Kimberly #2
I stood at the edge of the ballroom, holding my empty glass, watching the crowd glitter and hum, and gave myself a very stern internal lecture.
I was Kimberly Bishop. I could tell a man I loved him.
The absolute worst-case scenario was that he wouldn’t say it back, and then I would die of humiliation, but at least I would die with clarity, and Katelyn would be unbearably correct, and my headstone would read SHE FINALLY SAID THE WORDS.
On the other hand, maybe he’d say it back. Maybe he’d look at me with those gray eyes and say the three words I’d been waiting to hear, and the not-knowing would be over, and I could finally stop losing sleep over a question I’d been too afraid to ask.
I saw him slip through the garden doors into the cold night air. I set my glass on a passing tray, smoothed the burgundy silk over my hips, lifted my chin, and followed him. Tonight. Right now. I was going to find him and I was going to look him in the eye and I was going to say it.
My heels clicked on the stone terrace. The cool air hit my bare shoulders like a blade, sharp and bracing after the heated ballroom. The garden stretched ahead, dark and quiet. Music from the ballroom drifted through the closed doors, muffled and distant, belonging to a world I was leaving behind.
I heard Logan’s voice before I saw either of them.
They were standing near the low stone wall at the far end of the garden. Logan had his back to me, his hands in his pockets, his posture tense. Jackson faced him, his jaw set hard, his champagne glass abandoned on the stone behind him.
I stopped on the gravel. I hadn’t intended to eavesdrop. I'd come to tell Jackson Whitlock that I loved him. But their voices carried with perfect clarity in the still night, and my feet had already stopped.
"I’m asking you directly again, Jack." Logan’s voice was low, but with an edge beneath it. "What is this? What do you actually feel for her? Because I told you from the beginning, she’s my friend, and I need to know you’re not going to leave her demolished."
"And I told you from the beginning. It’s none of your business. Why do you keep asking, Logan?" Jackson’s voice dropped. "Do you want her? Is that what this is really about?"
"You’re drunk, Jack."
"Answer the question."
"I’m trying to protect her from getting hurt."
"She doesn’t need your protection." His breath dragged in, ragged. "I got close to her because she’s wearing the only key to our mother’s safe. The necklace fits the lock. I needed access."
The gravel beneath my heels made no sound. Or maybe it screamed, and I simply couldn’t hear it over the roaring in my ears, a rush like standing at the edge of a cliff and understanding, with horrible, complete clarity, that you are already falling and there is nothing beneath you.
I’d believed he cared about me at least. I'd taken off the armor I'd spent twenty-seven years building because I had to be the strong one, and I’d handed it to him piece by piece, and I’d stood there bare and trusting and completely, terrifyingly open.
And he just wanted the necklace.
Jackson looked up. His eyes found mine across ten feet of dark garden, and I watched the color leave his face in real time, draining from his cheeks like water through a crack.
He stepped toward me immediately, both hands reaching, his voice already breaking apart.
"Kim. That is not what it sounds like. You didn’t hear the full conversation."
"I heard enough." My voice came out level. Steady. Almost calm. I don’t know where it came from. Everything inside me was in free fall, hope and future and the quiet, private life I’d been building in the back of my mind, all of it plummeting through empty air.
But my voice held, because I had never once been allowed to be the one who fell apart.
I had spent my entire life standing upright while the ground vanished beneath me, and if poverty and grief and loss had given me one single skill, it was the ability to keep my spine straight while everything behind it collapsed.
"Kim, please." He took another step. His hands were open, palms up. "Let me explain. What I was about to tell Logan, what I’ve been trying to find the words for, for weeks…"
"You don’t need to explain." The tears came. Hot and fast and utterly beyond my control, sliding down my cheeks and dropping onto the silk of the dress he’d bought me, darkening the burgundy to something deeper.
I hated the tears. I hated that he could see them.
I hated that I was standing in a gown he’d chosen for me, crying over a man I should have been too smart, too experienced, too burned to trust.
"If this was what you wanted, Jackson, you only ever had to ask. I would have handed you that necklace the very first day if you’d looked me in the eye and told the truth.
I would have unclasped it and placed it in your hand and walked away, because I never wanted your mother’s jewelry more than I wanted to be treated like a person who mattered. "
"That’s not what happened. Kim, the necklace was never the…"
I reached behind my neck. My fingers found the clasp of the pendant, the small silver necklace Greta Whitlock had fastened there with her own frail, trembling hands on a gray afternoon in a garden full of roses, when she looked at me with those warm brown eyes and said, I have no daughters of my own, Kimberly. So this is yours. Keep it close.
I unclasped it. The chain slid against my skin, warm from hours of resting against my pulse.
I threw it at his chest.
He caught it on reflex, his hand closing around the silver.
"It’s yours," I said. "It was always yours. Enjoy your safe, Jackson. I hope whatever your mother locked inside is worth what it cost you to get it."
I ran.
Logan’s voice, faint but urgent, carried across the garden. "Jack. Go after her."
Jackson was calling after me.
I didn't wait.
My legs carried me faster and faster, away from him.
I hailed a cab and the driver gave me a concerned look, but he wisely didn't comment.
The car took me farther and farther away from Jackson Whitlock.
I broke.
I cried for the version of him I'd believed in with my whole stupid, reckless heart. And for the possibility that he had never existed at all.
And I cried for the girl from Beacon Hill who’d walked into a glass tower with a folder and no appointment and somehow, against all evidence and all probability and all common sense, let herself believe she belonged there.
The champagne had gone sour in my mouth. The celebration was still going on behind me, somewhere inside that golden room the world was continuing without me, the way it always had, the way I’d always known it would.