Chapter 22
Birdie
He doesn’t come home.
Not that night.
Not the next morning.
Not even by the time the sun starts bleeding into the evening sky.
I sit on the couch like a fool, clutching my phone, checking every few minutes as if maybe I missed a text. A call. Anything. But there’s nothing.
By the time I open social media, I already know. But seeing it—God, seeing it—is so much worse. Photos from the gala last night are everywhere. Lorenzo in a sharp tuxedo. Francesca in shimmering red. A power couple, the captions call them. Effortless. Elegant. Magnetic.
And they are.
He’s tall and commanding, the perfect portrait of control. She’s poised and beautiful, every inch the woman a man like Lorenzo is supposed to marry.
I scroll and scroll, unable to stop. One photo after another. Her hand on his arm. His lips near her ear. The press eats it up while I want to throw my phone across the room.
And the worst part? I can see it. I can see what everyone else sees. They belong. At least on paper. In pixels. In legacy. They look like they were born to be next to each other. Born to rule.
And me?
I’m the stupid girl in his bed. Wait. Not even in his bed, which might make it worse. Just the one who believed the whispers in the dark. The one who said okay when he made promises he never should’ve offered.
I knew he was engaged. I knew it from the beginning. And still, I listened. Still, I wanted him. I let myself fold into his hands like I was someone he could keep.
I made myself the other woman.
Worse, I made myself believe I was something I never was. Important. I let myself hope. God, I let myself hope.
And now? And now look at me.
I’m standing in the wreckage of my own choices, staring at the truth I tried so hard not to see.
I wasn’t special.
I was convenient.
And I walked right into it with my eyes wide open.
That’s how I spend New Year’s Day. Alone in a house that feels too big and too quiet to survive drowning in my guilt.
Not even the staff is here. They were sent home for the holiday, probably on his orders.
Maybe out of kindness. Maybe because he didn’t want anyone around to see the mess we’d made of things.
The rooms echo with emptiness. The clocks tick too loudly.
Every light seems too bright or too dim, like the house can’t decide how to hold itself without him anchoring it.
At midnight, I curl up on the sofa with Sienna’s quilt—the one she always kept in the living room, the one with mismatched patches she’d collected from every place she loved.
I pull it around my shoulders, burying my face in the soft fabric.
It smells like her. Like the warmth she carried everywhere she went. I fall asleep like that—wrapped in someone else’s memories, wishing for someone I have no right to miss.
So when he finally appears on January second, I’m already frayed around the edges.
I’m in the kitchen, eating reheated pasta that tastes like nothing. Just something to chew on so I don’t fall apart. The moment he steps into the room, I know. His footsteps. His scent. That shift in the air like something magnetic just entered the space.
But I don’t look up. Not until I hear it.
“Miss Miller,” he begins.
Hearing him call me Miss Miller feels like being shoved out of my own skin.
Like he took everything intimate between us—the whispers, the heat, the way he said my name against my throat—and wiped it clean with a single, cold title.
It’s a reminder that I was never his. That whatever we were wasn’t real, wasn’t lasting, wasn’t meant to matter.
It shouldn’t hurt the way it does. But God, it feels like he just slammed a door in my face after pretending it was open.
I look up slowly, even though I already know what I’ll see.
“Back to Miss Miller, huh?” A bitter laugh slips out before I can catch it. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
He’s wearing a suit. Not the tux he left in on New Year’s Eve. No, this one is crisp, immaculate, deliberately chosen to remind everyone who he is.
Who I’m not.
The fabric hugs his shoulders with the kind of tailored authority only a man like him can wear. His tie is crooked, faintly askew, like he didn’t bother to fix it after taking it off or after someone else pulled on it. And God help me, I wonder if she was the one who straightened it this morning.
If he slept in her bed.
If he held her the way he held me.
He looks tired, maybe—shadowed around the eyes, tension stiffening his shoulders. A little frayed at the edges, like the world has pushed in on him from too many angles.
But other than that?
He’s whole.
Untouched.
Exactly the same man he was when he walked out the door and left me behind. And somehow… that hurts more than anything. Because if I mattered there should be something different in him. But he’s steady, already rewritten back into the version of himself that doesn’t include me at all.
I force my voice to steady. “When can I go back home?”
His brow lifts, confusion flickering across his face as if the question itself is an insult.
I bark out a sharp, hollow laugh. “Did you really think I’d want to stay here after you chose her?”
His jaw tics. Just once. Small and contained like everything else he does.
“It’s not safe,” he says tightly.
“I don’t care.” My voice cuts clean through the room like a blade. “And you shouldn’t care either.”
And I mean it.
God, I mean it with every cracked piece of my stupid, hopeful heart.
He shouldn’t care. He has no right to care. Not after everything. He chose her. He walked into a gala on her arm. He stood beside her family, nodded along with their future plans, let their world swallow him whole.
And now he wants to stand here in front of me—in the house where he touched me, kissed me, whispered things I should’ve never believed—and pretend he has the right to be protective?
No.
Whatever connection we had died the second he chose her.
And if there’s any justice left in this universe, it should hurt him half as much as it’s hurting me.
The silence that follows is thick enough to choke on. He can’t decide whether to be angry or hurt or indifferent. And I can’t decide whether I want him to feel something or feel nothing at all. Because either way, it’s going to destroy me.
Silence stretches between us. A canyon full of everything we didn’t say.
“You made your choice, Lorenzo,” I whisper. “So let me make mine.”
He moves closer. Too close. The marble island presses into the back of my hips, trapping me between him and the counter. I refuse to let him cage me in, so I slide sideways, putting space between us.
“You have to see that this is best for everyone.” My voice shakes, but I keep going. “I go away. You marry Francesca. And everything works out the way it was supposed to.”
He watches me like he doesn’t recognize the language I’m speaking. Like logic is foreign to him.
“You’re hurting,” he says softly. “I understand that.”
“Do you?” I laugh, sharp and ugly. “Because if you understood anything about how I feel, you’d let me leave.”
“I owe it to Sienna to make sure you’re safe.”
That does it. A laugh rips out of me because the alternative is screaming until the entire city shakes.
“Bull crap.”
His brows draw together, offended, like I’m the unreasonable one. “What?”
“If Sienna were here and saw how you’ve treated me?” My voice trembles, but I don’t back down. “She’d be the first person to tell me to leave you.”
He flinches. Good Let something hurt him for once.
“She’d tell me I deserve better,” I push on, heat blistering through my chest. “That I shouldn’t stick around for scraps of affection while you publicly play house with someone else.”
His throat works, a harsh swallow. “I—”
“No.” I drag a shaking hand over my cheeks, furious when it comes away wet. “I get it, Lorenzo. I really do. You chose her. You chose the safe choice. The expected choice.”
He steps toward me again, jaw tight, eyes storm-dark. “It’s not like that.”
“I don’t care what it’s like,” I snap, my voice splintering. “Because the only thing that matters is this—”
My breath catches while my heart cracks And I finally say the words that have been clawing at my throat since the moment he walked through that door.
“I can’t stay here.”
Something in his expression cracks like I just struck bone. He reaches out, fingertips brushing my wrist, gentle, desperate.
“Elizabeth—”
I yank my hand back.
“Don’t,” I whisper. “Don’t touch me like you didn’t just shatter everything.”
Silence presses in around us. He looks devastated. But not enough to change his mind.
“I’m leaving,” I say, voice final, carved from the last of my resolve.
I don’t wait for his reaction. If I do, I might break.
In my room, I pace like a caged animal. I can practically feel his presence through the walls.
There’s a very real chance he won’t let me walk out of here.
And if he doesn’t… what’s my backup plan?
Wrestling his security detail? Running through the snow barefoot?
I can’t fight my way back to Kansas City.
I’m trapped—geographically, emotionally, and stupidly.
Just after midnight, something crashes downstairs.
My heart stutters.
I hesitate in the hallway, then move silently toward the noise. The house is dim, only the study light glowing through the cracked door. I push it open.
Lorenzo sits at his desk, shoulders slumped and tie hanging loose. He’s cupping one hand in the other, blood dripping onto important-looking papers.
“What happened?” I ask before I can stop myself.
He looks up, and the sight hits me hard. His eyes are glassy, unfocused. Vulnerable.
“Dropped a glass,” he says, but his words slur together.
He’s drunk. Really drunk. I’ve never seen him anything but composed, guarded, infuriatingly in control. Seeing him undone like this doesn’t feel victorious. It feels like watching a skyscraper collapse.