Sweet Romance15 min read
"I want a divorce, Isaiah." — The Call That Broke Two Lifetimes
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“You promised me.”
I hear my own voice and it sounds like metal.
“I said what?” Isaiah Bonnet asks from the other end, calm as a lake that never moves.
“I promised myself I would stop waiting.” I press the phone harder to my ear. “Isaiah, we should get a divorce.”
Silence eats the line for a beat. Then he says, “Think it through.”
“I have,” I answer. “Three years. Half a marriage. I remember everything now. I remember the rest.” My throat tightens. “I’m done.”
He breathes out like someone who has swallowed cold air. “You’re impulsive, Jewel.”
“I am done being a thing you use,” I say. “Goodbye.”
I hang up before he can say anything mean. My hand shakes.
“You’re doing the right thing.” Fiona Conley says it like comfort and not a command. She sits across from me in that beige apartment I can barely afford, and she squeezes my fingers.
“Right for what?” I ask.
“Right for you.” Fiona tilts her head and her eyes are steady. “You called him, didn’t you?”
“I did,” I say. “I called Isaiah.”
“You called the iceberg,” she mutters.
I smile despite myself. Fiona had been my friend since the first chorus line I ever stepped onto. She doesn’t know the whole story. Who could blame her? Who would believe the past life spilling into the present like a bad scene?
I keep my mouth shut. I have been dreaming the same scenes for two years. Night after night I wake with salt in my throat, images stuck behind my eyes: a cold throne room, a crown heavy and hot, a man with eyes like iron who loved me and then threw me away. In the dream I die on snow. In the dream he stands over me and listens to me beg.
“Is it the show?” Fiona asks. “You always wanted the empress part.”
“It’s not the show,” I say. “It’s everything. ‘Frostfall’ — the script is the same dream. I took the role because the script felt like home. Because my nights are already full of it.”
“You took a big risk,” she says.
“I know.” I fold the contract on my lap and stare at Isaiah’s name in the credits. He is one of the investors. He came to the table read. He came with Kiana Nelson, the girl he wants to push.
At the press launch the lights were bright and sharp. I stand second row, one of many faces the cameras could ignore, and his back fills my vision.
“Jewel, be charming,” Rowan Stevens says and taps my shoulder like I am a vase.
I lift my head and the wire above shivers.
“Isaiah—” someone gasps.
I see the rig snap. The spotlight falls.
“Kiana!” a voice screams. “Isaiah, save her!”
I watch a frame of my dream touch the stage: a man releases my hand without looking back. He drops his arm to shield Kiana. The lamp hits the floor where I was standing.
Pain lights up like a flare across my chest and I go down.
I wake up in a hospital bed. My ribs hurt. My phone has a feed of gifs: me on the floor, Isaiah standing stiff by Kiana’s side. The world becomes savage with commentary overnight.
“He didn’t even reach for you,” someone typed.
I scroll and my stomach falls through the floor. Isaiah’s assistant, Jacob Fontana, shows up at the car, tablet in hand.
“Boss, there are comments,” Jacob says. “Do you want them taken down?”
Isaiah blinks at the screen like a man who has decided he has more interesting things to do. “How is the heat on Frostfall?”
Jacob blinks back. “Number one on every platform.”
Isaiah looks at me, flat and small in his phone, and drops the tablet on the seat. “Let it burn.”
I go home with a scar in my chest and a decision in my pocket. The past and the present line up like two mirrors facing each other and I can’t tell which reflection is real.
Two days later, I sign the divorce papers.
*
“Do you believe in past lives?” I ask the room and not one person looks up.
“It’s new material,” Rowan tells me. He is chewing the corner of a printout and smiling thin. “But you did a great job in the chair scene. Honestly, your fall boosted our numbers.”
“You call that support?” I say. “You staged a scandal and called it support.”
Rowan does not look guilty. He had sent that photo that night, the one that made it look like I invited the publicity. He had told Kiana’s team who to smile for. He made me fall into the trap of being the tragic woman from a cheap story.
Rowan clears his throat. “The industry works the way it works, Jewel. I do what’s best for you. You owe me gratitude.”
Gratitude. The word tastes like bile.
“You owe me nothing,” I say.
Rowan laughs and the laugh is thin. “You need the role. This is how you get it.”
“I don’t want what you sell me anymore.”
“You’d be nothing without us,” he says.
I drop my gaze to the contract and think of the last line of the dream — the command to die. I will not accept that.
“Take me off ‘Frostfall,’” I tell him. “Replace me.”
Rowan’s mouth opens and closes like a fish. “You want to leave the series? Are you sane?”
“I want my life back,” I say. “Later that night, the agent screamed into the phone. He could smell money lost. He begged. I was made to bite my lip and keep going.
I go to the temple on my day off because Fiona said the abbott there, Ulysses Dietrich, can help with things mind cannot.
“You are tied to a story you do not remember,” Ulysses says when I tell him about the recurring nights. He speaks slow and looks younger than his gray robe should allow. “Someone cannot let go.”
“Who?” I ask.
He looks at me like he’s reading a book. “Sometimes the one who wronged you hangs onto their memories, too. That pulls everyone back.”
I think of Isaiah standing by Kiana as the light fell. I think of the emperor in the dream whose crown weighs heavy on his head.
“Help me,” I say.
For the first time, Ulysses studies my face and does not smile. “You know the answer.”
I leave and the world is small enough to swallow me whole. The set is a hive of whispers. Kiana laughs like a bell. Isaiah ties his cufflinks and doesn’t look my way.
“You’re here for the opening,” Rowan says, friendly poison. “Isaiah came too. He asked for you.”
He did not seem to want me. He had not once texted since the fall. But he had been at the launch just to add a gloss of legitimacy to Kiana.
“I should go talk to him,” I say, but Rowan shakes his head.
“He won’t see you.”
“He’s a man,” I say. “Men always see.”
I walk anyway.
Isaiah looks at me like he looks at a file. We have been married three years in name and nothing more. He knows all the contracts that bound us. He knows none of the pieces of me.
“You’re the empress role?” he asks without heat.
“Yes.” My smile is a knife. I reach out — a ridiculous, foolish gesture — and press a tissue to his lip where red from Kiana’s lipstick has left a ghost.
He does not look surprised. “Careful.”
“You don’t even know which hand to use to say thank you.” I murmured.
He catches my wrist, not hard, but enough. The world tightens.
“You’re Jewel Lorenz,” he says. “You should know your place.”
My name tastes like coal in my mouth.
“I’m your wife,” I say. “Remember that.”
He looks at me a long moment, then lets go and the silence hits me like winter.
*
After the hospital, after edits and viral clips, the director replaces me. Rowan smiles like a man who has just won at cards.
“You will be back,” Fiona says, but she does not know how to make the temple show me how to untie the knot in my chest.
I take the work Rowan hands me— a reality dating show called Love Sky. It pays well. It pays for my father’s debts and the last of the hospital bills. I agree because the past is a debt I cannot erase with money alone, but it helps.
The show becomes a stage of new dangers. There, in a glass villa live eight strangers. One of them is Lincoln Archer.
He is a surprise of bone and anger. He has the face that stops people, and somehow it matches the image of my brother in the dream — the small boy who died with a stone of jade in his hand.
When I meet Lincoln the first morning on the show, my knees betray me. He looks at me like he recognizes me without knowing why.
“Hi,” he says, slow and sharp. “I’m Lincoln.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m Jewel.”
The camera clicks and the chat explodes. “They look like siblings,” the fans say. They spin it into “Wen-family Couple.” The world is hungry and names everything that moves.
Gavin Haas is there too — the film actor I have loved since I was small. He smiles at me like the kind man in the river scenes in my dream. He is gentle and beloved. He becomes my assigned partner for the first challenge.
But even the show cannot contain the tension with Isaiah. One night, during a broadcast, I am halfway through a staged smile when the doors slam and Isaiah walks in.
“What are you doing here?” I whisper on the mic and my voice goes out to thousands of people.
“I’m here because my investment is here,” Isaiah says. His voice is precisely controlled. “Also, because I wanted to see you.”
The way he says it shakes the crew. He is icy and he is close. He cuts the air like a blade.
“Stay away,” I tell him, and the cameras love us.
He watches me in the days that follow. He acts like a man who does not care, but his eyes map my small moves. He sits by the live feed and studies me. He blocks producers when they suggest edits. He tells his assistant to put money into the show.
“You’re acting like you own the scene,” Jacob tells him.
“I’m protecting my asset.” Isaiah's voice is quiet, and the room goes softer.
Sometimes, he drags me into a quiet corner and asks the strangest things.
“Do you dream?” he asks one night.
“Sometimes.” I don’t tell him the part where I wake with a cold weight in my chest.
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“You lied,” he says. “You wanted the empress role because the dreams are like home.”
“You don’t know me.” My voice is brittle. I push past and leave him with the air cooling behind me.
He doesn’t follow. He never does exactly what I think he will.
*
The show throws us into small challenges. There is a day on the lake where Gavin and I ferry tourists, and Lincoln and his quiet glare are my anchor. We bring grandparents across and children clap for songs I remember from nowhere.
Isaiah arrives in a suit and a boat. He sits and tells the driver to take him across.
“I’m your customer,” he says to me with a cold tilt of his head.
I smile and step back. Gavin rows, but the weather sours. A child splashes. I slip and the world is water and air and cold.
Isaiah moves faster than I thought him capable. He plunges. Gavin goes after him.
I come up sputtering, lifted by hands that are both stranger and not. He holds me and whispers my name like confession.
“Jewel,” he says, voice thick. “Jewel, are you all right?”
I cannot answer because the dream and the water and his lips all crash into each other.
He collapses on a shore bench and is rushed to the small clinic. He goes grey. He recalls pieces; he trembles. I find him in a hospital cot, and for the first time in years he says, small and broken, “I dreamt of you again. I called you by the old name.”
The old name is the one the emperor called his wife in the other life.
“Don’t.” My breath is small. “Don’t say that word.”
He looks at me because he is a man with questions now. “I saw it. I saw us. I remember more than I should.”
Something unlocks inside him. The arrogance slips. For the first time he seems a man staring at a cliff's edge and realizing the drop is fact.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and the words are crude but honest.
“Sorry for what?” I ask.
“For leaving you when you fell.” His gaze is raw. “For leaving when the light fell. For everything.”
I don’t know whether to believe it. Memory is a sharp blade. I have learned to lift it to my chest and feel the cold.
“You saved Kiana,” I say. “You didn’t save me.”
He swallows and looks at the bandaged bruise along my ribs. “I’m sorry.”
I look at him and finally speak the truth I have been hiding. “I don’t want apologies anymore. I want a life that’s mine.”
He nods. “Then take it.”
We say nothing for a long time.
*
The big day arrives — the press conference where the truth spills. I have been collecting evidence quietly. I have recorded Rowan and his cohorts arranging the viral picture, offering money to a paparazzi account to push the narrative that I sought publicity. I have messages: Rowan’s text asking for “a little push,” a producer’s voice telling the pap to upload at a precise time. Fiona helped — she is good with a phone and brave with a plan. Lincoln and Gavin will testify if called. Even Jacob, Isaiah’s assistant, felt guilty watching the way things shifted and left a paper trail on an old hard drive.
I call a press conference.
“Jewel? Are you sure?” Fiona asks.
“I am sure,” I say.
The hall fills with cameras, and there are many faces I expect: Rowan in his tailored suit, the photographer who sold the footage, and the small account that lit the fire. Isaiah does not need to be told; his presence is a quiet thunder.
I step to the podium. My hands tremble, but my voice does not.
“You all saw the clip of me at the opening,” I begin. “You all watched the video and made a story. I’m here to tell you what you did not see.”
A hush. The live feed spikes.
“I fell because a light rig pulled free. I was injured. But the pictures someone pushed told a different story. They called it career theater. That narrative cost me my role.”
I play the messages on the screen. Rowan’s words pop in bright text. “Push this,” his message reads. “Make her look like she wanted the attention.”
“You staged it,” Gavin says from the side, and his voice booms. “You priced it.”
Rowan’s face changes. “You’re lying,” he says, too late.
“No,” Gavin answers. “I was there. I saw you negotiate with the pap. You offered a thousand for the upload. You demanded a photo of Jewel falling to make it look dramatic.”
Rowan’s jaw tightens. He holds himself like a dam about to break.
“Rowan Stevens, you betrayed your client. You marketed her pain as content,” I say. “You turned an injury into a sale.”
He is red as the stage lights. “You think your life is worse than my reputation? I built careers.”
“You built a lie,” I say back.
Then Isaiah steps up. He is very quiet. “I will confirm what Ms. Lorenz has said,” he tells the room. “Rowan sent the posts. He arranged with the paparazzo. He was the origin.”
The crowd gasps.
Rowan starts to speak but Gavin hit record with his phone and plays the voice message — Rowan negotiating payment. It is the sound of a man deciding to trade someone else's pain for a bump in favor.
The journalists move fast. Within hours the accounts linked to Rowan's agency are audited. Sponsors pull their offers and Rowan's agency loses its top clients. The paparazzo who sold the footage is exposed for selling staged content repeatedly. The little account that boosted the post is banned and its owners are unmasked.
Rowan tries to lie, tries to plead that it was industry standard; his words fall flat. Former clients speak up online. “I never knew he’d do this.” An influencer posts proof of similar schemes.
By the end of the week, Rowan’s phone rings and rings and rings. His deals dry up. His manager sends a message: “We have to cut ties.”
The agency fails to renew its biggest contract. Row after row of producers step away. Rowan sits in his empty conference room and watches his calendar scrubbed. He goes on camera to apologize in a way that sounds rehearsed and shallow. The internet doesn't accept it. The old articles about his “scouting” strategies are re-posted. His name becomes a marketable negative.
At a weekend hearing where legal teams gather, one of Rowan’s known partners stands and says, “We cannot associate.” He signs a public statement: Rowan Stevens will not represent our artists.
Rowan's collapse is not dramatic in a single moment; it is slow and detailed: investors call back, sponsors withdraw, the agency's bank account is frozen pending investigation into their marketing inflows. A documentary journalist posts evidence of his patterns. The feeds that once cheered him now clip his smug smile and call it the beginning of a downfall.
People who used to send him dinner and invites unfollow and block. He loses not only money but the network that gave him power. His staff quits. The paparazzo goes to jail for falsifying documents. The small online account is stripped of privileges and dragged into court.
Rowan kneels in a hospital lobby at some point — an old man who kept his power by hurting younger people. The world records the moment. He begs for help from people he burned. They film him and the video becomes another trending clip: the predator humbled.
“Do you feel better?” Gavin asks me when the story clears.
“No,” I say. “But I feel safer.”
“You did it,” Fiona beams. “You did it and you came out clean.”
I look at Isaiah. He is watching Rowan’s ruin without glee. He looks more like a man who spent years believing in a wrong thing and now has to pick up the pieces.
“You could have left me to the machines,” I say suddenly. “You could have let the rumor steamroller my life.”
He turns to me. “I was part of it,” he says plainly. “I stood by because I didn’t understand. I thought my silence was protection. It wasn’t.”
“You were part of it,” I repeat. The truth is weirdly freeing.
“That’s why I want to fix what I can.” His fingers find mine for a second. He says nothing else and I let the silence speak.
*
Weeks pass. The temple once more becomes a place I go when the echoes are too loud. Ulysses watches me with those eyes that know more than they let show.
“You’ve started to remember,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “Isaiah remembers too.”
“Good,” he says. “That means the ties are loosening. But remember: a life’s debt can be paid in many ways. Be careful what you ask of memory.”
I nod. I have asked the memory to work for me and it has. Isaiah begins to come to the set not as an investor but as a man who wants to know who I truly am. He watches me often, sometimes leaving before filming. He refuses to edit me out. He speaks to crew on my behalf. He shows up in small ways no one else sees.
“You changed,” Lincoln says one night in the villa kitchen, setting a plate down. “You used to be quieter.”
“I used to be someone else,” I say.
“Good other,” he says. He winks and hands me a mug. He has been a constant warmth. He asks nothing and gives a lot. He looks like my lost brother and yet is his own person. Fans call us “warm siblings.” I answer them because it makes them happy.
Gavin who plays gentle scenes with me off-camera now sends me a script he thinks I would love. He has a way of watching me that makes me want to be brave.
One night Isaiah stands in the doorway and watches me read the script. He steps closer.
“Finish it out loud,” he says.
I read the page and my voice cracks.
“You should take that offer,” he says. “It suits you.”
“You’re suddenly my book agent?” I smile.
“No,” he says. “I didn’t come to fight you. I came to tell you I’m sorry again. And to ask something that I can’t force on you. I want the truth.”
I set the script down and sit back. The hall is quiet except for the hum of the cooling fans.
“Then ask it,” I say.
He opens his mouth and the room narrows to his face. “Will you let me try to make it right? Not by words—by day-to-day things. By being visible when you need me. By protecting you when it’s real and getting out of the way when it’s not. By letting the past be the past if you want it to be.”
The past wants to be remembered. I doorways between two lives like someone carrying candles between rooms, afraid to spill wax on the floor.
“I don’t know how to trust,” I say. “I stopped trusting a long time ago.”
“Then let me rebuild it,” he says. “Slow. With small things.”
I give him a look. It is not warmth that floods me but the idea that he is asking and not demanding. He is asking to be part of a life that I choose.
“You can start by telling me why you stayed in the crowd when the light fell,” I say.
He looks ashamed. He tells me about the call he received as the light snapped — about a boardroom panic and a skewed instinct to keep his business safe. He explains how his silence felt like strategy and became cowardice.
“I don’t want your pity,” I say.
“It’s not pity,” he answers. “It’s a second chance.”
We try the slow life. Isaiah sits with me at shooting reads and brings the right coffee. He stands in the pouring rain with an umbrella over me when the press gets too close. He knocks on my dressing room and waits for an invite. He starts to leave little things on my table: a page from a book he thought I’d like, a tape with an old song on it. They are not grand gestures. They are not public enough for tabloids.
One evening, Ulysses finds us at the temple. He watches us under the paper lanterns and smiles like a man who’s read the last line of a long letter.
“You have both remembered,” he says. “Good. But now you must choose how to live forward.”
I look at Isaiah. I think of every time my heart broke in the cold of dream and how that hurt shaped me. I think of how he has been present. Present is different from perfect. It is ordinary and it is brave.
“I choose life,” I say.
Isaiah’s hands tremble when he answers. “I choose you.”
We do not marry again under banners and gold. We do not promise everything. We promise presence. We promise to speak when it is time to speak and to shut up when it is time to listen.
Rowan Stevens files for bankruptcy and loses his name; the producer who pushed him is blacklisted. The pap who staged viral hits goes to jail. The woman who wanted the main role—and who had been pushed by the machine—comes forward and says she was used. Her sentence is sympathy and a chance to rebuild. The industry learns, a little.
The feeds quiet. I have a new film offer — not an illusion of empress but a movie where a woman learns to be honest. Gavin will be the lead. Lincoln will be invited to a premiere. Isaiah will stand by me in the back row, not in front of cameras.
We go to the lake again weeks later, for no reason other than because the world was cruel there and because I wanted to feel the water without panic.
“You remember nights?” he asks quietly as he hands me a towel.
“Some,” I say. “Less. I decided to leave the worst on the shore.”
He looks at me like he is reading a map. “I will remember so you don’t have to.”
We fold the towel and walk. Fiona calls, we laugh. Lincoln organizes a small race, ridiculous and loud. Gavin plays us a song he wrote. The press comes because they always come. They take pictures. The pictures now show us together but not because of scandal. They show us because we chose to be.
One night, months in, he kneels on the studio floor with a small box.
“I know promises mean little,” he says, “but I want to keep choosing you.”
I let him stand and we move forward in fits and starts, like any two people do. The past is still there, like a shadow at noon. Sometimes it feels close and sharp. Other times it lies far behind, pale and manageable.
We do not erase what happened. We learn how to live with it.
“You’re still stubborn,” Isaiah says once in bed, fingers in mine.
“You don’t own stubborn,” I answer.
He laughs until the sound is small and happy in the dark.
At night, I sleep and sometimes the dreams come, but they are different now. They include a woman who steps off a wall and then turns around and walks back up. They include a man who reaches for her in time.
“Will you ever forget?” I ask him.
“No,” he says. “And I don’t want to.”
“Then hold me,” I say.
So he does. We hold on to the small things. We hold on to coffee cups and scripts and the scent of wet grass after the rain. We hold on to each other.
When I look at the phoenix crown once more, at a museum showing old props from history to sell tickets, I do not see the end of a life. I see a stage prop. I smile and move on.
That, to me, becomes the truest ending — not a final line on a tombstone but the quiet work of learning to care for one another in daylight.
The End
— Thank you for reading —