Trent nodded like his neck belonged to somebody else.
He watched the five children sit together at the table. Watched them stare at each other like mirrors learning they were mirrors. Watched the little girl with yellow hair ties push a box of crayons toward Maya as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Then Trent’s gaze snagged on a memory that had been buried so deep it should’ve stayed fossil.
A woman. A laugh that warmed cold rooms. A voice on the phone, six years ago, asking, “Trent… what do you mean it’s not working?”
Simone.
And in that instant, he understood something brutal: the past wasn’t past. It was simply patient.
1. The Woman He Was Told Not to Love
Six years earlier, Trent Collins had been thirty, and in love in the way adults get when they finally stop dating “potential” and start dating truth.
He met Simone Washington at an art gallery in the South End, the kind of place where people pretended to understand abstract paintings while secretly scanning for donors. Trent was there because his mother wanted him seen. Simone was there because she’d designed the flyer and got paid in exposure and a handshake.
He noticed her because she didn’t pretend.
She stood in front of a huge canvas that looked like someone had spilled a sunset and said, “It feels like a storm trying to apologize.”
Trent laughed. “That’s… weirdly accurate.”
She glanced at him, eyes sharp and amused. “You’re either a poet or you’re lost.”
“I’m an architect,” he said. “So… both?”
That got her smile. It wasn’t polite. It was real. Like she was letting him into a joke she’d been carrying.
They started talking. Then they didn’t stop.
Simone worked two jobs then: graphic design during the day, freelance at night, and an occasional coffee shop shift when invoices didn’t come in. She had a mother who worked as a nurse, a friend named Kesha who told the truth even when it stung, and a stubborn belief that success was something you built with your hands, not inherited like china.
Trent had money he didn’t talk about and a family that did.
For three years, they built a life in the spaces between his family’s expectations. Late dinners. Walks along the Charles. Sundays where Simone would sit cross-legged on his couch, hair wrapped in a scarf, laptop open, muttering at a logo design like it had personally offended her.
Trent loved the sound of her determination. Loved how she looked when she was focused, like the whole world was a puzzle and she refused to leave pieces missing.
He told her once, in bed, “I didn’t know life could feel… this honest.”
Simone kissed his shoulder. “Honest is just what happens when you stop performing.”
He thought he could stop performing. He thought love was enough.
Then his parents found out.
They didn’t scream at first. That would have been too obvious.
They hosted a dinner.
They used crystal.
They used silence.
His mother, Catherine Collins, lifted her wine glass and said, softly, “Simone seems… spirited.”
His father, Richard, smiled without warmth. “Ambitious women can be exhausting.”
Simone, to her credit, stayed calm. She asked polite questions. She talked about work. She made his brother Preston laugh once, which seemed to irritate Preston more than insult him.
Then later, in the study, the door closed, the warmth evaporated, and the truth arrived like winter.
“You will never be accepted in our circles,” Catherine said, as if she was talking about a dress code violation.
Richard leaned against the desk. “We need someone who fits, Trent.”
“Someone who fits,” Trent repeated, feeling suddenly young. “She’s a person, not a couch.”
Preston smirked from the corner. “She’s a complication.”
Catherine stepped closer, voice low. “This isn’t about love. Love is… for novels. This is about family. Legacy. Reputation.”
Trent felt the old wiring in his brain spark to life: approval, obedience, fear.
His father’s eyes hardened. “If you insist on this, we can’t support you.”
It was the kind of threat delivered like a courtesy.
Trent left that room with his spine wobbling.
He should have gone to Simone then. He should have said, “I choose you.” He should have chosen the life that felt honest.
Instead, he went home, stared at his phone, and let fear write his decisions.
He broke up with her over a phone call, voice shaking, using the coward’s vocabulary.
“It’s not working.”
Simone’s silence on the other end was a long, stunned inhale.
“Trent,” she said carefully, like she was trying not to drop something fragile. “Tell me the real reason.”
“I… I can’t.”
“You can,” she insisted, and the hurt in her voice made him flinch. “You owe me that.”
He didn’t give it.
And when he blocked her number two days later, he told himself it was to help them both heal.
Truth was, he blocked her because he couldn’t survive hearing what he’d done.
Two months after he broke Simone’s heart, his mother introduced him to Lauren Bennett at a charity event like she was unveiling a carefully selected painting.
Lauren was kind. Beautiful in a restrained way. Safe in the way his parents wanted. She laughed at his mother’s jokes. She knew which forks to use without thinking. Her family belonged to the same invisible club.
Trent told himself: This is fine. This is what adults do. They choose stability. They move on.
Eight months later, he married her.
Two years after that, twins were born: Marcus and Maya, perfect, loud, miraculous.
And for five years, Trent lived in a house with white columns and a quiet ache he refused to name.
2. Five Faces at One Table
See more on the next page
Advertisement
<
See more on the next page
Advertisement
