Penelope ambushed her. She found something on that phone, leverage, and she used it to force Ivy out.
And Ivy didn’t fight back. She didn’t come to me. She didn’t try to negotiate.
She surrendered.
I don’t know what was on that screen. I don’t know what unknown reason made her fold. But I know she didn’t leave because she stopped caring. She left because she felt she had no choice.
She played the villain so I could remain the hero.
My hand closes around the ring in my pocket. It doesn't mock me anymore. Now, it feels like a promise waiting to be kept.
I pick up my keys.
I have hours to get to River Bend and back.
I’m coming for her. And this time, I’m not bringing a contract.
I drive like a man with nothing left to lose. I don’t care about the speed traps on the LIE or the thickening holiday traffic. I reach her building in record time, finding it was easy enough with a targeted search.I’ve never been here before; I’d only ever sent a car to her door.
I reach for the buzzer. I press it. Once. Twice. Ten times.
Nothing.
I stand on the sidewalk in the humid city heat, looking up at her dark windows. I call her phone, but it goes straight to voicemail.
I don’t leave. I wait. I sit on the steps of her brownstone while the sun goes down and the streetlights flicker on. I watch every person who goes in or out, praying one of them is her. A light rain starts to fall around midnight, soaking through my shirt, but I don’t move. I can’t move.
It isn’t until the sun starts to rise the next morning, bathing the city in a cruel, cheerful light, that I finally accept the truth. She isn’t here. Or if she is, she wants nothing to do with me.
“I’m sorry, Ivy,” I whisper to the empty street.
I get back in the car. I have a gala to host and a reputation to burn. If I can't have her, I can at least make sure Penelope Vanderbilt pays for what she's done.
The drive back to the Hamptons passes in a blur. When I finally walk into the cottage, the silence hits me like a wall. I drop my keys on the counter. The ring is still in my pocket; I pull it out and set it on the kitchen table, exactly where she left it.
If she comes back, it'll be waiting. Just like me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
IVY
My apartment is exactly as I left it eight weeks ago.
It smells of dust and the lavender reed diffuser Maddy surely refilled while I was gone, a scent that usually means home but now feels like a reminder of everything that has changed. The succulent on the windowsill, the one I’d named ‘Survivor’, is finally dead, its leaves shriveled into gray husks. The stack of unopened mail on the counter is a tower of catalogs and junk flyers, a physical manifestation of the life I hit pause on the moment I tackled Brooks Taylor into that marble cherub.
It is safe, but it is also small and terribly quiet. In the Hamptons, the air always sounded like something: the rush of the ocean, the clink of crystal, the low, steady hum of Brooks’s voice in the next room. Here, the silence is heavy. It feels like a coffin.
It is Labor Day. 5:00 PM.
Right now, at Eastmoor, the sun is beginning its slow dip toward the Atlantic, turning the ocean into hammered gold. The caterers are putting the finishing touches on the raw bar, meticulously nesting shrimp into beds of shaved ice. The floristsare arranging the white hydrangeas I selected, the ones I argued with Betty about for three hours because she wanted lilies and I knew the hydrangeas would catch the twilight light better. Betty is probably terrorizing a waiter about the napkin folds right now, her spine a straight line of steel.
And Brooks?
Brooks is probably standing on the terrace, wearing that navy suit that makes his eyes look like the deep Atlantic. He’s accepting congratulations. He is wearing that shark grin, the one that doesn’t reach his eyes, the one he uses when he’s ready for a kill. He is shaking hands. He is winning.
And I am sitting on my beige IKEA sofa, staring at a check for five hundred thousand dollars.
It sits on the coffee table, right next to a coaster stained with old coffee rings. The paper is crisp, the ink dark. It is enough money to expand Ever After, Inc.It is enough money to pay off my student loans, put a down payment on a condo, and take a vacation to somewhere that doesn’t smell like hydrangeas and heartbreak.
