72
Dorothy did not cry when she read Sebastian's email.
That seemed important at first.
She stood in Victor's office with the printed message in her hand, Hale watching her too carefully, Victor pretending not to look murderous, and she did not cry.
Her face remained composed. Her breathing stayed even.
Her fingers tightened around the paper only once before she forced them to relax.
To anyone watching from the outside, Dorothy Perry received Sebastian Hood's sudden withdrawal the way powerful women were expected to receive injury: with a still mouth, a lifted chin, and enough restraint to make grief look like judgment.
Inside, something old opened.
Not dramatically.
Not with the violence of the hospital memory or the humiliation of the necklace gala.
This was quieter, and because it was quieter, it entered more deeply.
Sebastian had not shouted. He had not accused her publicly.
He had not chosen Vanessa over her in a room full of witnesses.
He had not done any of the obvious things Trevor had once done so easily that Dorothy could recognize them from across a ballroom.
He had simply become unreachable.
Formal.
Distant.
The title sat in the email like a door closed with care.
That was what made the wound so precise.
Sebastian knew how to close a door without slamming it.
He knew how to make distance look reasonable, responsible, almost kind.
The message said all the correct things: operational commitments would continue, teams would coordinate, public speculation should be stabilized, visible overlap should be reduced.
No cruelty. No abandonment written in plain language.
No sentence Dorothy could underline and say, there, that is where he left me.
And yet he had.
Not entirely, perhaps. Not in business. Not in legal coordination.
Not in the ways that could be documented and judged by committees.
But emotionally, the warmth had been withdrawn so suddenly and so cleanly that Dorothy's body did not care about nuance.
Her body remembered other withdrawals. Trevor leaving the dinner table because Vanessa called.
Trevor's phone going silent while Dorothy sat in a hospital corridor.
Trevor standing beside Vanessa at a gala while Dorothy learned that public humiliation could happen without anyone raising a voice.
Her mind knew Sebastian was not Trevor.
Her body did not ask permission before hurting.
Hale said something about tracing Vanessa's movements after the forum. Victor said something about Hood's wording being "cowardly, or coerced, and I dislike both possibilities." Dorothy heard them from a distance. Her eyes remained on the email.
She had once been Mrs. Raymond in a house where the title meant nothing. Now she was Miss Perry in a message from a man who had once said her name like it belonged to her before it belonged to anyone's expectation.
The paper blurred.
Dorothy lowered it before anyone could see.
"I need a moment," she said.
Victor's face softened immediately. "Dorothy."
"Please."
That single word stopped him.
Victor Perry, who could dismantle companies before breakfast and make ministers reconsider their language by noon, looked at his granddaughter and stepped back because she had asked.
It was a small mercy. Dorothy was learning to count small mercies because large ones often arrived too late to be trusted.
She left the office before Hale could offer strategy and before Victor could offer war.
The corridor outside was quiet, lined with framed photographs of Perry estate through different decades.
Dorothy passed them without seeing much.
Her heels made almost no sound on the carpet.
By the time she reached the east conservatory, her chest had begun to tighten in a way she recognized and resented.
Not here, she thought.
But the body chose its own rooms.
The conservatory smelled faintly of damp soil, white lilies, and winter light caught in glass.
It was the same place where she had broken in Sebastian's arms after Trevor learned about the baby.
The memory entered before she could defend herself against it: Sebastian standing at the threshold, asking if she wanted him gone; Sebastian holding her only after she allowed it; Sebastian admitting it hurt to hold her while she cried over Trevor's failures,
yet staying because she needed someone who would not turn grief into debt.
He had stayed then.
Now he was gone.
No. Not gone. Distanced. Strategically withdrawn. Publicly separated. Emotionally unavailable until further notice.
Dorothy let out a sound that might have been a laugh if there had been any humor in the world.
Until further notice.
How clean men could make absence when they had lawyers to help them phrase it.
She stood beside a row of orange trees and pressed one hand against the edge of a stone planter. The leaves trembled faintly beneath the glass ceiling's soft draft. Outside, the garden paths were pale with afternoon light. The world looked far too calm for the number of things breaking inside her.
Sebastian had a right to be angry.
That was the worst part. Dorothy could not even make him the villain without lying.
She had hurt him. She had asked a question that should never have crossed her mouth.
She had let Vanessa's poison enter a place Sebastian had tried to keep honest.
He had told her he needed distance. She had heard him.
She had accepted it because she had no right to demand comfort from someone she wounded.
But this felt different.
Not angry.
Not wounded.
Cut off.
Dorothy opened her phone.
No new messages.
She stared at Sebastian's name. The last visible message was still his midnight reply.
They had not spoken.
He had sent an email instead.
Miss Perry.
The title struck again, and this time the tears came so suddenly she had no chance to swallow them down.
Dorothy turned away from the glass doors and wiped her face quickly, almost angrily.
She had cried too much lately. In conservatories, libraries, corridors, gardens, rooms full of lawyers.
She was tired of having feelings that arrived late, contradicted each other, and refused to behave like the clean woman the public wanted her to be.
She missed Sebastian.
She was angry with him.
She was afraid for him.
She was ashamed of herself.
She was afraid he had decided her confusion was not worth surviving.
And beneath all of that, deepest and most humiliating, she felt abandoned in a way that did not belong only to him.
It belonged to every door that had closed when she needed someone to stay.
Dorothy pressed her fingers to her mouth to stop the sound that tried to rise.
The conservatory door opened.
She turned sharply, already rebuilding her face.
Trevor stopped at the threshold.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
He had not expected to find her like that.
She saw it in the way his body went still before his expression changed.
The old Trevor might have looked away because tears made him uncomfortable when they belonged to Dorothy.
He might have frowned and asked why she was upset.
He might have assumed, judged, demanded explanation, or worse, stepped forward as if grief had become permission.
This Trevor did none of those things.
He remained at the door.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I did not know you were here."
Dorothy wiped beneath one eye with the side of her finger. "Then why are you here?"
"Hale asked Marcus to bring updated files from Raymond's internal investigation. Victor was in the office. I was told to wait somewhere that did not offend him."
Despite herself, a small, broken breath escaped her.
Trevor's mouth moved faintly, not quite a smile. "Apparently, every room I occupy offends him."
"He is consistent."
"He is."
The brief exchange faded quickly, leaving the truth visible again.
Trevor's eyes moved over her face, careful and restrained. He saw the tears. He saw the phone in her hand. He likely knew enough to guess the rest. But he did not step in. He did not say Sebastian's name first. He did not turn her distress into an opportunity for his own tenderness.
"I can leave," he said.
Dorothy looked at him.
The offer was genuine.
That was what made her answer difficult.
If he left, she would be alone with the email, the title, the memory of every absence. If he stayed, she risked letting Trevor become comfort for a wound Sebastian had made, and that felt like another way to betray everyone involved, including herself.
"You do not have to," she said at last.
Trevor accepted the permission with a small nod but did not come closer. He stepped inside only far enough for the door to close behind him, leaving several feet between them and the nearest bench. He stood as if the space itself had rules he was determined to obey.
Dorothy looked down at her phone.
"He called me Miss Perry," she said.
The sentence sounded small after everything that had happened.
Stupid, almost. Vanessa had stolen medical records, forged contracts, faked paternity claims, staged photos.
Adrian Vale's scandal threatened Raymond Group.
Hood Enterprises might be hiding something old and dangerous, though Dorothy did not yet know the shape of it.
And here she was, standing in a conservatory with tears on her face because one man had chosen a formal title in an email.
Trevor did not treat it as small.
"Hood?" he asked.
She nodded.
His face changed, but he controlled it quickly. "In the withdrawal email?"
"You saw it?"
"Marcus summarized it. Not the full text."
Dorothy's mouth tightened. "Of course everyone has summarized it."
Trevor looked down. "I am sorry."
"I am tired of being summarized."
The words came sharper than intended.
He nodded once. "That is fair."
Fair.
Everything was fair now. Everyone had reasons. Sebastian had reasons. Trevor had reasons. Dorothy had reasons. Even Vanessa, in some twisted private court of her own making, thought she had reasons. Reasons did not make the heart easier to hold.
Dorothy turned toward the glass wall. "He is pulling away."
"Yes."