“Because you were stressed. Because the event was on Saturday. Because I was waiting for the right?—”
“Don’t say right moment.”
He didn’t say right moment.
“I don’t want to be a woman whose name your mother doesn’t know. I don’t want to be a relationship you’re protecting from your mother. I’ve spent my whole life proving I belong in rooms full of women like Camille Sterling. And the one thing I won’t do is be in another room where she gets to decide whether I exist.”
“That isn’t what’s happening here.”
“Then what is, Gabriel. What am I, exactly, that your mother doesn’t know my name?”
He had no answer.
She walked past him toward the bedroom where she had left her clothes.
“Tessa. Please.”
“Don’t follow me.”
She dressed quickly. She grabbed her bag, her jacket, her shoes. He stood in the doorway, watching her. He didn’t try to stop her.
She walked past him through the apartment, down the hallway that had started to feel like home.
It didn’t feel like home anymore.
He didn’t follow.
She made it to the elevator before the tears started.
She walked from his building to her own.
Forty blocks. Her shoes didn’t survive it. The dress didn’t either, by the time she crossed the bridge. The wind took her hair apart. New York at midnight gave her wide berth, the way the city gave a clear path to a woman who looked like she might break something.
She didn’t cry on the bridge. She cried on her own street, in front of the bodega where the McDonald’s-card man had thanked Gabriel three weeks ago. The man wasn’t there tonight. She was glad. She wouldn’t have been able to look at him.
Her apartment was dark when she let herself in. She didn’t turn on the lights. She sat on the edge of her bed in the dress she had worn to the Plaza, holding her phone in her hand, waiting for it to ring.
It did.
Gabriel: I’m sorry.
Gabriel: I should’ve told you.
Gabriel: Please let me explain.
She read each one. She didn’t answer. She turned the phone face down on the nightstand, the way she had taught herself to do years ago, when she had needed to stop expecting things.
There would be time for explanations later. Maybe. If she could figure out how to stop feeling like she had swallowed broken glass.
Right now, she needed to breathe.
And to remember how to be alone.
Chapter 17
GABRIEL
Gabriel didn’t sleep.
