Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GRAHAM
Rose locked her cabin door on a Tuesday.
Not literally, or maybe literally, I didn’t check. But the message was clear. When I walked across the yard that evening the way I’d been doing every night for the past week, her light was off and the curtains were drawn and the stillness of the place said don’t.
So I didn’t.
The next night, same thing.
By Thursday, I’d stopped walking across the yard.
It wasn’t our little fight. That was the worst part.
A fight I could have worked with, could have pushed back, apologized, found the wound and tried to close it.
This was quieter and more lethal. Rose was simply retreating.
Pulling herself inward the way she’d done at the beginning, voice even, every interaction stripped down to the minimum required syllables.
We were back to week one. Worse than week one, because now I knew what she looked like without the mask. Laughing in bed, blushing when Kaya teased her, saying my name in the dark like it was the only word she’d ever needed.
I knew what I’d lost. That made the distance unbearable.
She still ate meals in the main house. Still worked alongside me during chores. Still said “morning” and “thanks” and “goodnight” with a courtesy that felt like a door closing.
“Whatever’s going on with you and Rose,” Dex said over breakfast, reading my face, “fix it or stop moping. You’re scaring Jamie.”
“I’m not moping.”
“You’ve been staring at the same piece of toast for ten minutes.”
“I’ve given her space. I’ve given her an entire solar system of space.”
“Then give her time.”
“She’s running out of time. That’s the problem.”
Dex looked at his laptop. Jamie looked at her phone. The kitchen was quiet in the specific way it gets when everyone knows something and nobody wants to say it.
Then Jamie picked up her plate, muttered something about checking the camera batteries, and left. Which meant Dex had asked her to.
He waited until her footsteps faded down the hall. Then he closed the laptop.
“There’s something else.” His voice shifted, the tone he used when he was about to deliver damage, and it made me set down the toast I hadn’t been eating.
“The bank called Rose’s loan.” He let that land before continuing.
“Insurance lapse. They’re demanding full payment.
Two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Thirty days.
” He leaned back in his chair. “Hank told me this morning. Rose hasn’t told anyone directly, but he said she’s been on the phone with her accountant all day. ”
Two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Thirty days.
Christ.
I could cover it easily, but I knew with absolute certainty that Rose would never let me.
I stood up, chair scraping back. “I need to talk to her.”
“Graham—”
“Now, Dex.”
I found her in the office.
She was at the desk, laptop open, papers spread in the familiar pattern of someone trying to make impossible math work.
Her hair was pulled back in a knot that looked like it hadn’t been redone in days.
She’d lost weight. I could see it in her face.
She wasn’t eating enough and she was working too much and nobody could tell her to stop because she’d stopped letting anyone close enough to try.
“Rose.”
She looked up. Her expression was neutral. A wall with eyes.
“The bank called your loan,” I said.
Surprise flickered across her face, then anger. “Who told you?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters because it’s my business. Literally. My business, my debt, my problem.” She turned back to the laptop. “I’m handling it.”
“Two hundred and forty thousand dollars in thirty days. How are you handling it?”
“I’m exploring my options.”
“Let me be one of them.” I stepped closer. “Rose, I have the money. Not as charity, as a loan if you want. A proper loan, with interest, with a repayment schedule, with whatever legal structure makes you comfortable. Or as an investment. A partnership. Whatever you’ll accept.”
“No.”
“Rose—”
“I said no.” Her voice was flat but her hands had stopped moving on the keyboard. “I’m not taking your money.”
“Why?”
“Because then this stops being mine.” She looked at me, and for a second I saw past the professional mask to an exhausted, terrified woman. “Because if I take your money, I become someone who got saved by some rich guy. And that’s not who I am.”
“It’s not saving. It’s—”
“It’s exactly what Dr. Carlisle warned me about.”
I stopped. “What does that mean?”
Rose was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice sounded like she was reciting something she’d practiced.
“It means you’re a distraction I can’t afford.”
The word hit me like a slap. Not because it was cruel. Rose wasn’t being cruel. She was being surgical. Cutting away anything that wasn’t essential to survival, and I’d just been classified as non-essential.
“A distraction,” I repeated.
“Your words are in my head when I should be running numbers. Your face is in my head when I should be making calls. I’m spending energy on us that I don’t have to spare.
” She met my eyes. “I’m drowning, Graham.
And I can’t save myself while I’m trying to figure out how to love you at the same time. ”
“You don’t have to figure out how to love me. You just do.”
“That’s the problem.” Her voice cracked. “That’s exactly the problem.”
She turned back to the laptop. Conversation over.
I stood there for another ten seconds, looking at the back of her head, feeling something I didn’t have a name for fracture behind my ribs.
Then I left.
Dex was waiting in my cabin. Present in the way Dex was always present when things were falling apart.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Sit down, Graham.”
I sat. He pulled the desk chair around to face me, close enough that I couldn’t avoid his eyes.
“You can’t keep doing this,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“You can’t and you know it.” His voice was steady.
Not unkind, just factual. The voice he used when emotions would only make things worse.
“Every day we’re here, more photographers show up.
Every day more bookings cancel. Rose’s crisis gets worse by the hour and your fame is a gasoline truck parked next to her burning house. ”
“I’m trying to help her.”
“You can’t help her from inside the blast radius.” Dex leaned forward. “Graham, listen to me. I know this isn’t what you want to hear. But Rose needs space. I’m telling you, as clearly as I know how, that your presence is costing her what’s left.”
“And Denise? I’m supposed to just leave her with Denise?”
Dex was quiet for a beat. “Olivia told me. About TKM, the shell companies, the timeline, all of it. She came to me yesterday because she needed a second opinion on the incorporation request, and frankly, because she thought I should know what you two have been doing behind my back.”
“I asked her to keep it between us.”
“And she did, until it mattered.” He didn’t sound angry about it. Dex understood operational decisions. “You can do this investigation from Scotland as easily as you can do it from Colorado. And in Scotland, you’re not generating tabloid headlines that make Rose’s life harder.”
I stared at the floor. The cabin was quiet. Outside, I could hear Brutus in the paddock, the heavy shuffle of hooves on packed earth.
“She called me a distraction.” The word tasted like ash.
“She called you a distraction because she’s terrified of losing everything. That’s not rejection. That’s a woman in survival mode making impossible choices.” Dex’s voice softened. “You love her? Prove it. Give her what she needs, not what you need. She needs space to fight. Give her the space.”
“And if she loses?”
“Then you catch her. But from a distance. Where your presence doesn’t make the fall worse.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to find the flaw in his logic, the loophole that let me stay.
There wasn’t one.
“When?” I asked.
“Tomorrow morning. I’ll have Jamie and Olivia pack tonight.”
I nodded. Felt the full weight of it settle onto my shoulders, the weight of walking away from the only person I’d ever wanted to walk toward.
“I need to talk to her first,” I said quietly.
“I know.”
I found her in the barn at dusk.
Cassiopeia’s stall. Of course. The place Rose went when the world was too much, when she needed something warm and steady and incapable of lying to her.
She was brushing Cassie’s coat in long, slow strokes. The barn was golden with the last of the daylight, dust motes floating in the angled beams, and she looked so beautiful and so broken that it physically hurt to breathe.
“Rose.”
“Not now.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Her hand stopped mid-stroke. She didn’t turn around.
“The team is packing tonight. Dex booked flights out of Denver in the morning. I wanted to tell you myself.”
Silence. Just the sound of Cassie shifting her weight and the barn settling.
“Good,” Rose said quietly. “That’s... good.”
“Is it?”
She turned around then, and her face nearly destroyed me. Red-eyed. Jaw set. The look of someone holding themselves together through sheer willpower and nothing else.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t have this conversation.”
“Then just listen.” I took a step closer. “I love you. That’s not a negotiation or an offer or a rescue. It’s just the truth. I love you, and I’m going to keep loving you whether I’m here or in Scotland or on the other side of the world.”
“Graham—”
“And you were right about the distraction. Not because what we have isn’t real, it’s the most real thing in my life. But because you need to survive right now, and I need to let you.”
Her eyes filled. She blinked hard, jaw working.
“You might be right about Denise,” she said.
The words stopped me cold.