
“Can you talk to Daddy? Please? He’s sad all the time. He thinks I don’t notice but I notice.”
“I’m sad too.”
“Then fix it!” He delivers this with the air of someone stating the obvious. “Grown-ups always say ‘use your words.’ So use your words. Both of you.”
Valencia laughs, a sound that comes out ragged around the edges. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I’ll try.”
That night, after Jules is in bed—after the bath and the three picture books and the extended negotiations about whether an elephant counts as a nighttime companion or a toy that should go on the shelf, all of which Jules wins—Valencia sits at the kitchen island with a cup of tea going cold in front of her.
Jules is right. She knows Jules is right. They are both miserable, both in love, both doing the thing that adults do when they’re afraid—hiding behind the complexity they’ve created and calling it reality. Jules’s logic is not wrong. His mother’s logic, inherited through him, is not wrong. You just choose each other every day.
But every time she and Dominic have tried to actually talk, it has collapsed into the same argument: class and money and power and the way those things don’t just disappear in the presence of love. It collapses because the obstacles are real, not invented. The fear is valid, not weakness.
Knowing that doesn’t make her less miserable. It just makes her precisely miserable, which is slightly worse.
She doesn’t go to Dominic’s office.
She finishes her tea and goes to bed, and lies awake for an hour listening to the building breathe around her, thinking about Amelie St. Clair saying you just choose each other every day, thinking about Jules saying being quiet didn’t keep Mommy safe.
Down the hall, Dominic sits in his office with the lights off.
He’s staring at his desk without seeing it, thinking about the conversation Jules initiated earlier in the evening—arriving in the office with his elephant and a very direct question: “Daddy, why aren’t you and Val together for real?”
He’d said: “It’s complicated, buddy.”
Jules had looked at him with profound, five-year-old impatience. “That’s what she said. But you love her. She loves you. What’s complicated about that?”
And the thing is—from Jules’s angle of vision, where love is the organizing principle and everything else is the stuff you figure out around it—nothing. Nothing is complicated about that. You love someone, you choose them, that’s the whole story.
But adult life is messy in ways Jules hasn’t learned to see yet. Power dynamics that don’t dissolve. Financial inequality that becomes emotional inequality over time. The social geometry of their situation that neither love nor good intentions can simply override. All of it real, all of it mattering, all of it standing between them.
Or can they just—
Dominic stops himself at that thought. He’s been around this loop before and it ends the same way: he comes up with a solution, the solution turns out to be some version of using money to fix a problem that money can’t fix, and he makes things worse while trying to make them better.
He doesn’t know what the answer looks like. He just knows he’s sitting in his dark office, three doors away from the woman he loves, and tomorrow they will perform again for whatever social event requires them, and the day after that, and the distance between them will keep being exactly this distance—intimate and vast and unsustainable.
Jules said: use your words.
Dominic sits with that.
He thinks about Amelie, the way she always knew when he was overthinking instead of acting, the way she’d say Dom, stop planning and start doing. He thinks about what she would make of this situation and decides she would find it absurd in the way only clear-eyed people can find absurdity in things they love.
He thinks about Valencia saying I want equality. I want a relationship where I’m not your charity case.
He thinks: what does that actually look like? Not as a concept. As a practice. What do I actually change, specifically, that creates what she’s asking for?
He doesn’t know yet.
He just knows he can’t keep sitting in this dark office, three doors away, loving her from the wrong side of an obstacle he hasn’t figured out how to actually dismantle.
Something has to change.
Not a gesture. Not a severance package. Something real.
He sits in the dark and tries to figure out what that is, and the city hums below him, and Jules sleeps down the hall holding his elephant, and Valencia lies awake with her cold tea, and all of them—in their separate rooms, in their separate silences—are waiting for the moment when one of the two stubborn adults in this story decides to be brave.
Not yet.
But the waiting has a different quality now. It has the quality of something close to its limit.
Soon.
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