“Thank you,” he said quietly.
“Don’t thank me. Just call me tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he agreed.
He walked to the door. Paused with his hand on the frame.
“Em.”
“Yeah?”
“I missed you.” The words were simple, unadorned, and somehow more devastating for it. “Every single day.”
Then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him.
I stood in the conference room for a moment with my heart pounding and my hands shaking slightly and something that felt dangerously like hope settling into the place where the hollow ache had been.
My phone buzzed.
Jenna:What the actual hell just happened? Sebastian Laurent is in our newsroom looking like a kicked puppy and you’re in the conference room looking like you’ve seen a ghost.
I typed back:Nothing’s happened yet. But something might.
Another buzz:That is the most cryptic thing you’ve ever said and I NEED DETAILS.
I slipped my phone back in my pocket and walked to the window, watching Sebastian’s familiar figure cross the street below. He moved differently than he had three weeks ago — less like a man who owned the world and more like someone who had finally stopped trying to.
It wasn’t forgiveness. Not yet. Maybe not for a while, depending on whether his actions matched his words in the weeks to come.
But it was a start.
And for the first time since that disastrous night at the gala, something other than the hollow ache filled the space in my chest.
Determination. And underneath it, quieter and more dangerous, the thing I’d been trying not to name for three weeks.
Hope.
The choice, for once, was mine to make.
I intended to take my time making it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sebastian “Bash” Laurent
The press conference room hummed with tension thick enough to choke on.
I stood behind the podium, facing a wall of cameras and hungry faces, and for the first time in my career, I had no strategy. No carefully constructed narrative. No exit plan.
Just truth.
I’d spent the drive over trying to locate the fear I was supposed to feel — the bone-deep dread of a man about to dismantle everything he’d built in public, on the record, without a net. Instead I’d found something that felt almost like calm. The specific calm of a decision already made, a direction already chosen, the relief of no longer calculating which exit to take.
Emilia’s column had been sitting in my chest for three weeks like a compass pointing somewhere I’d been afraid to go.
Standing in the fire even when escape routes exist.
I was done looking for escape routes.
