Not the way he normally sat. He dropped. The leather received him without comment, and he sat there with his elbows on his knees and his hands gripping the sides of his head and his eyes squeezed shut, and the city hummed beyond the glass, indifferent.
A thousand possibilities crossed his mind. The street. A bus. A hospital, had her leg given out, had she collapsed, was she somewhere in pain and alone, was she—-
No.
He couldn't go there.
But he couldn't stop going there, either, because the thing about losing control was that once it was gone, the mind did what it wanted, and what his mind wanted was to show him every scenario in which Chelsea was hurt and he wasn't there, and the scenarios were vivid and merciless and they wouldn't stop.
His phone sat silent on the cushion beside him.
Nothing from Adriano's network or Aivan's contacts or Giancarlo's people or his own security or Edgar's desperate search or Kazeyuki's clinic. Nothing.
She was gone.
And the thought of losing her, not for an afternoon but permanently, the way his family lost people, the way Paulette had been lost and the loss had turned his father into a ghost and Aivan into stone, the thought of that made it impossible to breathe, and this time, he didn't recoil from the impossibility. This time, he didn't reach for a framework or a rationalization or the familiar armor ofprecious is not the same as necessary.
This time, all he wanted was to stay inside the feeling.
Because the feeling was her.
The feeling was nine days of waking up with her warmth against him and falling asleep with her hand on his chest. Coffee in a chipped white mug. Colored highlighters. A breakfast table she set herself every morning because she wanted to.I love—-I mean, I'll see you tonight.A book with colored tabs.I want you to go to Heaven.The absolute, annihilating tenderness of a woman who asked for nothing except that the man she loved would exist forever.
He'd had that.
He'd had all of it.
And he'd held it in his hands and calculated its utility, and the calculation was the cruelest thing he'd ever done, crueler than anything Aivan had done to Sienah in ten years of neglect, because Aivan hadn't known what he had. Olivio had known. He'd known, and he'd used it anyway, and the knowledge of that was a weight that no amount of pacing or phone calls or twenty-three-million-dollar sacrifices could lift.
Only she could lift it.
And she was gone.
God, please.
The words formed in his mind before he could stop them, and he didn't stop them. He didn't want to stop them. The man who'd spent his entire life politely declining every invitation to faith, who had smiled and redirected and maintained his comfortable distance from the thing that had transformed his father and his brother and the woman he loved, that man was gone. Dissolved. Left behind in the elevator somewhere between the fifty-second floor and the realization that he was not, in fact, the center of his own universe.
I know I messed up.
Not eloquent. Not the kind of prayer his wife would construct, with its green-highlighted commands and its blue-highlighted references and its earnest, organized devotion. This was raw. This was a man on a couch in an empty office with his head in his hands, talking to someone he'd spent thirty-one years ignoring.
I know I was too proud.
The pride was the core of it. The pride that said: I will never need anyone. I will never be broken the way they were broken. I will build a life so controlled that loss cannot touch me. And the pride had worked, and the pride had cost him everything, and the cost was a girl in Mary Janes who loved him with a completeness that terrified him, and he'd answered that love by bringing her to a dinner and using her goodness to close a deal.
But I want to believe it's never too late.
He wanted to believe it the way Chelsea believed it, not as a hope but as a fact, a green-highlighted command from a God who didn't make mistakes, who had placed a girl in an elevator and a man behind her and a braid coming undone at the nape of her neck and nine days that were always going to end here, with him on this couch, talking to the ceiling.
I want to believe You're the God of many chances.
Because he needed more than one. He needed a God who looked at a man who'd spent his whole life building walls and said:again.Who looked at the wreckage and said:still.Who looked at the empty room and the cold tea and the capless highlighter and the wife who was gone and said:not yet.
So please.
I'm begging You.
Please, Father—-
