Ronan was watching him carefully. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
So Gabriel told them.
The plan took shape as he spoke. The Oath. The frame. His mother. A scene he had been avoiding for two decades, finally happening, with witnesses. By the time he finished, the room was quiet.
“It’s going to humiliate you,” Knox said.
“Yes.”
“Are you ready for that?”
“I’ll do whatever it takes as long as I don’t lose Tessa.”
Knox stood. He didn’t say anything for a moment. He walked to the window and looked out at Manhattan.
“For the record,” he said without turning around, “the Oath had merit. We were trying to protect ourselves from exactly what you just walked into.”
“I know.”
“And I’m going to be the last man standing.”
“I know.”
“That’s fine.” Knox turned. “I’m not the one in the room asking for permission. Burn the frame. Bring your mother into it. Get her back if you can.”
Ronan stood too. He reached over and clapped Gabriel on the shoulder, the way he had been doing since they were twenty-one. “Tell us what you need.”
“I need a venue. I need timing. I need help to make sure she sees it.”
“We can do that.”
By the time they had finished their coffee, they had a plan that might actually work. For the first time since Tessa walked out, Gabriel felt something other than dread. A hope that would require him to be braver than he knew how to be.
He picked up his phone and called Camille.
She answered on the second ring.
“Gabriel. Where have you been?”
“I’d like to come for lunch. Tuesday. Twelve thirty.”
A pause. “Should I be worried?”
“You should be ready.”
He hung up.
Chapter 18
TESSA
She didn’t sleep.
She lay in the dark and turned the Saturday timeline over in her head until it stopped being a timeline and became something else: the Plaza event, the Oath discovery, Gabriel’s face in the foyer. His voice going quiet.I love you.
She understood the logic of what he’d done. She’d been running a version of the same calculation for as long as she could remember—building, proving, waiting for the day when the work would finally be enough to silence the question she’d never let herself finish asking.
When is it enough?
