That stayed with you.
Somewhere along the way, you also stopped sleeping in the other room every night.
Not because the legal crisis ended. It didn’t. There were still threats. One contractor turned out to be feeding information to a rival family branch. A minor car accident on one of your routes was later revealed not to be accidental. A judge overseeing part of the legacy litigation was photographed leaving a meeting he should never have attended. The danger remained ambient, like humidity before a hurricane.
But your marriage changed.
Not into a fairy tale. Into something stranger and maybe better.
It became chosen again.
Every time you stayed, it was no longer youthful momentum carrying you forward. It was informed consent. A daily yes, smaller and harder-earned than the dramatic vow at the altar. Celia changed too. She stopped curating her pain and started speaking it. She stopped mothering you when fear rose in her and started trusting you enough to let you be a man beside her rather than a symbol in her grief.
The first time you made love after the wedding night disaster, it happened months later with rain on the windows and no performance left in either of you.
You were scared of hurting her.
She was scared of what your tenderness might awaken.
Neither of you said that out loud, but both truths moved through the room like weather. What happened between you was less about hunger than recognition. Less about proving the age gap could be erotic and more about proving truth had not killed desire after all. You learned each other slowly, awkwardly, reverently. And when she cried afterward, it was not because of shame.
It was because nothing had felt simple and clean in years.
Outside the house, the world remained obscene in its assumptions.
People still thought you were after wealth. They still watched for signs of disgust or regret or opportunism. Every time you stepped out together, you could feel strangers trying to decide which story made them feel smarter: foolish boy and manipulative widow, or calculating boy and desperate rich woman.
You stopped caring eventually.
Not all at once. But enough.
