"He didn't have to. His lawyers were more elegant than that." Cecelia's fury was controlled but unmistakable—the fury of someone watching a building she'd constructed being taken apart brick by brick by people with better tools. "They've been busy, Emmy. Cease-and-desists to three outlets that published your photo. A formal complaint to the press council about the original leak coverage. His team's PR office has been redirecting every media inquiry about 'the matchmaker's identity' since the leak." A beat. "This wasn't a reaction to the article. This has been happening since the day it broke."
Since the leak. Since his phone went to voicemail and his signature arrived on a termination contract with no words attached.
Grant hadn't been silent because he was hurt beyond reaching. He hadn't gone dark because she'd destroyed him.
He'd beenworking.
Quietly. Systematically. The way he did everything—without performance, without announcement, without needing her to know. The water glass slide, scaled to legal letterhead. Cease-and-desists she never saw. PR redirects she never heard. An entire apparatus of protection deployed around her while she sat in this apartment and convinced herself she'd hollowed him out.
"I underestimated," Cecelia said tightly, "how far he'd go for someone who doesn't deserve it." A breath. The first crack in the composure. "And now I have four former clients filing complaints with the AG's office, a reporter fromThe Globerequesting comment on our intake procedures, and Sabine in New York pretending she doesn't know me. So if you have any influence left with your quarterback's legal team, I'd suggest you?—"
Emmy hung up.
She sat there.
The apartment was quiet. Through the thin walls, someone was playing jazz—the same neighbor, the same closing-time department store sound that had been the backdrop to every hollow evening in this chair.
Bailey's voice:His heart was somewhere else before I ever met him.
Her mother's voice:He always seemed happy enough to let you.
Grant's silence, which she had read as abandonment. Which was, in fact, the loudest thing he'd ever done.
Emmy pressed her hands to her face. Her eyes were burning. The entire architecture of the last three weeks—I destroyed him, I hollowed him out, I used him up, I'm the one holding the knife—cracked down the middle and what came through the fissure was something so bright it hurt.
Not a revelation. A correction.
She hadn't broken Grant Knight. She'd broken her own ability to see him clearly—the same blind spot that had defined every mistake she'd ever made, her spectacular gift for applying considerable intelligence to the wrong conclusion. She'd been so busy punishing herself for what she'd done that she'd missed what he was doing.
Emmy stood up.
She grabbed her coat and her keys and opened the door.
Grant stood on her doorstep, hand raised to knock, wearing a look on his face so determined it took her breath.
They stared at each other.
The hallway was quiet. Christmas lights blinked in the stairwell. Somewhere below them, the Bluetooth speaker she’d gotten Mrs. Jasinski murmured carols through a closed door. The cold clung to him—his coat, the flush across his cheekbones from the December air.
"Going somewhere?" His voice was rough.
"To your house."
Something moved across his face. A crack in the composure, or the composure finally giving up.
"Grant, I'm so sorry?—"
He kissed her.
Not gently. Not the way she'd imagined it in the versions of this she'd refused to let herself imagine. He kissed her like a man who'd run out of reasons not to, every carefully maintained boundary gone. His hands found her face first, then her hair, and Emmy's back hit the doorframe and then the wall of her own entryway and her coat was half on and half off and she couldn't think—she actually, literally, for the first time in her organized, overanalyzed, pathologically curated life, could not form a single coherent thought.
His mouth was warm and he tasted like coffee and cold air and his hands were in her hair and her hands were fisted in the front of his coat, pulling him closer because closer existed and she hadn't known, she hadn'tknownit could feel like this—like being on fire and coming home at once, like every almost-moment from the last three months detonating simultaneously, the terrace and the tennis lesson and the too-small couch and the Page Six questions and every careful inch of distance she'd maintained collapsing into nothing, less than nothing, into the negative space where distance used to live.
Grant pressed her into the wall and Emmy made a sound she'd deny later—something between a gasp and a laugh, involuntary and embarrassing and absolutely real. His hand curved around the back of her neck. She arched into him. Her fingers found the hair at his nape, longer than she'd expected, and she pulled, and the soundhemade—low, rough, muffled against her mouth—rewired something fundamental in her understanding of the physical world.
"Oh my."
They broke apart.
