28. Adriana
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Adriana
I reach for two plates.
My hand is on the second one before the rest of me catches up, and I stand at the cabinet with a plate in each hand and nowhere to set the extra one down that doesn’t feel like a confession.
I put it back. Close the cabinet. Eat standing at the counter with one plate and the kitchen too quiet, and the meal tastes of nothing because eating alone has a flavor and the flavor is absence.
Day six without him.
The apartment is mine in a way it wasn’t when his coat was on the chair and his oranges were on the counter and his laugh was filling the corners I didn’t know were empty until they were full and then empty again.
The glass wall still shows the same gold city Conrad gave me weeks ago.
The view hasn’t changed. Everything else has.
I wash the plate. I dry it. I put it away with the other one, the one I didn’t use, and my hand stays on the cabinet door a moment too long.
***
The office is easier. The office has a purpose and a schedule and people who need answers, and I can pour myself into the work the way water fills a vessel, taking its shape, becoming useful.
The spring portfolio is on track. The Whitmore integration is running clean. Gerald calls every Tuesday now, not to check on me but to consult, and the shift from being supervised to being sought is the quietest victory of my life.
I’m good at this. I’m good at this in a way I never let myself fully believe when William was in the chair and my competence was dressed as support. Now it’s just competence, standing on its own, and the company responds to it the way a garden responds to someone who actually tends it.
The tulip sits on my desk.
Pressed flat between glass, the petals uneven, one edge slightly brown where he burned it with the iron. I haven’t moved it since the night he gave it to me. Every morning my eyes find it when I sit down, and every morning my chest does a thing I refuse to name.
Today I pick it up.
The glass is cool in my palm. The stem preserved behind it, the flower frozen mid-bloom, caught in the moment before it would have opened fully.
He’d pressed it himself. The internet walked him through it.
The man who could buy any gift in this city chose to ruin a flower with an iron and put it in a frame because I once mentioned, in passing, that my husband never noticed the tulips I put in a vase every week for a year.
Knox noticed.
Knox noticed everything.
My thumb traces the edge of the frame, and the composure I’ve been holding since the night he walked out, through the office mornings, the client calls, the Gerald consultations, the six days of eating alone and sleeping alone and being the CEO of a company I saved, splits open.
The tears come.
Not the violent storm of the spare room.
Not the desperate wreck of the bar. These are quiet, tired tears, the kind that arrive when the body has run out of adrenaline and the only fuel left is truth.
They slide down my face and fall onto my hands and the glass between them, and I sit at my desk in my office with my name on the door and I let them come.
Because the truth is this: I love him.
The thought lands plain and whole, no drama attached, a fact sitting beside the other facts of my life.
I love the man who peeled me oranges and noticed my pens and pressed a tulip in a frame and told me not to go small with him.
I love the way his humor covers his wounds and the way his prose goes quiet when he means it and the way he held my face in his hands in my apartment and looked at me as though I were the only real thing in his life.
And I let him go.
I let Blythe’s poison do what Blythe intended, I let it turn every warm thing cold, let it reframe every morning as a transaction, every touch as a strategy, every moment of genuine care as an inheritance play.
I knew better.
Some part of me always knew better.
I was just too afraid to trust it.
Because the last time I trusted it, I spent a year in a blue dress cooking dinners nobody ate, turning a ring on my thumb and calling it love while the man beside me called his mistress from the next room.
The last time I trusted it, I broke so badly I threw a vase against a wall and cut my hand open on a lamp and cried on the floor of a room I’d never used until I needed somewhere to shatter.
William taught me that wanting was dangerous. And when Knox showed up and the wanting came back, stronger and truer than anything William ever inspired, the fear came with it. Because wanting Knox meant risking the kind of loss that the first one barely survived.
My hands curl around the tulip frame, the glass warming under my grip.
The fear is the last cage. And I built it myself.
I sit with that for a long time. The tears dry on my face. The office goes dark outside the windows, the city lights replacing the daylight by degrees, and I stay at my desk holding the pressed flower a man made me because he was paying attention.
***
Conrad calls on a Thursday. I pick up because it’s Conrad and because his voice is the closest thing to warmth that doesn’t come with a cost.
“How are you, really?” he asks. No preamble.
“I’m okay.”
“Try again.”
I press my forehead to the window glass and close my eyes. “I’m getting there. Some days are better.”
“The Beaufort thing?”
“The Beaufort thing.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “For what it’s worth, I still think about what I said when you first brought him around. That he ruins people and forgets their names. I don’t think I was right about him, Adriana. I think he’s the one person in your life who actually showed up.”
My throat tightens. “He left, Conrad.”
“Everybody leaves.” His voice is gentle. “The question is whether they come back.”
We talk for a few more minutes about the company, about Thaddeus, about nothing. After I hang up, a text arrives. Not from Conrad.
Idriana Rosewood: I heard about the board decision. Your father would have been pleased.
No congratulations. No apology. No warmth beyond the invocation of a dead man’s approval. A year ago it would have gutted me, the insufficiency of it, the way she can’t bring herself to say the actual words.
Today I read it, and I feel peace.
Not forgiveness, I’m not there yet, may never be.
But peace with the fact that this is who she is, and who she is can’t touch who I’ve become.
The door I closed before is still closed.
The woman on the other side of it can send whatever messages she wants.
They land on the doorstep, not inside the house.
I type back: Thank you, Mother.
Two words. Enough.
***
Thaddeus’s folder sits on my kitchen table.
The overseas venture. Cape Town. A development firm, small, growing, room for a partner with instincts and no fear. He’d sent the prospectus weeks ago, and I’d read it the way I read everything, thoroughly, analytically, looking for the flaws.
There aren’t many.
The numbers work. The market’s strong. The team is solid and the opportunity is the kind that doesn’t repeat.
A chance to build a thing from the ground up, outside the Rosewood name, outside the city, outside every room I’ve ever walked through performing a version of myself that served someone else’s plan.
Just me.
I spread the pages across the table and I look at them the way I looked at the company books that night in the study, except this time the numbers aren’t a disaster. They’re a beginning. A clean, bright, open beginning, and the woman reading them is a woman who has earned the right to take it.
The CEO chair is mine. I’m not giving it up, Leon can oversee the division while I’m away, the turnaround team is strong, and the structure I’ve built will hold. I’m not abandoning what I saved. I’m expanding past it.
Now, the horizon isn’t a wall. It’s a door.
I pull my phone out and call Thaddeus.
“Tell me about Cape Town,” I say.
His voice comes alive the way it does when he talks about the thing he loves. He talks for twenty minutes, and I listen to every word, and the excitement building in my chest isn’t the excitement of running away. It’s the excitement of running toward.
***
The night before I finalize the plans, I sit in my apartment alone.
The glass wall shows the city going dark. My reflection stares back at me, and the woman in it isn’t the woman who stood in front of a mirror in a blue dress not so long ago, trying to decide if she’d overdone it for a husband who wouldn’t notice.
This woman wears violet. This woman runs a company. This woman broke twice and rebuilt herself both times, and the second rebuild is stronger because it includes the cracks.
I press my palm to the glass. The city pulses below, and beyond it, past the buildings and the bridges and the water, there’s a plane that will take me somewhere I’ve never been, to build a thing I’ve never built, to become a version of myself I haven’t met yet.
I’m going.
The decision settles in my body the way a breath settles after being held. My shoulders drop. My jaw unclenches. The tightness behind my sternum releases.
I’m going because I’ve earned it and I want it and my life is finally, fully, entirely mine.
But…
There’s a pressed tulip on my desk and a man somewhere in this city who made it, and the ache of him is still here, sitting beside the excitement, refusing to let me leave without acknowledging it.
I love him. I’m afraid. And the fear has cost me more than the risk ever could have.
I don’t know if he’ll still be there when I’m ready. I don’t know if the half-truth he gave me was all he had or whether there was more he couldn’t say. I don’t know if Knox Beaufort is capable of what I’d need him to be.
But I know I can’t leave without finding out.
The phone is in my hand. His name on the screen. The cursor blinking in the empty field.
I don’t type. Not tonight. Tonight is mine, and tomorrow is the venture, and the day after is the rest of my life.
But soon. Before the plane. Before the door closes.
I owe us both the truth, even if the truth is the thing I’m most afraid of.
My hand closes around the phone, and I hold it against my chest, and the city burns gold beneath me, and I am whole and terrified and ready.