Sweet Romance14 min read
Summer Sleepless Nights: Reunion, Return, and the Toll of a Promise
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"I never thought I'd see him again," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant.
"Why? You weren't exactly hiding," Jess Simmons said, nudging my elbow with a grin. "Come on, Norma. It's been seven years."
"I know," I said. "But I checked the guest list twice. I checked that he wouldn't—" I stopped and pressed my fingers into the cloth of the table. The restaurant buzzed around us. The elevator had delivered a neat stream of classmates, each face a little older, a little different. The same small cruel world that always notices who shows up and who doesn't.
"Look!" Jude Green laughed from the far side as the door opened. "There you are. The late arrivals. You two are going to be punished."
Punished. "Jude," I said, and tried to smile. "You always say that."
"Of course I do," Jude said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "This is tradition."
Across the room, someone clapped. A camera flashed. Our old noise, the way we once took up space, folded around us like a familiar blanket.
Then I heard it: a laugh that was both soft and severe. "I'm home to collect debts," Finch De Luca said, and his voice cut through the room like a clean line.
"You came back for love?" someone teased. "Or to collect love's interest?" Another laugh. All eyes turned in our direction. Heat rose under my skin.
"I—" Finch said nothing more. He wore that quiet calm that had always made people give him the benefit of the doubt. He always had a face that made the light seem kinder to him than anyone else.
"Is he...?" Jess whispered.
"Don't look," I told her, because I didn't want anyone to look at the way my hands trembled under the table.
"Norma!" Finch's voice reached me from two tables over. He stood in the elevator doorway for a second and then walked toward us. "You look...different."
"That's called time," I said.
We exchanged a few words that sounded familiar in shape but not in weight. "You came back to collect debt," someone joked again.
"Maybe I'm collecting favors," Finch said, and his mouth turned. "Maybe I'm collecting what I couldn't take seven years ago."
There was a small silence. "So," Jude said, clapping his hands to break it. "Group photo!"
Flash. Laughs. A thousand small moves to squeeze together. The mechanic of old rituals. After the photo, the crowd thinned. Jess leaned over and mouthed, "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," I lied.
Outside the restaurant, I tried to call a car. The app said 149 people beyond me. "Great," I said softly. A cigarette pack slipped into my bag like a useless talisman.
"And you smoke now?" Finch's voice came from the opposite curb. He had a cigarette in his hand. My heart did a hard, private lurch.
"I don't," I said. I tried to put the pack away. "It's nothing."
"Let me," Finch said, and then, quieter, "I can drive you."
"No," I said. I had already requested the car. But Finch grabbed my wrist and walked me to his car like a man with old rights, then put me into the passenger seat and shut the door firmly.
"You're hurting me," I said at the light press of my skin.
"Sorry," he said, finally. "I shouldn't have—"
"You don't have to drive me," I told him. "I can get a ride."
He looked at me for a long time. Then he pressed his forehead to the steering wheel for a breath. "I'm staying," he said. "This time I'm not leaving."
"Why did you come back?" I asked later, when the car hummed down the quiet street.
"Because there were things left unfinished," he answered. The rhythm of his words made me remember nights at sixteen where we'd plan small, safe futures like we could fold them into pockets.
"Like what?" I asked.
"Like not saying I'm sorry in the right way, like letting you go without pulling you close one last time," Finch said. He did not say 'I hate you' this time. He did not say the thing that had shattered us.
We arrived and he left without giving me more explanation. At home, Griffith Bass—my brother in the only way that had ever counted since they found me—stood, leaning on his cane.
"Where were you?" he demanded, and his voice had undercurrents I had spent seven years learning to read.
"I went to a reunion," I said. I didn't tell him the details. I didn't tell him about Finch's cigarette. "Why? Are you mad?"
"You saw him?" Griffith asked. The cane hit the floor once.
"Yes," I said. "He drove me home."
"He came to the country to get you back, didn't he?" Griffith's voice lowered. "You promised, remember?"
"Griffith," I said, because I didn't want to hear the rest.
"Don't call me that," he snapped. "You promised. You promised when—"
"Stop," I said. My fingers touched the edge of the door. My heart had learned to jump at the word promise. "I'm going to my room."
He said, "You promised us. You promised you would take care of me. You promised you would be here. You promised—"
I shut the door and locked it.
I lay against wood and listened to the house settle. I thought of the elevator, of Finch pressing the open button, of his hand on the wheel. I thought of promises that were fences.
Monday at work, I walked in late and saw a man at the head of the floor, silent and taller, a foreignness around him like a new cologne. "Norma," Eduardo Kelley said. "This is our new director, Finch De Luca. You'll report directly to him."
My hand hovered over the resignation form I had once drafted. "I can resign," I said out loud before I could stop myself.
"Norma," Finch said. "Don't."
"Do you remember me?" I asked him in the elevator that morning, as he stood with his coffee.
"I remember," he said. There. That simple admission was an unmoored ship. The office made us dance a business waltz. He said my old job title with a courtesy that left no warmth.
"Don't call me 'old flame' at the meeting," I whispered to him later, but there we were, on the same team, and he had assigned me to take him through the departments like a tour guide of my own past.
"You always knew how to explain things," Finch said once while we crossed the open office, and the way he said it felt like a hand tracing old stitches.
That week turned work into a hurricane. The Shanghai client would not sign. We brainstormed till my head hurt. At one point, Alice Coleman—bright and young—brought peaches to the table. "They're from home!" she said.
I joked, "Finch is allergic to peach fuzz."
"How would you know?" Alice asked.
"He told me years ago," I said.
Finch leaned in the doorway, smiling. "You still remember that?"
"Of course I remember," I said. The room held a small, easy warmth. It was the kind of moment that could have been ordinary if not for the shadow that always fell across my life at home.
"You're coming with me to Shanghai tomorrow," Finch said. "We need to meet them in person."
"I can do the presentation." I tried not to sound scared.
He looked at me like a man making a vote. "Then I'll be there."
We flew on the train together. I slept. He woke me before the station. "We're here," he said. "Don't be nervous."
"It's just a meeting," I told him.
"It feels like more," he said softly. "You okay?"
"I'm fine," I lied.
The hotel later that evening felt like a temporary city. Finch insisted on being on the same floor and arranged our rooms across the hall—reasonable for work, intimate for everything else. He asked me to put on a scarf because it was cold in the lobby. He opened the door to my room. "We have work to do," he said.
We sat side by side, two screens glowing, and slowly the hours unstitched themselves. He drank less than I expected. His patience with the client went deep. Once the business had been nudged into place, he booked a dinner and then, suddenly, brought the talk to a different place.
"Why did you leave?" he asked me, when we were on the balcony and the city spread out like a slow heartbeat.
"Family," I said.
He took a breath. "You shouldn't have had to choose."
"I didn't," I said. "I—"
"We were silly kids," he said, "and something terrible happened and people made decisions for you."
"You have no idea," I said. I couldn't explain the feeling of being traded like a plane seat.
"I know enough to know I wanted you then," he said. "I want you now."
We went to Disney the next day like children unmoored from calendars. Finch bought a plain white T-shirt and wore it like a man stepping back into a memory. I laughed more than I had in years. We rode small things and large things, and at night, when the stars were fireworks and everything was loud and everyone else melted into a single texture, he held me and I let him.
"Do you want to come back tomorrow?" he asked later, when we were walking back to the hotel.
"No," I said. "I have to go home."
"Let me go with you," he said.
"No," I repeated.
"Promise me," he said. "Promise me you'll tell him no."
"I can't promise you anything," I said.
That night, my phone lit up with my brother's message. "My leg is bad. I'm at the hospital," it said. The words were small pins.
"You going?" Finch asked, watching the phone.
"I will," I said. I booked the first flight home and barely slept in the hope that the morning would straighten everything.
In the hospital, the lights were harsh. My brother smiled when he saw me. "You came back," he said. "Good."
"Why did you lie?" I asked, when the nurse said there was nothing seriously wrong.
"Because I wanted you to come back," he said. "You promised."
"I never promised this," I whispered. It felt small against his need.
"You did," he insisted. "You promised me everything."
That night the two facts of my life shaped the room. One was the memory of a car steering away, a promise broken and a young Finch with blood in his eyes saying he hated me. The other was the steady claim my brother made on me, a quiet, dangerous hunger. Which promise did I owe?
I stopped pretending there was no villain. There were two kinds of villains. Some left by plane. Some stayed and learned how to make being near an arrested safety.
On a Saturday, after the Shanghai deal had closed, after a team karting day where I crashed and they carried me out laughing, Finch handed me a concert ticket. "For Jay Chou," he said. "You like him."
"I love him," I said, and meant all of it.
The concert was a stitch in a torn page. I went, and later we slept on his couch like two people who had found an island. The next day I told my brother I was going to the concert.
"If I say no?" he asked, and the cane tapped the floor.
"I—" I could not speak.
"You chose him," he said later. "He gets in your head."
"He saved me," Finch told me quietly that afternoon when I told him a fragment. "You don't owe anyone the cost of your life."
When I got home that night, the air was thick with what my brother wanted to own. He cornered me in the hallway. "You promised," he said.
"Stop," I told him. The word was small but—"I'm not a promise pinned on the wall. I'm a person."
"Don't lie to me," he hissed. Then, with a cold clarity that made me dizzy, "If I can't have you, nobody will."
Those words shook something. They had been said before, in a smaller voice, but now they had a plan behind them. I felt like I stood on a bridge over a river and the current under my feet suddenly moved.
"I am done," I said aloud, and the room felt very full of air.
That next week, the company threw a signing dinner to celebrate the Shanghai contract. The room was warm, filled with our clients and our team. Finch was sent to give the opening words. I sat with my fingers folded, the way I had learned to manage fear—small and contained.
Midway through the meal, my brother arrived. He came like a shadow into the lighted room. He threaded himself through our colleagues and the clients and found me easy as if I were a chair he had always expected to be empty for him. He ordered wine. He smiled with a social ease that made the table let down its guard.
He stood and clinked his glass and asked for attention. "Everyone," he said, "I just want to say how lucky I am."
All polite applause. Finch's eyes flicked down to me, then back to the room. "I think," Griffith continued, "that family should be kept private, that certain things must stay intact."
"He's my brother," I said. "We don't—"
"Save it," he cut me off, and at that moment something in the room shifted. Eyes went to me. Cameras went to phones. The air gathered.
I stood up. "Griffith," I said quietly. "Stop."
He laughed, small and quick. "Stop what? Being right? Being the only one who remembers promises?"
I felt my throat tighten. Then I did the thing I had rehearsed in the mirror at home for nights I thought I'd never have the courage for. I walked to the front of the room.
"Everyone," I said, and heard the echo of my own voice. "You all know me as Norma from college. You know Finch; we were together. But I have something you should know."
There was the polite murmur. "Go on," someone said.
"Seven years ago," I said, "my brother stopped me from choosing. He told my parents to pressure me. He told me he loved me like a man and demanded—"
"Stop!" Griffith's face reddened. He reached for me with one hand like a man trying to snatch a falling object.
"Listen," I insisted. "He has used our family's fear to control me. He has been calling my colleagues. He has ordered people not to be my friends. He has—" My voice rose. "He told me if I left, anything could happen. He told me I had promised. He used a promise like a weapon."
Silence hit like a hard wave. Finch's expression folded into something terrible and open. Phones were out. Somebody whispered, "Is that true?"
Griffith's face changed: from authority to shock, shock to anger, anger to denial. "You're mad," he said, and then, "You always never tell the truth."
"Look at the messages," I said. I stepped back and hit 'show' on my phone. Texts, photos, calls to my work number—evidence like small nails. "He calls me at midnight. He shows up at my workplace. He demanded I never be alone."
Gasps. People upheld their wine glasses to their mouths. Finch moved, slowly, like a man seeing land after a long shipwreck. "Is this true?" someone asked.
"It's true," Finch said. "She told me he came to the office last month and demanded she quit."
Griffith began to sway. "This is slander," he said. "These are lies."
"Then explain the texts," I said. "Explain the calls to my coworkers. Explain why three different people at my unit have had his number. Explain why he is always there."
"You're a liar!" Griffith said suddenly, and his voice cracked. "You always wanted to hurt me."
A woman at the next table had already begun recording. Another person opened her phone and called security. "Sir," the client said quietly, "we cannot have this at our table. This is not business."
Griffith's face registered: he had been unmasked. Where he had once stood behind the small, tall line of threats, now the room stood between his arsenal and him. He tried to shout louder, to pull people to his side. "They don't understand," he pleaded, like a man at the edge of a pool wanting to be rescued.
Finch stepped forward. "This is harassment," he said calmly. "You have been harassing her. You have been threatening her. People have screenshots."
Now the witnesses multiplied. A junior colleague who had received a call from Griffith that morning raised a hand. "He texted me and asked if Norma is home," she said. "Then he asked for her schedule."
A senior manager shook his head. "This is illegal," he said. "You can't follow an employee like this. I'm calling the company hotline."
Every reaction built like a small wall around me. Griffith went through stages: denial, then anger, then the moment—when the room was a net and he could not find air—when his face fell and the color left it.
"You're making a scene," he said, in a voice small and shrinking. "You're making me out to be the villain."
"Yes," I said. "You are."
People began to close in with questions. Someone asked if he had been at my workplace. The colleague who had answered the phone that week nodded. "Yes," she said. She described a man who called at odd hours. Another showed a video where Griffith had come into the building this month and tried to get up to me.
"Security will escort you out if you don't leave," the client said.
Griffith's face crumpled. He looked like a man used to always pulling the strings and finding that someone had cut the cord. "You will regret this," he muttered, but in a voice that no longer carried the power it used to.
"Be quiet," Finch said. "You're being belligerent."
"How dare you," Griffith hissed, now accusing Finch for the cruelty he had dished out for years.
"Stop," I said. "Please stop."
Security took his arm. People filmed. The world condensed to the small, bright rectangle of screens and the low steadying voice of someone asking if he wanted an ambulance. Griffith's mask had slipped: the man who demanded ownership had become the man everyone recognized as a man whose terror had been exposed. He was not arrested in that dining room, but the daylight of the room made him vulnerable. He begged, then pleaded, then tried to twist truth in his favor. "You're lying," he said to me. "You and him are together. You're ruining me."
By the time the staff had him gently removed, there were whispers, some sympathetic looks, many cold eyes. A future that had allowed Griffith's small tyrannies blinked and shrank. People who had once nodded when he made a claim now refused to take a call from him. The client who had been most courteous to me pulled Finch aside with a whisper and a card. "If you want, we'll see the police," they said.
I sat down when the room cleared and felt suddenly very small. Finch's hand found mine. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"No," I said honestly. "But I think maybe I can breathe."
The public unraveling of him changed everything. Gossip lives on, and in our world, gossip can become a weapon of its own. Some called it exposure. Some called it justice. For me it was a bright, sharp relief to say the truth out loud and have others bear witness. The crowd's attention had been the punishment; the slow, crushing removal of his control was the consequence.
But justice in the room did not fix the nights. It didn't fix the years of sleep stolen. It didn't erase the words he had spoken into my ear, the small missiles. It didn't unring the bell of when my brother had said, "If I can't have you, nobody will."
Weeks passed. The Shanghai contract closed smoothly. Finch stayed professional and then he stayed close. We spent a weekend at a show—Jay Chou again. At the end, he turned to me. "Will you stay?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. The word sat heavy.
"Don't make a decision you don't mean." He was a gentle man when he wanted to fight. "I am not asking you to be brave for me. I'm asking you to be brave for you."
I tried. I tried to open my hand to the world. I tried to go to kart tracks and to be on panels at work and to answer calls without feeling the cold net drop into my chest. I tried to sleep without a hundred small alarms.
Then one night, later, after a string of small victories, I opened the bottle on my nightstand. The small white pills glittered like tiny moons. I thought of the empty T-shirt in the back of my closet with a small line written in marker: "My Norma, be happy." I thought of a plane that I could not have been on, of a boy who loved me enough to cross oceans, and a brother who loved me enough to break me. I thought of Finch's quiet hands and Jess's laugh and Eduardo's business mind that kept us afloat.
I thought of a life in pieces and tried to count them.
"Norma?" I heard after a while, but voices in the corridor are long and thin. Jess had stayed the night. Finch had sent a message. My phone was bright with messages: "Are you okay?" "Call me." "Come to the ER."
My eyes went to the pill bottle again. The sound of the television in the next room was a steady, distant wave. On the little nightstand, a news ticker flashed: "Seven years today since accident—families remember." It felt like a window that could not be closed.
Then I did a small, strange thing: I went to my wardrobe and took out the old college shirt—the one with the marker note. I read the line aloud, voice small: "My Norma, be happy."
I thought about Finch's face the last time we had gone to the balcony. He had said, "I don't want you to owe life to anyone." He had said, "Promise me you'll not let them close you off."
Griffith's punishment had been public. That had been a relief. But punishment is not the same as healing. Public consequences do not sew a heart back together. They make space, and space is where people can either fall or learn to build a floor.
My hand trembled. I put the bottle back in the drawer and closed it. I called Jess. "I'm coming out," I said. "I don't know what will happen, but I'm going to try to stay."
The days after were ordinary in the way of all recovery: a series of small, difficult tasks. I went to a counselor, and then another. I told Finch things I had kept like sharp stones in my mouth. He didn't fix everything. He couldn't. But he stayed.
Months later, there were invitations I answered differently. There were afternoons I took without guilt. There were times my brother called and I did not answer. He learned the hard wall of a door. The legal system started its slow steps; an order was made after evidence from the dinner and recorded threats. The company issued a statement that harassment would not be tolerated. There were documents and forms and a few more hearings.
The important thing was this: the people around me believed me. That belief became a scaffold. When I fell—because you do fall—it was into hands.
"You look like you did when we were twenty," Finch said once in our small kitchen. "A little braver now."
"You're wrong," I said. "Twenty-year-old me ran into your arms like the world was a playground. Now I'm trying to stop being afraid of the slide."
He took my hand. "Then keep trying."
In a way, the story never really ended. The college T-shirt sat folded on my shelf. Every so often I'd take it out, rub the handwriting, and remember the boy who wrote it, the boy who had died in a flight I never took and the boy who had come back across oceans. I kept the note because stories deserve to be remembered, whole and half-broken.
The last night of this long chapter, I sat in the dark and I wrote a note to myself on the back of an old ticket stub. It said: "You survived the meeting. You spoke. You were heard." I folded it and put it into the T-shirt pocket.
"Goodnight," Finch said at the door before he left.
"Goodnight," I answered. The apartment smelled faintly of coffee and of the last fireworks, the way memories sometimes smell faintly of other people's skin.
Outside, a television in a neighbor's window muttered a news story about an anniversary. I listened and then turned off the lamp. The last image I let myself hold before sleep was the small, written line in permanent marker and my hand over it—pressing, holding, reminding.
The End
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