I did. I remember every word she said that night, the torchlight on her face, the certainty in her voice as she drew a line down the middle of the world and put us on the same side. I held her hand and I said nothing because her words built a wall I couldn’t climb over without losing her.
Except I lost her anyway. Worse than I would have then. I see that now.
Anything I say here is too little, too late.
“Take me back to your place.” The words are quiet. Final. “I need to get my things.”
“Ella. Please.”
She stares at me and the bleakness in her eyes feels like a door closing. Shutting me out. “Take me back now, Alec. I need to get my bag from your apartment and I need to go.”
CHAPTER 26
ELLA
The suitcase is still open on the bed where I left it.
I hadn’t finished unpacking. A few hours ago that felt like anticipation, the start of a weekend stretching out ahead of us in this brownstone where I had foolishly imagined I could actually belong. Now it just means there’s less to gather.
My sundress from the Barbados street market goes in. A tank top and a pair of shorts. My sandals. I don’t fold anything. I push it all in with hands that are steadier than they should be, and the efficiency surprises me, distantly, like noticing awful weather through a closed window.
I’m still wearing the green dress I’d planned to wear to dinner. I don’t want to wear it now, but taking the time to change clothes will only make this whole disaster feel worse. I need to get out of here. I need to be somewhere I can breathe. Somewhere I can think. Somewhere I can let my breaking heart fall to pieces without Alec here to witness it.
The bathroom takes thirty seconds. My makeup bag is on the counter where I set it when we arrived. I shove all my things into it, then pick up the bag and throw it in my tote. Now the counteris just his again. His toothbrush alone in the holder. His razor by itself on empty space I’ve vacated.
Back in the bedroom, I reach for my phone charger on the nightstand, and silk shifts softly against my throat.
The scarf.
I’m still wearing it, too. Through the paparazzi and the car ride and the silence and the walk back into this apartment, I forgot it was on my body. My hands were too busy with the mechanics of leaving to register what was still touching my skin.
I feel it now. The turquoise silk, cool and light against my neck. Almost nothing. Yet somehow, everything. Alec’s fingers lifting my hair at the nape of my neck in a street festival in Bridgetown. The painted sea turtle. The vendor with the silver rings. The afternoon I fell even more in love with Alec without saying the words.
I reach up. Untie the scarf and lift it over my head. The silk slides across my skin one last time and then it’s in my hands, the little turtle looking up at me from a fold of fabric.
I can’t take it with me now. Keeping it would mean carrying a piece of him out the door, and I need to walk out of this brownstone with nothing of his on me. Nothing of his in my bag. Nothing that will catch the light in my suitcase next week and gut me when I’m not braced for it.
I set it on the bed. Not folded. Not arranged for him to find. Just there, on the white sheets where we made love this afternoon, and where it hopefully won’t be noticed until after I’m gone.
I zip the suitcase.
The wheels are loud on the hardwood. The living room opens up around me. Alec is standing by the kitchen counter. Not leaning against it the way he was an hour ago when he told me about his risotto and his body heat radiated toward me and I was briefly, intensely aware that there was a bedroom in thisbrownstone and we were not in it. He’s standing with his arms at his sides, his body held in the rigid stillness of a man who has been listening to every sound from the bedroom and waiting for me to emerge.
He sees the suitcase. I watch it register on his face. The flinch. The brief close of his eyes. The set of his jaw when he opens them again. He was hoping I’d come out without it.
“Ella. Don’t go. Not like this.” His voice is low and rough. “Stay tonight. We can talk in the morning.”
I roll my suitcase toward the small foyer. “There’s nothing to talk about in the morning that’s different from right now.”
He frowns. “Yes, there is. Everything you saw today, the brownstone, Lucia’s, the neighborhood. This is me. I’m the same person who brought you here a few hours ago.”
I shake my head. “You’re the same person who sat across from me for ten days and chose, every single day, not to tell me who you were.” I stop walking. Turn to face him. “I found out who you are from strangers with cameras on a public sidewalk, Alec.”
He’s quiet. His hand goes to the back of his neck, the gesture of a man whose composure is failing. “It wasn’t like that.”
“No? I was standing there, holding your hand, and I was the only person on that street who didn’t know who Alec Beckett really was. My face is in those photographs now. Attached to a nine-billion-dollar story I knew nothing about.” My voice is level. Not loud. I don’t need it to be loud. “I had no warning. No chance to decide for myself whether I wanted to be in those pictures. You took that choice from me the same way you took every other choice. By deciding I didn’t need the information.”
“I didn’t know they’d be there.” His voice is strained. “I never meant for that to happen.”
