Chapter 21 Rose #2
“Isn’t it something,” she says.
“What?”
“How easy it is to manipulate men.”
I set down my fork. “Pearl, are you okay—”
“Don’t.” The word comes out flat, stripped of polish. “Don’t fucking ask me that.” She glares at me, eyes cutting once to Logan, then back to me, and the mask is just—gone. Completely gone. “You have ruined everything.”
“What have I ruined?” I ask. Except I already know. Logan is right beside me and has barely looked at her all morning. I hate that it hurts her this much, even now, after everything she’s done.
“Pearl,” Logan cuts in, low and careful.
She shakes her head, those long, perfect sheets of blonde hair swaying. “No. No, fuck this. Fuck you.”
A few sharp inhales around the table. This Pearl—no one else here has met her.
“What is your problem?” I ask, just as Dad says her name in that warning tone, telling her to calm down.
“Calm down?” She laughs, short and ugly. “I am so fucking sick of you defending her to her face and talking shit behind her back.” Dad grumbles defiance, but she continues, “You called her dangerous, remember?”
“What?”
She turns back to me. “He said you were dangerous. Stupid. That you were advising people about their health when you didn’t have a degree—”
“I have a degree!” I look between them. Dad’s jaw is tight, color climbing his cheeks.
“Pearl, that is enough,” Dad snaps.
“And you.” She turns to Logan. He goes completely still beside me, and I feel it—the way his whole body changes. Something cold settles in my stomach. “You want to tell her what you’ve done behind her back?”
“Pearl, please don’t do this,” Logan pleads. His voice sounds strange. Chills break across my skin. My heart clenches painfully.
A short, strange laugh escapes her. Then she opens her hand and lets the knife fall. It hits the table with a hard clank that makes Jo flinch.
“You want to know how easy it is to manipulate Logan?” Her voice drops, turns almost sweet.
“A little secret between you and me. A little girl talk.” She leans forward on her elbows, closing the distance across the table.
“That doctor who signed the petition to close your practice.” She lifts one finger and points it at Logan, beside me.
My brain goes quiet first. Throws up a high wall of white noise.
That’s all I hear when I turn to look at Logan’s face.
Everything else—the restaurant sounds, the clinking, the low murmur of other tables, all of it drops away.
Just that absence of sound, that wall, and then my heart beating into my ears.
“What?” I croak.
I wait for him to shake his head, to deny it. The look in his eyes, though... “Baby, I’m sorry—”
I stand abruptly, my chair scraping against the floor. “What?” The word comes out again before I can find a better one. My throat has gone completely dry. “You? What?”
“He didn’t even read it,” Pearl says. Her voice flat again. “Didn’t care enough to. You don’t matter, Rose. No one trusts you. Like Dad always said. You pretend to be good, so fucking self-righteous, but you’re just as lazy as your mother was.”
The air leaves my lungs. “You shut your mouth about my mother.”
“She was a housekeeper. And then suddenly she’s in my house, trying to be my mom, like she was good enough—”
“That is enough, Pearl!” Dad is on his feet. His voice cracks through the room. “That was my house. Not yours. And I’ve had about enough of your vitriol about Inês to last me a lifetime.”
I look at him. He’s flushed, jaw set, staring Pearl down—and his cold words move through me, quiet and separate, like I’m out of body.
“Enough about Mom,” I say. “But not me, right, Dad?”
He looks down at me, surprised. Like he’s forgotten I’m standing here. The thing that makes him stand up to Pearl isn’t me; it’s my late mother.
I turn to Logan. “Did you really sign that?”
“Rose, I didn’t know–”
“Did. You. Sign. It.”
“Yes,” he exhales.
I wipe my cheeks. I didn’t even realize I was crying. “Do you have any idea what you did to me?”
“I didn’t know—”
“No. You didn’t.” I look at my dad. He won’t meet my eyes. “I went to school, Dad. I worked my ass off. I’m good at what I do.” My voice breaks, but I press on. “You might not understand it, but I am.”
I turn back to Logan. “Do you have any idea what that cost me? Forget every penny I had to my name—”
“I’ll pay you back. Everything you lost. I can make up what the investors—”
“Stop.” The word comes out firm, like a whip.
“Just stop talking about money.” He closes his mouth.
“I lost my reputation. They went on social media and called me a fraud. A liar. They said I was dangerous.” I laugh, short and airless.
“You were thanked for it. They praised the brave doctors who came forward.”
He stands slowly. “Rose—”
“They took my business plan. All of it. The formulas, the projections, the cost analysis, the layout. Everything I had built. They’re using it right now, downtown, in some glossy wellness center for rich people.”
He shakes his head in shame. “I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t look.” I feel something close in my chest. “There’s a difference.”
“If I had known it was you—”
“I’m glad it was me. Because if it was someone else, some innocent person who—” my voice breaks again.
It’s strange, this feeling between cold clarity and hot heartbreak.
I shake my head. “They would never have known why. They would have spent the rest of their life wondering what they did wrong.” I look at him. “At least I know.”
“I’m so sorry.” He tries to take my hands, but I rip them away, hold them at my sides, curled into fists. It’s the only power I have right now, at this table, surrounded by people who don’t respect me.
“You’re a doctor. A fucking doctor.” My voice shakes.
“You took an oath. You were supposed to—” I stop.
Breathe. “Do you have any idea how many people I could have helped? Real people. People who couldn’t afford what you charge for twenty minutes of your time.
” I look around the table. At my dad. At Pearl.
And honestly, at everyone else because this room is full of wealth.
I look at the gleaming silverware and the untouched piles of decadent food, and the soft lighting that costs more per fixture than most people make in a month.
“There is so much money in this room. So much. And you used it to take away the one thing I built that was actually going to do something good. For people who needed it.” My voice drops.
“You didn’t just take my business. You took away my hope. ”
I turn to Pearl. “Are you happy now?”
She looks pissed. And deeply, genuinely unhappy. Her lip trembles—for real, for once.
“Dad told me you were lying to people,” she says. “I believed him.”
Dad says nothing.
I don’t even know what to say.
I turn away, but Logan catches my arm. “Rose, wait. I can fix this—”
I pull free. “Stay the fuck away from me.”
I think I’m watching his heart break in real time, too. But I can’t take that on. I can barely stand.
Then Sunshine is there, her hand on my arm, steering me out of the restaurant and down the hall without a word.
“What room number?” she asks.
“Twelve.”
She takes the key from my fingers when they won’t stop shaking. Just as she gets the door open, Logan’s footsteps come fast down the hall. “Rose, I can’t let you just walk away from this—”
“Hang tight, honey,” Sunshine says, shutting me in the room.
Their voices bleed through the wall. I don’t listen. I stand in the middle of the room and look at the bed, the crumpled sheets, the place where I slept next to him, where I felt maybe the happiest I’d been in years. The thought of lying down in it makes bile rise in my throat.
Then, suddenly, I’m packing. I don’t think about it, I just move, shoving everything into my backpack. Fortunately, I didn’t bring much. By the time I’m zipping it up, Sunshine’s opening the door.
“I can drive you out of here,” she says, looking at my bag.
I nod. Then I hand her the red dress. “Please tell Maria I said thank you. I didn’t wash it, I didn’t get a chance—”
“I got it, don’t worry about that now. Easy-peasy. But I don’t know how long Logan’s going to give you. I told him you needed space and would talk to him later. If you’re planning ongoing,” she points at my bag, “then I’d say it’s time to skedaddle.”
“I’m ready.”
She nods once, and I follow her out. We move quickly, past the restaurant. Dash is there, unsurprisingly, waiting by the door with his hands in his pockets, like he’s been there a while.
“Babe, I gotta go,” Sunshine says. “I’ll catch up with y’all later.”
Dash doesn’t say anything. He just falls into step behind us.
We push through a side door and out into the humid morning air, bypassing the valet loop, cutting around the outside of the resort along a path lined with low landscaping lights. I don’t let myself look back at the building. I look at my shoes on the pavement instead.
I’m going to miss this place. It was a sanctuary for a little while. From the storm. The place where Logan and I stopped pretending, where we started to build something. That’s over now.
I swallow hard and keep walking. My hands feel clammy.
Sunshine’s VW is in the employee lot, tucked between a pickup and a catering van. I climb into the back. Dash folds himself into the passenger seat. Sunshine starts the car, and we pull out, and I watch the resort shrink in the rear window.
We cross the bridge in silence. Halfway over the water, something in my chest gives, and I start to cry—not quietly, not the kind I can swallow back. The ugly kind. The kind that hurts, deep in my soul.