Chapter Sixteen
By the time she checked into the small hotel—which was a serious downgrade from where she had been with Alex, Verity felt crumpled and reduced.
The whole day had been an emotional roller coaster, and the end of it had been...everything she was afraid of, really.
Everything.
It was why she had been holding it back. That declaration of love. Because what good had it done to say it?
She wiped at the tears that kept on tracking down her cheeks. “Alex, you idiot.”
He had taken her on the most romantic date. He had made love to her, and it was glorious like always. He had made her believe in something impossible, beautiful and glorious. And then he had gone into hiding again.
She supposed yelling at him had been character development for her. She hadn’t felt the need to placate him either. How funny. His anger didn’t scare her. Her own didn’t either, not now.
However, it felt like a hollow victory. Maybe she wouldn’t really feel like she had changed until she yelled at her parents like that.
She thought about it. She thought about calling them and screaming at them, years’ worth of pent-up rage.
But the idea didn’t... It didn’t fill her with any kind of satisfaction.
Mostly because it wasn’t what she wanted.
She didn’t get mad at Alex to satisfy something in herself.
She had done it because she was desperate to reach him.
There had been a purpose to it. There was no purpose talking to her parents.
They wouldn’t change. They hadn’t. But she had.
She would continue to change. She would keep on doing it, even without Alex. Even though...
Her life would be less without him. She had loved him from the first moment she had met him.
Someday, maybe she would celebrate the risk she had taken.
That she had taken steps to actually get to know herself rather than just protect herself.
He had taught her a lot. About her own bravery.
About her desires. About what mattered to her, and what wasn’t negotiable in the end.
So maybe she should just be happy. Someday.
Not now. Now she would be miserable. She would eat pastries, and lament.
She would sit in her feelings and feel them.
Because she wasn’t hiding from anyone. Not him, not herself.
They had both spent their whole lives being so afraid of discomfort.
So afraid that it would never end. She had put on a happy face and tried to make everything around her nicer, more comfortable.
He pretended he didn’t feel. And she could see now that a lifetime of that created a bland life that contained no authenticity.
They had touched it with each other.
But she was ready to drown in it. He wasn’t.
He had hired her to be his conscience. So she had to stand firm even now. Because letting him continue to lie to himself, letting herself live a lie, that would be against everything that was right.
She lay back on the bed, and tried to sleep. But the bed was too empty without him. So instead, she went to the window and looked out at the city below.
The city of love.
Well. She had risked everything for love here. Had incredible sex in a museum. It was an exceedingly Parisian thing to do.
As she sat staring at the Eiffel Tower lit up in the distance, and crying over her broken heart, she figured that was very Parisian of her too.
In the end, he had gone back to his hotel room in Paris, and hadn’t come out for two days. He finally got a call from the board president telling him he needed to get back out there.
“I have no desire to. Not now. My wife and I are separating.”
“You can’t separate from your wife now,” the man said, practically spluttering with outrage.
“Well, it’s a shame, because I am. She has left me.”
“You have to get her back. You have to pay for her to come back.”
“It will fix nothing.”
“It will fix the optics for the company. Your relationship with Verity Carmichael is the single best thing that has ever happened to you.”
Those words echoed inside of him. Because he agreed. He agreed on every level.
Verity had been the single greatest thing that had ever happened to him, and in the end, he had to send her away. Because just looking at her...
He felt sick with regret. With helplessness.
It reminded him of being a boy. Passed around from home to home. Gawked at by potential parents but never taken home. He had always vowed he would never feel this way again. And she had made him. She had done this to him. She...
She had fundamentally changed something inside of him.
He had lost control of himself. He had thought all of his life that he didn’t have the ability to connect to another person, and she had shown him what that could be like.
Just for a moment. And she was acting like he chose. ..like he chose to stay alone?
He had never chosen this. Not ever.
For the first time in your life someone reached out to you, someone said they wanted to be with you, and what did you do?
He growled.
“Mr. Economides,” the president said, his voice placating. It brought Alex back to the moment.
“What is happening between myself and Verity has nothing to do with business. It is my life,” he said.
His life. She was his life. The business was no longer his life.
He didn’t care what happened with the product launch.
It would be successful even if he went out into the street and stole an ice cream cone from a child.
It might not be as successful, it might not be as popular, but it didn’t functionally matter.
Not truly. Yes, he could do more. The company could be bigger.
It always could be. It could be more essential.
That had been his plan, it had been his legacy, and what was it now?
It was hollow. It felt like nothing. It meant nothing.
Verity...
She was everything. She meant everything.
You could wish on that star...
The way she looked at him, with all that hope. But if it were that simple, if he could just wish on a star and have everything be fixed, then he would. He would.
She said that even if it was hard it was worth it...
But there was hard, and there was impossible. And he couldn’t...
He thought about the birthday party again. About the way she had seen it. The way that she described him.
He thought about Christmas. Christmas didn’t mean anything.
He had an image of a tree, and a house that wasn’t his, children opening presents. None for him. For the real family members. A family that he would never be a part of. On the outside looking in.
Christmas didn’t mean anything.
Except it did. It had been taken away from him.
He had hoped that someone would adopt him and every time they came to see him, he had something taken from him.
His hope. With each passing day. He had only been a small boy.
He had asked for none of it. None of it.
He had only been a boy. He had not been born with a mother who cared for him, but he had been born with hope.
And slowly, very slowly, the world had taken it from him. So he’d had to stop hoping. He had to stop caring. He had to stop believing that he might find someone to care for him. He had given the control over to himself. He had turned it into a choice.
He had built up a wall inside of him so thick and tall and strong that he was the one keeping others out. Instead of the other way around.
He thought of Verity, decorating that ridiculous cake. Her scrawl of Happy Birthday written across the top. No one had ever baked him a birthday cake before. No one had ever told him they loved him.
The president of the board of directors was still talking; he couldn’t hear him. He hung up the phone. It rang instantly. He didn’t answer it. He didn’t care.
Because it was like everything inside of him was falling to pieces. That wall cracking down the middle. “It matters,” he said. “It matters.”
He saw her. Looking at him across the desk, eating her salad and laughing at him.
Talking to him about her day, every detail, great and small.
Her, naked in the over-water villa. The way she had been hurt after the encounter with her parents.
Her cooking for him, laughing with him. And finally, the museum.
Verity, naked beneath him. He had been certain the sex with her was some sort of strange magic, conjuring up a feeling that only existed then.
But it was the only place where he lost himself just enough to feel it.
It was the truth. Everything else was a lie.
He had to find her. He had to find her and give her everything.
He closed his eyes, a feeling so big it nearly knocked him over expanding in his chest.
Hope.