Chapter Five
Hayden
The building emptied slowly. Universities always carry a strange stillness after evening settles in, a weight that feels heavier than simple silence.
Footsteps fade down hallways, office lights blink off one by one, and the faint murmur of conversation disappears until only the distant hum of heating systems remains.
I stayed. The dean’s office had already grown familiar in the few hours I had occupied it, though the polished desk and tidy shelves still carried the faint impersonality of someone else’s order.
Papers sat stacked in neat administrative folders, each one representing a life that had intersected with the university in one way or another.
One of them sat open in front of me.
Edwina Rhodes.
I leaned back in the chair, staring down at the file again as if the information printed there might rearrange itself into something easier to understand. It didn’t. My fingers tapped slowly against the desk as my eyes moved over the same line again.
Marital Status
Blank. No checkmark beside married. No spouse listed anywhere in the documentation. Just an empty box.
I exhaled slowly through my nose.
“So what the fuck happened to you, Edwina?”
The question filled the office without expectation of an answer.
If she wasn’t married, then why keep another man’s surname? Women rarely change their names without reason. Marriage, divorce, family history—one of those explanations usually sat somewhere behind the choice.
But the file didn’t show a marriage. And she wasn’t wearing a ring.
I noticed that the moment she walked into this office earlier today.
Five years hadn’t erased my ability to notice the smallest details about her.
Her hands had rested briefly against the back of the chair while we spoke, her fingers tightening when she grew angry, and there had been nothing on that left hand.
No ring.
No faint pale line where a ring might have once been.
Nothing.
Which meant one of two things.
Either she had been married and divorced since leaving Washington… Or Rhodes wasn’t a husband’s name at all.
I leaned forward slightly, resting my elbows on the desk while my fingers pressed against my temples.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
I reached for my phone. There was only one person I trusted to help me untangle the pieces. The line rang twice before Elias answered.
“I’m assuming there’s a reason you’re calling me in the middle of my workday,” Elias said.
“What time is it there?”
“Just after noon.” A pause followed. “Which is exactly why I expected you to be back in New York by now, not still in London.”
I said nothing.
“Hayden,” he said, his voice sharpening, “what the fuck are you still doing there?”
“I had something to handle.”
Elias exhaled slowly.
“You called me in the middle of my workday, Hayden, so get to the point. What do you want?”
“I need information.”
A brief pause followed.
“About?”
“Someone.”
He already sounded tired of this conversation.
“Name.”
“Edwina Rhodes.”
Silence. It stretched until I almost pulled the phone away from my ear. Then Elias spoke again, his voice slower now.
“Rhodes?”
“Yes.”
“Rhodes or Carter?”
The question reached exactly where it should have.
“Are we talking about the same Edwina?”
My jaw tightened.
“Yes,” I snapped. “Fuck, Elias. Yes.”
Another long pause followed.
“You’re telling me,” Elias said carefully, “that after five years of acting like a ghost you suddenly call me because you found Edwina Carter living under a different surname?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
A laugh escaped him. “Jesus.”
“I need you to look into her.”
“Of course you do.”
“Everything,” I continued. “Where she’s been since she left Washington. Whether she married someone named Rhodes, then divorced him.”
Elias sighed.
“You spent five years trying to find her. Maybe you should ask yourself why the first thing you want now is a background investigation.”
I let out a humorless breath.
“Fuck off, Elias.”
“And now that you finally found her, the first thing you want is a file on her life?”
“I want to know what kind of life she built,” I bit out. “I want to know the person she goes home to, the one she calls baby, and which fucker thinks he belongs where I used to be.”
Elias didn’t answer immediately. When he spoke again his tone had shifted slightly.
“Your father asked about you this morning.”
I leaned back in the chair again. “Yeah?”
“He’s not doing great, Hayden.”
The words carried a weight I recognized even through the distance.
“His health hasn’t been stable since the engagement with Alessia collapsed.”
The mention of her name irritated me. A life I had stepped away from years ago.
“I know,” I said.
“The company still expects you to return eventually.”
“They’ve been expecting that for eight years.”
“And?”
“And I told them eight years ago that I wasn’t interested.”
Elias sighed.
“You walked away from that life completely.”
“I never wanted it.”
That part had always been simple. My father spent decades building an empire he expected me to inherit. Boardrooms, contracts, corporate negotiations—the entire machine of it had been waiting patiently for me since childhood.
Eight years ago I stepped out of it. I chose academia. Research. Teaching. A life that belonged to me rather than the company.
“You still left the family scrambling when the engagement with Alessia ended,” Elias said carefully.
“That was never my future either.”
“I know.”
Another pause settled between us.
“I’ll visit soon,” I added.
“You say that every few months.”
“I mean it this time.”
“Sure you do.”
The sarcasm carried through the line clearly. Then his tone shifted again.
“Really, Hayden?”
“What.”
“That girl again?”
The question came out sharper this time.
“You’re still doing this?”
I stared down at the file again. Edwina Rhodes.
“You spent five years chasing her shadow,” Elias continued. “You walked away from an arranged engagement, pissed off your entire family, and now you’re calling me asking for a background check the second she appears again.” His voice hardened slightly. “Why are you so obsessed with her?”
The word lingered in the silent office. Obsessed. Maybe that was the right word. Maybe it always had been.
“Because she’s the only thing in my life that ever felt real,” I said slowly.
Silence followed. Then Elias muttered something under his breath.
“You’re fucking hopeless.”
“Most likely.”
“And what exactly are you planning to do now that you’ve found her?”
I looked down at the file again.
“I’m going to find out what happened to her,” I said.
“And then?”
My fingers closed slowly over the edge of the folder.
“Then,” I murmured, “we’ll see if she still hates me enough to walk away again.”
Because this time I wasn’t the one planning to disappear.
The line went quiet for a moment after my last words. Elias knew when not to push. He had watched the last eight years of my life unfold in ways no one else really understood, and he had been there so long that he knew certain subjects still carried edges that could cut.
“You know,” he said slowly, “none of this would have happened if you had just told her the truth back then.”
“I fucking know,” I snapped. “Damn it, Elias, I know. I couldn’t do it.”
I broke the engagement with Alessia two weeks after Edwina left. I ended it directly, with nothing pretty wrapped around the truth, because there was no soft way to escape something I had never chosen.
My family reacted exactly as expected. Outrage, accusations, my father’s voice cutting through all of it and lodging somewhere in my head where it still echoed years later.
Elias had been there that night, watching the whole thing fall apart across a dining room table full of people who believed my life belonged to them before it ever belonged to me.
“You embarrassed both families,” my father said.
“I don’t care.”
“You humiliated Alessia.”
“I never asked for that engagement.”
“You agreed to it.”
“I tolerated it.”
The difference mattered to me. Apparently it didn’t matter to anyone else in the room. My mother tried a different approach.
“Your sister would have wanted this marriage to continue.”
That sentence nearly made me lose whatever restraint I had left.
Because my sister had nothing to do with the engagement. Her death had simply made it convenient. After the accident that killed her and her fiancé, the families had decided that another union between us would somehow maintain the balance that tragedy had disrupted.
It had never been love, only an arrangement, an obligation, a duty dressed up as tradition.
And for a while I played along with it. Because grief makes people do strange things.
Because when you lose family in a single moment, you stop arguing about decisions that seem insignificant compared to the silence left behind.
But then Edwina walked into my life. And suddenly the future everyone else had designed for me felt like a cage.
“I never wanted Alessia,” I said to Elias now.
“I know.”
“She was a responsibility. A deal between families.”
“That’s how those things usually work.”
I leaned forward slightly, staring at the city lights outside the window.
“But after Edwina left…” I continued slowly, “…I realized something.”
“What?”
“That I had just lost the only woman I ever actually loved.” The words felt heavier now than they had five years ago. “And there was no fucking way I was going to marry someone else after that.”
Elias sighed softly on the other end of the line. “You really blew up your entire life over her.”
“I didn’t blow it up.”
“You walked away from it.”
“Same difference.”
Another pause followed.
“Your father never forgave you for breaking that engagement,” Elias said.
“He’ll survive.”
“He nearly didn’t.”
The reminder carried more weight than he intended. Still, the truth remained unchanged.
“You know what the worst part is?” I said quietly.
Elias didn’t answer immediately.
“What?”
“I might already be too late.”
Silence settled between us again.
“She changed her name,” I continued slowly. “She built a life here. A career. Everything.”