Selene's POV (Three Years Earlier)
The key didn't turn smoothly.
That was the first sign that something was wrong. Selene's apartment key always turned smoothly. She'd had the lock changed six months ago after the engagement, when Tunde moved his things in and started rearranging her life like it was a business project waiting to be optimized. The lock was new. It should turn smoothly.
It stuck.
She jiggled it, frowning. And that small act of frustration—that tiny, ordinary irritation—was the last moment before everything broke.
The door swung open.
She'd learned later that this was what people always wanted to know: Did you scream? Did you cry? Did you rage? As if her reaction should have been loud. As if heartbreak had a volume setting and hers was simply broken.
She didn't scream.
The bedroom was down the hall. The door was open. And framed in that doorway, tangled in sheets that still smelled like her perfume, was Tunde Coker—the man she'd agreed to marry because he checked all the boxes her father had drawn up. Educated. Ambitious. From the right family. The man she'd thought she loved because she'd been trained to think that love looked like obligation.
And on top of him, her hair spread across his chest like a trophy, was Vivienne.
Her stepsister.
The girl who'd whispered I'm here for you during the engagement party. The girl who'd borrowed her dresses and her confidence and apparently her fiancé when Selene's back was turned.
Tunde's eyes went wide. Vivienne's mouth opened. They both moved to cover themselves, to explain, to do what guilty people do—scramble for words that might rewire what she'd just seen.
Selene turned around.
She walked back down the hall. She closed the apartment door. She got in her car. And she drove until the glittering towers of Lagos faded into smaller roads, then smaller roads again, until the city lights blurred into something that looked like grief.
She'd kept her hands on the wheel. She'd kept her eyes forward. She'd kept the screaming locked somewhere deep inside her chest where it couldn't escape and ruin her the way Tunde had ruined her, the way Vivienne had ruined her, the way her own hope had ruined her for trusting people who'd been trained their whole lives to smile while they stole.
By the time she found The Black Veil, she'd forgotten how to feel anything except empty.
It wasn't the kind of place that advertised. No sign. No lights. Just a narrow door wedged between two closed storefronts, with music bleeding from underneath like a secret the building was trying to keep. The kind of place where people went to disappear. Where identities mattered less than the quality of the whiskey and the promise that no one would ask your name.
Selene needed that kind of place.
She paid cash. She took a mask from the pile at the entrance—gold, elaborate, the kind that covered enough of your face to matter. She found a dark corner and sat down with a drink she didn't order but accepted anyway.
For an hour, no one bothered her. For an hour, she could pretend the world hadn't just fractured into before and after.
Then someone sat beside her.
He didn't ask permission. Didn't introduce himself. Just folded into the chair next to her with the careful grace of someone who understood that some people wanted company more than they wanted silence, but both in equal measure.
"Bad day?" His voice was quiet. Deep, but controlled. The kind of voice that didn't demand anything from her.
Selene didn't look at him. "Bad life."
He nodded slowly, like this made perfect sense. Like this was a reasonable thing to say to a stranger in a masked bar at midnight. "I understand that."
She believed him. Something in the way he sat—in the particular stillness of his shoulders, the way he stared ahead without trying to see her—told her that this man had his own wreckage. His own reasons for wearing a mask in a place where everyone wore masks.
"I was supposed to be happy," she heard herself say. It felt important to explain this to someone who would never see her face again. "I did everything right. The right school. The right family. The right man. And I found him in my bed with my stepsister, and I didn't even cry. I just walked out."
"That's not weakness," he said. "That's strength."
"That's numbness."
"Sometimes they're the same thing."
He didn't ask her to elaborate. He didn't push or probe or try to fix her the way people always did, offering solutions to problems they didn't understand. He just sat there, present but not intrusive, like he was willing to hold space for her broken things without needing her to explain them.
After a while, she realized she was cold. She was shaking—not from crying, but from the kind of deep shock that made your body forget how to regulate itself. Without a word, he reached over and took her hand.
His hands were warm. Quiet, somehow. Like hands that knew how to hold something fragile without crushing it. Like hands that had learned restraint.
"You're going to be okay," he said. Not a question. A promise.
"You don't know that."
"I do." He turned to look at her then, and even through the mask, she felt the weight of his attention. "Because you didn't break today. You left. The people who could walk away from their own pain—those are the ones who survive it."
She didn't believe him. But she held his hand anyway, and for the first time since she'd walked out of that apartment, she felt like maybe—maybe—there was a version of her that could exist in a world where Tunde had betrayed her and Vivienne had destroyed her and she hadn't simply ceased to exist as a person.
"What's your name?" she asked.
He was quiet for a long moment. She could feel him considering it—the weight of giving her that information, of letting her inside even this small way.
"It doesn't matter," he finally said. "Not tonight. Tonight, I'm just someone who knows your pain. And you're just someone who knows mine. That's enough."
It should have felt like a rejection. Instead, it felt like the most honest thing anyone had ever told her.
Hours passed. The bar emptied and refilled and emptied again. He ordered her water when the whiskey went to her head. He didn't try to kiss her or seduce her or turn her vulnerability into his opportunity. He just sat beside her—a stranger with quiet hands and an unnamed face—and he let her exist in her broken moment without asking her to explain it.
When the night started turning toward dawn, she knew she had to leave.
"Will I see you again?" she asked.
He took her hand one last time. His grip was careful. Deliberate.
"I don't know," he said. "But if you ever need to disappear again, you'll know where to find me."
She left The Black Veil as the sun started rising, her gold mask still in her pocket, her hand still warm from his grip, her heart still broken but somehow—impossibly—a little less alone.
She would never learn his name.
Six weeks later, alone in a London flat with a pregnancy test in her shaking hand, she would realize that the stranger's hands weren't the only thing she'd never forget about that night.
CUT TO PRESENT DAY:
Damien is walking toward her.
And in his eyes, as he approaches, Selene sees the exact moment he recognizes her.
Not from the airport. Not from her return to Lagos.
From three years ago. From a masked bar. From the night she disappeared into his arms and never learned who was holding her together.
His jaw clenches.
His step slows.
And Kofi—standing right beside her, with Damien's impossible brows and Damien's exact same jaw—reaches up to tug her sleeve.
"Mummy," Kofi whispers, staring at the approaching stranger. "It's the man from the screen."