Updated Feb 23, 2026 • ~13 min read
POV: Valencia
Maria’s couch is not comfortable. This is not a complaint — it’s simply a fact that Valencia has catalogued over the past three weeks with the detached precision of someone who has run out of larger things to think about. The cushions are slightly too soft and slightly too short, so that her feet hang off the armrest at night, and there’s a spring somewhere in the middle that she’s learned to avoid by sleeping on a specific diagonal angle. She’s become an expert in the couch’s geography. This is what three weeks of sleeping on it does to you.
One-bedroom apartment, two adults, one suitcase shoved under the coffee table and another against the wall. Her life in two bags, same as when she left, same as when she arrived.
Maria has been wonderful. That’s the honest truth, the thing Valencia holds onto when everything else feels impossible. Maria is supportive and non-judgmental and she has not once said “I told you so,” despite the fact that she did, in various indirect ways, tell her so. Warned her not to catastrophize. Warned her not to assume the worst before it arrived. Warned her that leaving at the first sign of real difficulty might be creating the disaster rather than escaping it.
And then Valencia left Dominic anyway.
So maybe the catastrophizing was warranted. Or maybe she created the disaster herself by walking out the door with her two bags and her dignity and leaving the rest behind. She turns this question over in her mind at night, in the diagonal position on the couch that avoids the spring, and she never arrives at a clean answer because there isn’t one. The truth sits somewhere uncomfortable in the middle: the situation was untenable, and she made it worse by running.
She’s been in Brooklyn for three weeks.
Three weeks of temp work — administrative jobs, data entry, the kind of quiet office labor that asks nothing of her and gives nothing back. She sits at other people’s desks and sorts other people’s files and watches the clock and thinks about Jules narrating dinosaur facts with the urgency of a breaking news anchor. She thinks about Dominic’s hands on her face. She thinks about a block tower in a room with a dinosaur theme, and a small boy who chose that particular morning to hand her a green block and start the long journey back to language.
She misses Jules in a way that has no clean edges to it. It’s not like missing a job or missing a neighborhood — it’s the specific, physical ache of missing someone who needed you, someone who looked at you and saw something permanent. She misses his chatter, his questions, the breathless way he’d deliver information he’d just learned as if she needed to know it immediately. Misses bedtime stories where he’d correct her dinosaur facts mid-sentence. Misses the mornings when he’d appear in the kitchen doorway still half-asleep, elephant tucked under one arm, and climb onto the barstool and wait for her to make him the specific kind of toast he liked. Misses being “V” — the particular way he said it, like it was its own word with its own weight.
And she misses Dominic, which is harder to sit with because with Jules the missing is clean, uncomplicated by guilt or anger or the awareness that she’d played some role in the ending. With Dominic it’s tangled. She misses his smile, the particular one that arrived slowly and always looked slightly surprised by itself, as if he hadn’t planned it. Misses morning coffee standing at the kitchen window when the city was still waking up. Misses the way he looked at her sometimes — not with the practiced attentiveness of a man performing feeling, but with something unguarded and almost helpless, the look of someone who has let something in that he didn’t entirely mean to.
She misses being in love.
She misses believing that it was enough.
But she holds her ground.
Dominic texts daily — she has kept the texts, has read each one more than once in the early morning hours when the spring in the couch is digging into her hip and sleep has abandoned her. They are careful, measured texts, not flooded with feeling, which somehow makes them harder. Miss you. Jules asks about you constantly. Hope you’re okay. She doesn’t respond. She composes responses in her head and deletes them before she types them, because going back without actual change is not a solution — it’s just a postponement. Going back means accepting that she’s secondary, that she’ll always be managed around rather than centered. And she refuses to accept that. Even if it costs her everything she wants.
Especially then.
Maria comes home on Friday afternoon with tabloids tucked under her arm, which is not her usual Friday habit, and the particular expression she wears when she has information she thinks Valencia needs and is trying to figure out how to deliver it.
“You should see these,” she says, spreading them across the coffee table with the decisive movement of someone laying out evidence.
Valencia looks. She doesn’t want to, but she looks.
The first headline catches her before she’s ready: “Tech Billionaire Restructures Empire.” She reads the article in pieces, bracing herself for the inevitable publicist-speak, but the facts are plain and verifiable. Dominic has named a new COO — someone senior, someone capable, someone who represents a genuine delegation of operational control rather than a ceremonial title. The sources quoted describe it as a substantive restructuring. “St. Clair is understood to be prioritizing family time following personal challenges.”
The second tabloid: “Devoted Dad: St. Clair Spotted at Park with Son.” A photograph of Dominic and Jules at the playground they used to go to on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Dominic is pushing Jules on the swings and he is actually there — not physically present while mentally elsewhere, not performing presence for a photographer’s benefit, but actually present, laughing at something Jules said, turned toward his son with his full attention.
The third is a business publication rather than a tabloid: “St. Clair Sets Work Boundaries, Cites Restructured Priorities.” The article describes hard limits on his hours, a regular schedule, a new policy around weekend communication that he apparently announced to his entire executive team. No more eighteen-hour days. Home by six. Weekends protected.
Valencia stares at the spread of papers on the coffee table.
“He’s actually changing,” Maria says, sitting down beside her. “These aren’t just promises — these are structural changes. Measurable ones.”
“Words are easy. Articles can be PR.” She says it because she needs to say it, needs to hear herself say it, needs to test whether it holds up.
It doesn’t, really.
“A COO isn’t words,” Maria says, with the patient directness of someone who has already thought this through. “That’s giving up operational control. For him, that’s enormous — you told me how much he hated delegating. Setting boundaries isn’t a press release, either. He told his executive team. That’s accountability, not performance.”
Valencia wants to believe it. She wants to very badly, and the wanting feels dangerous, because wanting has led her wrong before. She’d wanted to believe the relationship was sustainable and look where that got her. She’d wanted to believe love was enough and she has the couch spring in her hip to prove it isn’t.
“What if it doesn’t last?” she asks. “What if the guilt fades and he gets comfortable and the pattern comes back? I’ve seen him do it — pour himself into work until everything else disappears. What if that’s just who he is?”
“Or he’s learned something. Actually, genuinely learned it. People can change, V. Not always. But sometimes.”
“I can’t know that from three weeks of tabloid articles.”
“So what are you waiting for? Six months? A year? And what does he do in the meantime — keeps proving it to no one, while Jules keeps asking when you’re coming home?”
Valencia is quiet. Outside, someone on the street below is playing music from a car — something with bass that comes and goes with the traffic. The afternoon light in the apartment has gone that particular amber color it gets in late winter when the sun is low and everything looks slightly more significant than it is.
Her phone buzzes.
She picks it up, and it’s Dominic, and she reads it before she can decide not to.
I know I don’t deserve another chance. But I’m changing. Not just promises — actual changes. Hired a COO. Set hard boundaries. Started therapy. Home every night for Jules. Being the father he needs and the partner you deserve. Please let me prove it.
She reads it twice. Then she reads the word “therapy” again.
Therapy.
Dominic St. Clair — who has always treated his emotional landscape like proprietary information, who has never voluntarily made himself vulnerable to anyone in a professional context, who spent eighteen months after his wife’s death refusing to grieve in front of a single person — is in therapy. That’s not a performance. You can’t perform therapy. You sit in a room with someone and you take yourself apart and you try to understand the mechanisms, and it is uncomfortable and slow and nothing about it looks good from the outside, and you do it because you’ve decided to actually change rather than simply intend to.
She doesn’t respond.
She holds the phone and doesn’t respond, because she doesn’t know what to say, because every sentence she could type opens a door she’s not sure she’s ready to open.
But she’s thinking about it differently now. The idea of going back, which has been formless and frightening and tinged with the sense of defeat, has started to take on a different shape — not defeat, but possibility. Not surrender, but choice.
That night she dreams about Jules.
The dream isn’t dramatic; it’s just an ordinary morning — the kitchen, the toast, the barstool, Jules sitting with his elephant waiting for breakfast. In the dream she’s making the toast and Jules is talking about something, some fact he’s discovered, his voice carrying that particular quality it had when he was fully himself, fully present, fully healed. She wakes up at four in the morning and the dream evaporates the way they always do, but the feeling of it stays — the specific grief of something real that’s gone missing.
She lies on the diagonal on Maria’s couch and stares at the ceiling and lets herself feel how much she misses him. Really feels it, without the protective layer of righteous self-preservation she’s been wrapping around everything. The missing is enormous. It doesn’t diminish any of the reasons she left, but it sits beside them and refuses to be ignored.
Maria finds her in the kitchen at five in the morning making coffee, red-eyed, wrapped in a blanket.
“You’re miserable,” Maria says, not unkindly.
“I’m fine.”
Maria gives her the look. The look that says: we both know that’s not true, and we also both know I’m not going to pretend otherwise. “You’re in love with him. You love Jules. You miss them every single day. And according to those articles, Dominic is genuinely doing the work. So what are you waiting for? What does he have to do that he hasn’t already done?”
“I’m waiting to know it’s real. To know it’ll hold. To know I’m not just — convenient. That when the guilt fades and the novelty of being changed wears off, I won’t find myself back in exactly the same position.”
“You will never know that.” Maria pours herself coffee and sits down across from Valencia at the small kitchen table. “That’s just true. You’ll never have a guarantee. No one ever does. That’s not what relationships are — they’re not guaranteed outcomes. They’re decisions you keep making.” She wraps both hands around her mug. “The question isn’t whether it’s certain. The question is whether you trust him enough to try.”
“What if I go back and he disappoints me again?”
“Then you leave again. You did it once. But at least you’ll have tried. At least you won’t have thrown away something real because you were too scared to risk being wrong.”
Valencia stares into her coffee. The apartment is very quiet at this hour — just the distant sound of the city beginning, a garbage truck somewhere, the hiss of a bus. She thinks about the word Maria used. Try.
“I hurt Jules when I left,” she says. “I saw his face. I heard him begging. I broke his heart and I did it anyway, because I told myself it was the right thing to do. And maybe it was. But it was still a wound.”
“And staying in a situation where you were being actively diminished would have been a different kind of wound. You modeled something for him — that you matter. That your needs matter. That’s not nothing.”
“Then why does it feel so wrong?”
Maria is quiet for a moment. Then: “Because love is complicated. Because the right choice can still hurt. Because being correct about something doesn’t make it feel better.”
Valencia’s phone buzzes on the table between them.
She reaches for it, reads it.
Jules asked when you’re coming home. I told him I didn’t know. He said, “tell her soon.” I miss you too. I love you. And I’m proving it. However long that takes.
Home.
Jules asked when she’s coming home.
Not “back.” Home.
Like the penthouse is where she belongs. Like her leaving was temporary and her return is simply a matter of timing. Like the question isn’t whether she comes back but when.
She sets the phone down carefully, as if it’s something fragile. She can feel the crack in her resolve — not a collapse, not a decision, just a hairline fracture letting light through. The smallest amount of light.
Maybe.
Maybe Dominic really has changed, in the ways that matter, the hard slow ways that don’t make good headlines. Maybe therapy and COOs and hard boundaries and being home by six every night add up to something real and lasting. Maybe people do, sometimes, actually learn. Maybe the crack in the door is worth opening.
She doesn’t respond. She’s not ready. But she’s no longer closing herself off from the idea, and that’s different from where she was yesterday.
She sits with Maria’s coffee in the quiet kitchen and holds Dominic’s words and Jules’s question and her own tentative, frightened, furiously protected hope. The sun is beginning to come up over Brooklyn, gray and tentative, and the city is waking up around them, and Valencia sits in the middle of it and lets herself feel the full weight of missing them.
Missing them and maybe — just maybe — believing that going home is still possible.
Not yet.
But the word “yet” is doing different work than it was yesterday. Yesterday it was a door shut. Today it’s a door that’s simply not open yet, and there’s a difference. A real one.
And that, she thinks, might be enough to start with.
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