Unseen

POV: Angeline

I sit in the passenger seat with the leather cool beneath me and the engine idling like a restless animal under the hood.

Beside me, Edward scrolls his phone with one hand while the other rests loose on the wheel, all easy grin and polished indifference, and my own phone keeps buzzing in my lap like a warning I already know how to read.

My sister.

Her name flashes across the screen, bright and merciless, and with it comes the familiar drop in my stomach, that ancient dread that arrives before the first insult is even spoken.

I do not answer because I know exactly what waits on the other end: another dinner, another table where I will be arranged like a servant and smiled at like I should be grateful for the privilege.

They will sit there with their expensive confidence and their shining lives, Devon in New York with his marketing empire, Yvonne with her bestselling novel, Michelle with her daycare chain in Chicago, and somehow my two master's degrees and my doctorate will still feel smaller than the silence they give me.

The screen glows against my palm, cold and accusatory, and I can feel the weight of every time I have picked up, every time I have swallowed my pride and walked into a room where I was treated like the help.

My throat tightens as the phone buzzes again, and I stare at my sister's name as if it might finally become something else if I look hard enough.

I know the answer already, but I keep hovering in the ache between obedience and refusal, listening to the engine hum and feeling the shape of my own life shrink around me.

"They're calling again," I say, keeping my eyes on the screen. "It's always the same. They want me there to pour drinks, to smile, to let them act like I'm still the little sister who needs instructions."

Edward doesn't look up. "Angeline, you're doing that thing again."

"What thing?"

"Making it bigger than it is." He glances at me, then back to his phone, like my feelings are a minor inconvenience he can manage between traffic lights. "It's family dinner. Go, eat, leave. Simple."

I laugh once, sharp and humorless. "Simple for them. I've raised their children. I've shown up for every crisis. I've been the one they call when their lives fall apart."

"And they appreciate you," he says, voice light, almost bored. "You always turn it into a tragedy."

"They look at me like I'm just a teacher." The words taste like rust. "Like teaching is some little hobby I picked up because I couldn't do anything else."

"You are a teacher," Edward says, and there is that charismatic softness again, the sheen of a man who knows how to sound reasonable while saying something that lands like a dismissal. "There's nothing wrong with that."

There's nothing wrong with that. He says it as if he is soothing a child, as if my doctorate, my work, my whole life can be folded neatly into a phrase and put away.

"Teaching is what I love," I say. "And that should matter."

"It does matter," he replies, but he is already turning the wheel with his wrist, already elsewhere. "You're the one making this into a class war."

The car feels smaller with every sentence, the air thinning, the dashboard lights too bright, his voice too smooth to hold anything real.

My frustration rises slow and hot, a fire under glass, because every time I reach for depth, Brian meets me at the surface and pats it flat.

He deflects with a joke, minimizes with a shrug, and then somehow turns the whole thing back toward himself, as if my pain is just another stage where he is expected to perform heroism.

His charm, which once felt like sunlight, starts to feel like a cover laid over something cold and closed.

The cabin of the car turns suffocating, the leather, the heat, the faint chemical scent of his cologne mixing with the stale air until I feel trapped inside the shape of his indifference.

I hear myself asking one more time for him to understand, and I hate how small my voice sounds against his practiced ease.

I am trying to get emotional depth from a man who only operates on the surface. The realization lands with a brutal calm, as if I have finally looked through clear water and seen there is nothing below.

He wants my laughter, my body, my attention, my silence when it suits him — but not the trembling, difficult, meaningful parts of me that ask for witness.

And in the terrible quiet that follows, I understand that I have been standing at a locked door and calling it love.

"I forgot that you are a surface guy," I say, my voice low and steady, each word sharpened by a clarity that feels almost holy. "You only want to talk about the easy things like the weather or the oil change you got yesterday, or what you want to do to me when we have sex. I forgot to put you in that compartment and not talk to you about anything with meaning or substance. So I'm not angry with you, I'm angry with myself for asking something of you that I know you can't give."

For a second, the car is silent except for the engine and my own pulse hammering in my ears. Then Edward's face hardens, the charm draining out of him like water down a sink, and what is left is all edge and self-importance.

"You know what?" he snaps. "I'm done. I'm done being the bad guy in your story, Angeline. Everyone else sees what I do for you. Everyone else appreciates me."

He laughs once, bitter and incredulous. "But you? You're never satisfied. I support you, I'm attracted to you, I make you laugh — but it's never enough, is it?"

I do not answer, and that seems to fuel him more.

"Maybe the problem isn't me," he says, hand slapping the door handle. "Maybe it's you expecting some fairy tale that doesn't exist."

The car door jerks open with a sharp crack that cuts through the night, and he gets out hard enough to make the whole frame shudder.

His footsteps hit the pavement heavy and angry, the sound receding toward the house while the sudden silence blooms around me like a bruise.

I sit frozen, his words still hanging in the air, and the phone in my hand feels warmer now, almost alive.

Alone in the car, I stare at the screen until the blur of my own reflection looks like a stranger waiting to be chosen.

My thumb hovers over Christopher's number — the designer who noticed my fashion blog, who wrote to me like my thoughts were worth collecting, who wants to fly me to New York for a summer position and see what I can build when no one is standing on my neck.

He has never called me "just" a teacher.

He has never looked at me like my life was an apology.

My finger trembles over the call button, and then I press it.

The ringing sounds enormous in the empty car, each tone pulling me farther from the woman who sat here a minute ago and farther into the unknown.

When he answers, Christopher's voice is warm and genuinely pleased, and my chest aches with the shock of being met with delight instead of demand.

"Angeline," he says, and somehow my name sounds new in his mouth. "I'm glad you called. I've been following your work. I see something special in the way I think about fabric, lines, and movement.

As he continues complimenting me, I hear myself accept the offer, hear myself say yes to New York, yes to the summer position, yes to the possibility of a life that might finally belong to me.

His flirtation is subtle, respectful, threaded with admiration rather than appetite, and it frightens me precisely because it feels real.

When the call ends, I am still sitting in the car with the phone in my hand, and I feel like I have just stepped off a cliff — terrified and exhilarated all at once.