Chapter One #2
“You look surprised,” she said, her voice even. “What were you expecting, Professor? That I’d still be stuck after you lied to me?”
“I did not expect to find you on another continent with a different name,” I answered, allowing the weight of that final word to settle between us. “Rhodes.”
The surname tasted foreign and unwelcome, and the most obvious interpretation pressed forward with an ugly clarity that I could not entirely suppress. Five years could turn absence into vows, rings, and another man’s claim on what I had once believed was mine.
“People change,” she replied.
“Yes,” I agreed, my tone darkening despite myself, “they do.”
Silence thickened, dense with everything unsaid.
“You disappeared,” I said, my voice low, tight with something I wasn’t trying to hide. “Five years without a word isn’t change, Edwina. It’s you leaving me behind like I didn’t fucking matter.”
Her composure fractured then, easy to miss for anyone who didn’t know her, yet I saw it in the brief tightening around her eyes.
“You received what you wanted,” she said, and there was restrained accusation in her voice now. “Your career. Your reputation. Your fiancée.”
“You think that was the point,” I said, stepping closer without touching her, closing the distance until it felt tight with tension. “You really think I’d just replace you because it was easier?”
The words slipped out before I could stop them.
“I looked for you everywhere, my little Flare,” I said, my voice rough, anger breaking through. “Don’t you dare fucking twist that into something easier just so you don’t have to face what you did.”
The corridor felt smaller than it was. Her breath caught, subtle but undeniable.
“Don’t call me that,” she said, her voice quieter now. “You lost that right a long time ago.”
“My little Flare,” I repeated, the words rough, grounded in something I had never given up. “You were never something I could switch off.”
The honesty in that sentence unsettled both of us. Footsteps echoed faintly at the far end of the corridor, reminding us the world still existed beyond this confrontation, this was still a professional event, and boundaries were expected here.
She stepped back first. “Do not do this here,” she said.
“Do what,” I asked softly, though I knew exactly what she meant.
“Whatever this is.”
I studied her face, searching for evidence of happiness, confirmation of a life that had flourished without me, and any sign that the name Rhodes belonged to a man waiting for her somewhere in this building.
“You changed your name,” I said, unable to restrain the question that had been burning since the moment I read it. “Is he here?”
Her expression closed entirely.
“That is none of your business.”
The absence of denial ignited something raw and irrational inside me, something possessive and unrestrained that five years had not extinguished but merely buried beneath discipline.
London was merely a city. The congress was merely an event.
But the woman standing in front of me was the axis around which the last five years had silently revolved.
And seeing her there, alive and composed and carrying another name, made one truth unavoidable.
Time had passed.
Nothing else had.
I moved closer then, unhurried and calm, certain in a way that left no room for doubt, reclaiming the space between us step by step until the corridor narrowed around us and I could see the faint rise and fall of her breathing, the tension settling across her shoulders beneath the composure she still held.
“Edwina—” I said, allowing her name to settle fully between us, unhurried and heavy. At that exact moment her phone rang.
The sound fractured the charged stillness in a way neither of us had anticipated, and I watched her expression change with careful attention as she lowered her gaze to the illuminated screen in her hand.
The shift was immediate. The anger she had been directing at me dissolved into something else entirely, something softer and far more unsettling.
There was hesitation, then unmistakable concern.
Her fingers tightened slightly around the phone before she turned her body away from me, instinctively shielding the display as though I had not already seen enough in her reaction alone. She answered.
“Hey, baby,” she said, and her voice transformed so completely that for a moment I felt as though I were witnessing a version of her I had no right to recognize.
It was not the composed academic tone from the stage, nor the restrained anger she had just used with me; it was warmth, unguarded and instinctive.
“Yes… I just finished,” she continued gently, pacing two slow steps away, her back partially turned to me as though creating a boundary where none existed. “I know, I know… I miss you too.”
The words were soft, familiar in a way that struck somewhere deep and unprotected inside my chest.
Fuck.
Fucking fuck.
She laughed quietly at something the voice on the other end must have said, the sound low and intimate, and I realized with a sharp clarity that I had not heard her laugh like that in years, not even in memory, because the version of her I carried had been frozen in a different timeline.
“Yes, my love,” she murmured, the phrase effortless. “I’m coming soon, I promise.”
My jaw tightened, the muscle jumping beneath the strain as I kept myself still, fighting the urge to reach for her and demand the name of the man who had earned that tone, the man allowed near the softness she once guarded so carefully.
Some fucker had taken my place in her voice, and the realization hit with a force that was anything but distant.
It settled in my chest as a territorial ache I couldn’t ignore, a line I had never agreed to cross.
“Of course I’m okay, baby,” she said. “I’ll call you when I’m on my way back.”
On my way back.
The words sank deeper than they should have, pulling at something sharp and unwelcome.
Back to where? Back to who?