"Can I say a thing?" Jessica asked, drying her hands on one of those obscenely expensive towels. "It mightoverstep, and I want you to know that's not my intention."
"Go ahead." My voice came out even. I was proud of that.
She turned to face me. In the warm bathroom lighting, with the door closed and the dinner noise muffled behind it, she looked younger. Softer. Less like a weapon and more like a woman who'd been hurt and hadn't quite healed.
"I see the way he looks at you," she said. "I'm not blind. He's different around you—lighter. Present. And I'm glad, Willow. Genuinely. He deserves that."
"But?"
She paused. The pause was the whole show—the beat before the blade.
"But I sat where you're sitting. Twenty years ago. I was the woman who made Callum Hayes lighter. Who pulled him out of his head and into the world. Who made him laugh and made him present and made him feel things he'd spent his whole life avoiding." She met my gaze. "And then he got a big contract. And another one. And another one. And each time, the buildings got bigger and the room he made for me got smaller. Not on purpose. Not with malice. He just... prioritized. And I was never the priority."
The room was too small. The air was too warm. Her voice was too kind.
"I spent fifteen years waiting for him to choose me," she said. "Fifteen years thinking I could love him hard enough to change the pattern. I couldn't. Elena couldn't. And she was a child who needed her father, and that wasn't enough to shift the equation."
"He's changed," I said. The response was automatic—defensive, immediate—and even as I said it, I heard how it sounded. Naive. Young. The exact thing a twenty-three-year-old would say about a man she'd known for weeks.
"They all change in the beginning," Jessica said. Not mean. Sad. "The beginning is the easy part. He's charming and attentive and he shows up. He shows up right until he doesn't. And when that happens—and it will, Willow, it always does—you'll have spent your best years waiting for a man who loves buildings more than people."
I couldn't speak. My throat had closed around the rebuttal I wanted to make and was holding it hostage.
"I'm not telling you this to be cruel," she said. "I'm telling you so you have the information I didn't. So you can make a choice I wasn't smart enough to make at your age." She touched my arm again—that same warm, friendly gesture—and it burned. "You seem like a good person. You deserve someone who puts you at the center. Not in the margins."
She dropped her hand. Smiled. Opened the door.
"I'll see you back out there," she said, and left.
I stood in the Ashfords' powder room with my hands on the marble counter, staring at my reflection, and felt every wall I'd built since Devon come down at once.
You deserve someone who puts you at the center. Not in the margins.
Convenient. Not essential.
The old wound, ripped open by a woman who'd been kind enough to use anesthesia.
I lost track of how long I stood there. Two minutes. Five. Long enough for the cold water I splashed on my wrists to dry.
I walked back to the dining room on autopilot. Sat down. Picked up my wine glass. Callum's hand found my knee under the table—a reflex, a check-in—and I let him touch me and felt nothing.
No. That's not true. I felt everything. I felt it so hard that I had to go numb to survive it.
The rest of the dinner passed in a blur of polite conversation and dessert wine. Jessica was across the table, laughing at one of Richard's stories, and she didn't look at me again. She didn't need to. The work was done.
Callum walked me out to the car at ten-fifteen. The February air hit my bare arms and I welcomed it—cold and sharp and clarifying after two hours of suffocation.
"What happened?" he asked. His voice was careful. He'd been watching me shut down in real time and he knew enough to tread lightly.
"Nothing happened."
"Willow."
"Nothing happened, Callum."
"You've barely spoken in an hour. You wouldn't look at me during dessert. And you flinched when I touched you just now." He unlocked the car but didn't open the door. "Talk to me."
"I talked to Jessica."
