“All set?” the driver asks.
I nod, and the car pulls away from the curb.
Only then, once I’m in motion and the decision is behind me, do I look back through the rear window.
Alec is there. Standing at the curb in the amber glow of the streetlight. The brownstone behind him. The stoop, the dark door, the iron railing. His hands at his sides. Watching me go.
The car turns the corner and I pivot away from the window and cry.
CHAPTER 27
ALEC
The ride share vehicle’s taillights disappear around the corner and I’m still standing at the curb.
I don’t know how long I stand there, waiting—hoping—Ella will change her mind and tell the driver to bring her back to me. It feels like I’m waiting forever. Could be minutes.
She doesn’t come back.
I turn and climb the stoop to my brownstone, my entire body feeling wrung out. Drained. Empty.
The door closes behind me and my home is what it was before she arrived. Before I ever met her. Same floors. Same walls. Same air cycling through the same vents. But the silence has a different quality now. Heavier. The kind of silence that can’t be filled ever again.
I told her I loved her and she kept walking. I feel the words in the hallway where I said them, hanging in the air like smoke from something that burned down. The truest thing I had. Offered with nothing left to shield it.
That only makes it worse. You know that, right?
She was right, because it does. For both of us. I had something precious and I messed everything up. Now she’s gone.
Her water glass is on the counter where she left it. Her soft fragrance lingering in the air.
Fuck.
I can stand here counting the evidence of her absence, or I can move. Do something. I opt for moving. Standing still has never fixed anything in my life, and I know it won’t fix anything I’ve done tonight.
She told me I took choices away from her. I did. And tonight, if I’d blocked the door, or grabbed her arm, or used my body to keep her in this apartment one second longer than she wanted to be here, I would have become the exact man she just described. The one who overrides. The one who knows best.
The only reason I let her walk out is because the alternative was proving every accusation right, and I could not do that to her. Not even if letting her leave takes me apart.
Jesus. So fucking noble. So goddamned principled. The shelf life on that particular brand of restraint expired about thirty seconds after the Uber turned the corner.
I need to go after her.
It’s not about control. It’s about standing in front of her one more time without cameras and shock and fourteen billion dollars detonating between us. She deserves a version of the truth that isn’t delivered in a moving car while she’s trying to process the betrayal.
She deserves to see my face and hear my voice and to have the whole ugly story laid out on a table she can walk away from at any time. And if she still leaves after that, I’ll live with it. But she has to hear it right.
I need my keys. I need to get to JFK. I don’t have her flight details but there are only so many departures to Phoenix, and I’llfigure it out when I get there. Identify the problem. Pursue the solution. My brain is already running logistics while the rest of me is still standing in the wreckage.
I move toward the bedroom. My keys are on the nightstand.
And then I see it.
Turquoise silk on white sheets. Ella’s scarf. The gift I gave her to remember our time together, to remember me. Left behind near the center of the bed. The bed where we made love together this afternoon. Where she was underneath me and her eyes were open and her hand was on my face and neither of us knew that in a few hours she’d be packing that suitcase and rolling it across my floor.
She didn’t forget it. Ella doesn’t forget things that matter to her. She untied the scarf from around her neck and set it on the bed and walked out of this room without it. Deliberately. The way she cleared the bathroom counter. The way she zipped the suitcase without looking back. She removed me from her body piece by piece, and the scarf was the last to go.
I cross the room and pick it up. The silk is cool and weightless in my hand, the turtle’s painted shell bright against the pale turquoise. I crush it in my fist as a deep pain builds inside me.
