Chapter 60 Rafe
RAFE
I lead Paige through the garden. She’s trembling, and her breath is coming shallow and fast. These attacks are coming way too often. She told me it was something that happened sometimes. But now it’s been weeks and she’s had three, just around me.
My jaw grinds together.
Something in her life has changed recently. It’s not hard to pinpoint what it is.
We walk out onto the dock. Near the water that she loves so much, beneath the warm Italian sun, I hold her while she starts to cry.
Breathe, I tell her. In and out. In and out. I stroke over her long blonde hair. The interviewer better not mention any of this. I have no doubt Karim is already handling all of that.
She cries.
But she doesn’t sob so hard it sounds like she’s breaking apart, and she doesn’t sound like she can’t breathe. I revel in those small things. The lack of panic amidst all the sadness.
I hold her against me. “Those questions were out of line,” I mutter against her temple.
She shakes her head. “I just wasn’t… I wasn’t prepared for that.”
“They weren’t preapproved.”
“It was just, the question… what would my parents think about this? As if I don’t wonder that every single day?” Her voice cracks. “How am I meant to answer that?”
“You don’t have to. Fucking reporters. We won’t do another one of those.”
“But we need… we need good press. For the lawsuit. And my uncle. And—”
“Paige,” I say again, my chest tight. “I’ll handle it. Don’t think about that. You don’t have to answer her questions.”
I lean back and smooth my thumbs over her cheeks. They’re tracked with tears, and she looks up at me without any of the ire we lobbied at each other just hours ago. “This happens when you feel trapped. Like you told me the other week. Right?”
“Sometimes. Yes.”
I smooth over her back and think about that. The interview. The question about her family.
Has it all been about her family?
The first one was the day after I told her what her uncle had done to my sister. The second after he confronted her. And now… questions about her parents’ accident.
She peers up at the sky, looking miserable. “This is the worst,” she says. “I was still angry at you. I planned to go to bed in really sexy lingerie tonight to get back at you, and instead I’m the one wrecked and… sobbing.”
That makes my lips twitch. “There’s still time. And it’s okay to fall apart. You’ve seen me at night.”
She buries her head in her hands, and her shoulders curve inwards. I hate the sight.
“When did it start?” I ask. “The panic attacks?”
Tears seep out from behind her hands. I don’t think she’s going to answer me. But I keep stroking her hair and feel her breathing steady against me.
“When I was in college,” she murmurs. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“And I didn’t want to talk to you about… my brother. The other night.”
“Did it help?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Paige half groans, half chuckles. We’ve ended up sitting on the stone dock, my boat rocking softly beside us.
She settles against my side and her breathing slows.
She looks vulnerable like this, knees drawn up, her hair a mess around her shoulders.
“I played tennis all my childhood, in high school, too. I went to college on a tennis scholarship. But I knew it wasn’t what I wanted long-term.
I could never go pro or anything.” She takes a deep breath, and I curl one of her blonde locks around my finger.
This is not where I thought she’d start.
“My mother taught me. She was a great player; she did go pro for a few years. And then when I was in my second year of college…”
“They passed away.”
“Yes. A car crash. They were in Oregon visiting my aunt, and there was a truck. Drunk driving. They died instantly, but from one day to the next…”
“Your whole life changed.”
“See, that’s the thing.” She turns, her voice strengthening. My arm is still beneath her head. “It did and it didn’t. I was still at college. I still had my summer job lined up at Mather & Wilde. I had my uncle. Everything changed and yet nothing was different.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I had my college scholarship, and it was conditional on me playing for the school.” She takes another deep breath. “I inherited shares, not bucketloads of money, you know? So I’d go out on court and play in tournaments, then fall apart afterward. When no one could see me.”
Like I did.
Buried it in the night, in fighting and in nightmares, clad in darkness. Far away from where friends and family could bear witness.
There’s been so much on her shoulders since then. Her family company and her future, and all of it with no one but a meddling uncle to rely on.
“I was doing so well here, with all of it. I made sure I’d only fall apart in private. But then you saw.”
“I did.”
She puts a hand over her face. “Can I just say how much I hate that you did see it? And then how terrified I’ve been that you’ve actually been… that I can… that it helps me?”
“You can say it. You can say anything.” I press my lips to her temple. Her skin is soft. I shift my lips to her hair, the sheet of gold that’s haunted me since she first walked into the courthouse.
“Why do you understand me so well? Is it because of your… your nightmares? And the accident?” Her knees pull up, resting against mine. “That interviewer out there, she—”
“She didn’t see a thing. We’ll make sure of that.” The stone is hard beneath me, but she’s soft. Her question is valid. But I don’t want to answer it, because it’s different. I was the cause of my accident and what it cost me. “Did your panic attacks start coming more often when you married me?”
I stroke over her back, like the answer doesn’t matter immensely. Like my heart isn’t pounding in my chest at the idea.
“No, that’s not why. I don’t think so, at least.” She takes another deep breath. “I’m not always good at having… at feeling. And for many years I tried to not feel. But that’s been hard lately.”
“You’re feeling a lot these days,” I say.
She nods, and the hand on my chest flattens. “My uncle is gone. He’s still alive, but the relationship I’ve held on to for years…” Another tear runs down her cheek. It’s soaked up by my shirt.
“He’s a fool,” I say, “for not realizing what he had. Anyone would be a fool to have you in their lives and lose you.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.” There are many reasons why I dislike Ben Wilde.
Many very intense reasons, connected specifically to my little sister.
But to throw away his last remaining family with carelessness, with neglect, is an action I’m never going to understand.
Paige is whip-sharp and her ideas for Mather & Wilde are good.
She cares so much she married me to protect the people who work there.
She lost her parents in one fell swoop. And now, in death by a thousand cuts, she has finally lost her uncle completely too.
No wonder she’s feeling a lot.
Her eyelashes are wet. They clump together when she blinks. “You’re being kind to me again. And I’m not sick.”
“You’ve been kind to me. Sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” she echoes, and there’s a smile in her voice. A tiny one, but a smile, nonetheless.
“You can be angry at me again later,” I tell her, “if you really feel the need to be.”
“I wanted you to tell me yourself. About the layoffs. It felt… I just wish you’d told me.” Her voice wavers a little, and I hate that sound. I hate that I caused it.
“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t, darling.” I smooth my hand over her back again. “Will you tell me more about what happened after you lost your parents?”
“After?”
“Yes. You were only nineteen.”
She takes a deep breath. “I had to handle everything. All the logistics. The house, the funerals… Ben helped. He really did, Rafe, I promise. He paid for the lawyers and let me start working at the company as soon as I graduated. You see, I knew everyone who worked there. I found a small apartment by the ocean and spent every single day with the people who make our bags and loafers, or organize photoshoots and campaigns, who oversee the financials.”
“They’re your family,” I say simply.
She nods. Her fingers are walking over my chest. Boats pass by in the distance, on the busy lake.
“They were all there for me. And they all… knew. If I would start feeling terrible on a random Tuesday, four years after it happened, and all of my friends had long since stopped asking me about my grief. They knew, and they let me have my space.”
I run my free hand over my face. It’s too close to home, and yet I can’t stop the words coming out of me. “Grief takes time. That’s what they’ve told me, anyway. But I don’t think it ever really heals.”
“Me neither,” she says. “It just becomes easier to bear.”
I stroke away a tear on her cheek and think of how she’s killing me every single day, and how I can’t find it in myself to blame her for it.
Her eyes meet mine. They’re glossy from her tears, but steady again, her panic receding. “Are we agreeing on something?”
“It seems like it, darling.”
“I don’t think I need to be angry at you again later.” She digs her teeth into her lower lip. “We worked it out pretty well.”
My mouth curves. “Yeah. I’d say so.”
“It was a fun way to argue.”
“Yes. It was.”
“But,” she says, and lifts herself up on an elbow, “I still want you to tell me all about the potential layoffs, and I want to be involved in deciding who and why and when. I want it to be a last resort. You’re not leaving me out of the decisions again.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I tell her, and it’s the truth.