“Come in.” She moved aside, letting me in fully. “You want coffee?”
I nodded, though I didn’t care what I drank. I just needed something to hold. Something to anchor me. The space around us was quiet, save for the gentle hum of the espresso machine and the distant echo of early morning traffic far below.
We settled onto the oversized off-white couch in front of the windows. The city still wore its pre-dawn hush. Glass towersblinked with tired office lights. The sky was beginning to shift—bruised indigo bleeding into soft pink.
“So.” She tucked her legs underneath her. “What’s going on?”
I stared at her, at this poised girl with everything and nothing at the same time. The heiress, the Astor counterpart. The girl I was supposed to marry.
“Do you evenwantthis engagement?” I asked.
Rosalie blinked. “What?”
“This—us. The alliance. The legacy bullshit. Do you want it?”
There was a pause. Her mug hovered near her mouth. I saw it there—in the space between her inhale and the answer she was crafting. Her silence spoke louder than anything.
“That’s what I thought,” I muttered, something tight and painful crawling up my spine. I laughed, bitter and sharp. “Jesus.”
“Theo—”
“I can’t do this,” I said, standing up suddenly. My hands were shaking. “I can’t keep playing pretend. My father—he’s been trying to rewrite, no rewire me, since I was fifteen. He sent me away. Away from everything. I thought it was a boarding school. It wasn’t. It was fuckingconversion therapy. Reprogramming. A place for boys who liked boys and embarrassed their fathers.”
Rosalie’s mouth parted slightly, her eyes wide but not in judgment—justhurt. So much sympathy. I almost couldn’t bear it.
“I learned how to lie there,” I continued. “How to smile at the right time. How to fold myself up small enough to fit into the life he wanted. I buried everything. Every urge. Every truth. I crushed it all down so deeply I forgot what it felt like to breathe.” I rubbed my face, pacing now, raw and unraveling. “And then Sin happened. And he ruined everything. Heshatteredme. In the best, worst fucking way. He reminded me of what it felt like to want. Tobe. I hated him for it, and now I love him and Ithink it might destroy me, but I can’t go back. I can’t pretend this engagement means anything.”
Rosalie was quiet for a long moment. Her voice, when it came, was so soft I barely heard it over the ringing in my ears. “I’ve been in love with someone, too,” she whispered. “Since I was seventeen.”
I stopped, turning to face her.
“Jacob,” she said. “We met at boarding school. He was my roommate’s brother. A total mess. Wild, impulsive. He worked at the stables nearby just to afford visits. Wore his heart on his sleeve. He’d sneak in after curfew and leave Polaroids on my windowsill. I think I loved him the second he laughed, like he didn’t know what pain was.”
She smiled, almost apologetically. “But my father would never allow it. Jacob doesn’t come from money. He can’t offer my father anything—no stock shares, no power plays. Just... me. And that was never going to be enough.”
We stayed in a reflective silence for a few minutes. The sun was beginning to breach the horizon now, casting long gold streaks across the city. The sky caught fire in oranges and peach-tinged pinks, light fracturing across the spotless glass.
“I think we’re the only ones who never expected this marriage to mean anything,” Rosalie said finally. “Our fathers don’t see people, Theo. They see property. Leverage.”
I sat back down beside her. She didn’t flinch away. “So what do we do?” I asked. My voice was low. Tired. Honest.
She looked out the window at the city we both owed our lives to but never truly belonged in. “We be honest. With each other. With ourselves.”
“And them?”
A dry, humorless smile tugged at her lips. “Let them rot in their dynasties.”
The light bathed her features in gold, making her look softer. Younger.Free.And for the first time in a long time, I had someone in my corner who understood me.
“You know,” I said slowly, “you’re the only one who’s ever seen me like this and not looked at me like a problem.”
She looked at me then. “That’s because you were never broken, Theo,” she said. “You just weren’t theirs.”
The sun tipped fully over the skyline. A new day. A fragile, luminous kind of beginning. And maybe this was the start of something real. Not love. Not escape. Butfriendship.
A friendship forged in truth. In grief. In survival. And in the quiet, we let the light break over us.
CHAPTER 22
