The Don Tore Up Our Divorce (Gemma and Cassian) novel Chapter 450

Chapter 450
Mikhail’s POV

It stuns her. She blinks, uncomprehending. She’d constructed a narrative where external forces—her father, my career, bad timing—were the villains. The idea that I might have been an obstacle, that my own feelings were the wall, hasn’t occurred to her.

My eyes drift away from her confused, hurt face. They land on Gemma. She’s trying so hard to be a potted plant, studying a real one in the corner with absurd concentration, clearly bored and awkward. The sheer effort of her not-listening is almost comical. A short, soft chuckle escapes me.

Hearing it, her head snaps up. Her face is a perfect canvas of bewildered suspicion. Are they talking about me? her wide eyes seem to ask.

“Mikhail…” Linda’s voice is a wounded whisper now, pulling my attention back. Her sorrow is deep, genuine. She’d assumed Gemma was a placeholder, a tool to make her jealous. She thought that with her return, I’d discard the prop without a second thought and run back to her arms.

“Linda,” I say, forcing my voice to be gentle but firm. “I admit, I once had unresolved feelings for you. But that’s all they were: lingering feelings from a chapter that’s closed. I’ve moved on.” I hold her gaze, needing her to hear this. “You should, too.”

The rejection is a physical blow. She recoils. “I don’t want to!” The protest is immediate, childish in its raw defiance. She’s finally untangled her own heart, flown here to present it to me, and I’m telling her to put it away. She can’t compute it.

“Mikhail,” she pleads, tears finally spilling over, tracing paths through her carefully applied makeup. “A life without you isn’t really living!”

There was a time, years ago, when those words would have wrecked me. They would have been a siren’s call, a validation of all my own desperate longing. Now, listening to them in this sterile room, with the specter of brain surgery hanging over me and Gemma pretending to be a botanist across the room, I feel… nothing. A strange, hollow calm.

In fact, a selfish, petty part of me just wants her to leave. So the room can be quiet again. So Gemma can sit back down and keep reading those stories in her clear, steady voice. When I tried to read them myself earlier, the words were flat, lifeless on the page. They only came alive when she spoke them.

Linda’s tears are flowing freely now, a silent torrent of grief for a love story she’s realizing only she is still reading. She gathers herself for one last, desperate appeal to history.

“Mikhail, back then… your father,” she chokes out, the memory clearly painful. “He told me you were going into the military. He said we could never have a future together. I admit… I got scared. I believed him.”

She offers it as the ultimate explanation, the root cause of all our pain. My father scared her away. It’s supposed to absolve her of all her choices, make me see her as a victim of circumstance, and to rekindle the ‘us against the world’ bond.

I just look at her. The excuse, which once would have been a cornerstone of my resentment, now feels like ancient history. 

It doesn’t change the woman sitting before me, or the man I am now. 

It just explains a choice she made a long time ago… a choice that set us on different paths, and I’ve long since stopped looking back at the fork in the road.

“Linda,” I say, forcing myself to look at her, to make this final. “You’re an amazing person. You’ll meet someone better.” I use the oldest, kindest lie in the book. Then I give her the truth that has finally settled in my own mind, cold and clear. “My dad was right back then. I’m not good enough for you.”

For years, I’ve played the ‘what if’ game. What if I hadn’t enlisted? What if I’d chosen a different, safer path? Would we have made it? The answer, I realize now, was always no. It wasn’t about the army. It was about us. Back then, I was all heart, all desperate, singular focus. She had a whole checklist—permanent residency, future security, social standing. Love was an item on her list, maybe even a prized one, but it was never the only thing. We were out of sync from the start. Two different instruments trying to play the same song and failing.

“No, you weren’t beneath me!” she cries, rejecting the narrative. “Didn’t you once say that love can overcome anything? We could have worked through it together!”

I shake my head. That was the foolish, passionate boy talking. The man who has seen what real incompatibility looks like—the kind that gets people killed, or leaves them alone in hospital rooms—knows better. “Love can’t overcome everything,” I say, my voice quiet but firm. “Compatibility can.”

And we were not compatible. We are not compatible.

The conversation is over. The energy it has taken is immense, draining the little reserves I have left before tomorrow. “Thank you for coming to see me,” I say, the words formal, a dismissal. “But I’m tired now. You should go.”

I turn my head away from her pleading eyes, from the raw sadness on her face. I can’t carry it anymore. My gaze finds Gemma, who has been a silent, uncomfortable statue in the corner. A lifeline back to the present, to a simpler, less emotionally fraught connection.

“Gemma,” I say, my voice regaining a sliver of its usual command. “Please show her out.”