Chapter Thirty-Seven
Knox
I watchher walk away until she’s just… gone.
And I do nothing.
Nothing but stand there on the sidewalk like an idiot while the one thing that matters most to me slips through my fingers.
Every instinct inside me screams to go after her. Drag her back to me. Fix it. Say something, anything.
But she’s right.
There’s nothing I can do to fix this that doesn’t involve burning down everything I’ve built.
Change the plans.
That’s the only real solution. Not flowers, not apologies, not another fucking grand gesture. The only thing that would make this right is killing the project that’s been holding my future together by a thread.
I would give her anything. The world. My time. My money. My name. Everything I own.
But this?
If I give her this, too… what the hell is left of me?
She doesn’t understand that. Except she does.
Isla looked me in the eye and told me she wouldn’t ask me to change my plans. She meant it. That’s what guts me the most.
I haven’t stopped thinking about the restaurant since that day on the terrace when Dorian confronted me about the divorce papers.
Every waking hour since then has been spent trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do.
Last week, when Isla got the job, I hoped maybe it would be enough to soften the blow of what I thought would land months from now. But even then, I knew better.
Besides, all I did was put her in touch with the right people. That job is hers because of her talent.
Money can’t buy people like André Nebruski. And it shouldn’t.
I just hoped her happiness—her dream—would temper the fallout when the truth eventually came out.
It didn’t. It fucking didn’t.
For the first time in my life, I don’t know what the right move is. There is no win here. Just different ways to lose.
The last time I felt this trapped, I was a kid in a house that never felt safe. Back then, I had no power, no money, no say in anything.
Now I have all of it.
Power. Money.Control.
And I’m standing here on a Manhattan sidewalk, watching the ghost of the woman I love walk away from me.
I need to do something.
But what?
I can’t go after her now. Not without a plan. An answer. A solution.
