I pushed open the door, and the night air hit my face, cold and clean and smelling like the lake, and I walked out of the gala and into whatever came next.
Chapter Eighteen
HOLLAND
The freight elevatorat the Wabash building smelled of cold metal and old plywood. I leaned against the wall as it climbed, the leather portfolio a heavy weight under my arm. I hadn't called, hadn't texted. I'd left Sloane at the curb with a quiet 'no' when she offered to come up. She'd understood. Now there was only the shudder of the elevator rising toward him.
The elevator shuddered to a stop on the top floor. The door rolled open onto the studio, and the first thing I saw was Finn at his drafting table, a lamp pulled low over a set of plans, his glasses pushed up into his hair. The city lights pressed against the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him, a grid of white and amber stretching toward the lake. He looked up when I stepped off the elevator, and he did not ask if I was all right. He did not ask what happened. He simply set down his pencil, crossed the room in four long strides, and stopped a foot away from me.
"What do you need?"
NotAre you okay?NotI saw the gala; I heard what happened.Just that:What do you need?And I realized, standing there in my gala dress with the portfolio still clutched against my ribs, that no one had asked me that question in seven years. Not Callum. Not Laura. Not anyone at Crestline. They had all asked what I could give, what I could fix, what I could cover for, what I could design before the deadline, what I could sayat the client dinner to smooth things over. But no one had ever asked me what I needed.
"I filed," I said. The words came out flat and clean, like a fact my body had been carrying for days before my mouth caught up. "Not someday. Not after another conversation. Not after he finds a new way to make me doubt what I saw with my own eyes. The petition is already moving. Mara has the evidence. Callum was served. The next step is not me deciding whether to leave. The next step is me deciding what I want to build without him."
Finn held my gaze. He did not reach for me. He did not tell me I was doing the right thing. He simply listened, and in the quiet of the studio, with the city humming twelve stories below us, I felt the weight of the gala finally settle into my body. The speech I had given. The faces in the crowd. Callum's expression when I held up the incorporation documents, the way his mouth opened and nothing came out. Laura's frozen smile as I named the Morrison estate, the Thompson fix, the Alden underpinning. The moment the room understood that the woman they had been applauding as a visionary had never designed a single thing.
"I stood up there and I told them everything," I said. My voice cracked on the last word, and I did not try to stop it. "I told them I funded the company with my trust. I told them I designed the lakefront portfolio. I told them the signature aesthetic they have been marketing under his name for seven years came out of my drafting table. And the whole time I was speaking, I kept thinking – this is the first time anyone in this room has heard my voice. The first time. Seven years of building that company, and I had to stage a public takeover of my own life just to be seen."
Finn pulled his glasses down from his hair and set them on the drafting table. "You didn't stage a takeover. You staged a correction."
"It felt like burning the house down."
"It was your house to burn."
I let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "That's the thing. It was. Every inch of it. And I kept thinking that if I just stayed quiet, if I just kept working, if I just kept making him look good, eventually he would turn around and say my name. He would give me credit. He would see me. But he never did. He just kept taking. And Laura kept stepping into the space I left, and the gala program called me an early contributor, and I realized—" I stopped. Pressed my palm flat against the portfolio. "I realized I was never his partner. I was just—I was the ground he built on. And you don't put a plaque on the ground."
Something moved through Finn's expression—not surprise, not pity, but a deep, quiet recognition. The same look I had caught across industry panels for years and always told myself I was misreading. "I know," he said, his voice low. "I've been watching you carry it.
"I've been carrying it since I was twenty-two years old and I handed him my trust check and my junior year portfolio and he looked me in the eye and saidwe'll build this together. And then he built it on top of me."
I set the portfolio down on the worktable beside me. The leather was warm from my grip. "I'm not doing it anymore. I'm not being useful to people who need me to stay invisible. I'm not making him look competent while he takes credit for my work. I'm not letting Laura Vale wear my life like a dress she borrowed." I looked up at Finn. "I'm done."
His hands didn't move. That was what I noticed—not what he said, not the expression on his face, but the fact that his hands stayed exactly where they were, loose at his sides, while the rest of him waited. He had been waiting, I understood, for a long time. He was simply the only one who had known it.
I stepped forward and kissed him.
The kiss held nothing of the gala, nothing of Callum. It was only Finn, solid and real. It was the decade I'd spent aware of him, the silent challenge after the cantilever competition, every glance I’d caught and dismissed across a crowded room. This time, I met his eyes.
He went still for a moment, the kind of still where you can feel someone deciding something. Then his hand came to the side of my face, unhurried, his thumb finding my jaw like he already knew where it belonged, and he kissed me back with a steadiness that made the whole evening finally stop moving.
He broke the kiss but didn't step back. His eyes were very close. "Holland." Something had shifted in his voice—lower, careful with itself. "Tell me this is what you want."
"I told a room full of strangers that I built the company my husband took credit for." I held his gaze. "I am not confused about what I want."
His thumb moved along my jaw. "Then hear me." Not a warning—an offering. "I won't be the direction you run because you needed somewhere to go. If Callum is still in the room with us—if any of tonight is still in the room with us—we stop here. I'll be here tomorrow the same way I'm here right now."
"Callum isn't in this room." My voice came out quieter than I expected, but certain. "He hasn't been for a long time." I held Finn's gaze. "What's in this room is you, looking at me like I was worth looking at since we were kids in a lecture hall. And me, spending all the years since then pretending not to notice."
Something flickered in his expression—not the careful mask he wore when he was holding back, but something raw, like a door swinging open. "Ten years," he said, his voice low. "You remember."
"Since the cantilever competition." My hands slid up his chest, feeling the heat of him through the thin cotton. "You came in second, and you walked up to me afterward and said youdeserved to win. And you meant it. No one had ever said that to me before. No one has since."
"I remember."
"I know you do."
He kissed me again before I could say anything else, his hands sliding into my hair, fingers tangling in the strands. The other hand gripped my waist, pulling me against him with a force that made my breath catch. His mouth was insistent now, pressing until I stopped resisting and let him in, and the taste of him—coffee and something darker, something that was just Finn—flooded my senses.
