Chapter Twenty-Six #2
I look down at my hands. At the ring.
"I fell in love with him," I say quietly.
My father doesn't look surprised. If anything, he looks like he's been waiting for me to catch up. Which... fair.
Then his face changes.
"How much is he paying for this place?"
Every muscle in my body goes still.
"What?"
"The timeline never made sense," he says gently. "Not if you were in love before the wedding. And then at the rehearsal dinner, I overheard enough outside to understand there was some kind of deadline."
I can feel my pulse in my ears. In my throat. In my damn fingertips.
"I don't know every detail," he says. "I don't need to. I know you. And I know you would only marry a man you didn't love for one reason."
His eyes move around the room. The monitors. The bed. The window with the view of the parking lot that costs more per month than my old apartment.
"This."
The tears come before I can stop them. Not the pretty kind — not the single tear rolling down the cheek like some woman in a perfume commercial. The ugly, messy, can't-breathe kind that makes my nose run and my mascara do things I'll regret in the bathroom mirror later.
He reaches for my hand.
"I'm not angry," he says immediately. "I just need the truth."
I wipe at my face with my free hand and nod.
"It started that way," I whisper. "The contract. The arrangement. He needed a wife before his thirty-fifth birthday. I needed..." I gesture weakly around us. "This. You. Safe."
He waits.
"Three hundred and sixty thousand dollars," I say. "For one year."
He doesn't flinch. Doesn't judge. Just keeps holding my hand.
"But that isn't what it is anymore." It comes out in a rush.
"It hasn't been that for a while. I don't even know when it stopped being that, Dad, I just know that somewhere between signing a contract and standing in a village in France watching him try to find Mom's apartment from a forty-year-old photograph I just..
." My voice cracks. "I fell in love with him. "
His grip tightens.
"Not the arrangement. Not the money. Not what he can do for us. Him."
I'm crying and talking at the same time now, which is not my best look, but if I stop I'll never get it out.
"He remembers things. Stupid, small things I said one time and forgot about, and then he just..
. does something about it. No announcement.
No speech. He flew me to France because I mentioned Villefranche once.
He built me a studio because he saw one painting and decided I deserved a room.
He reorganized his entire schedule so he could work from the estate because I said I liked it there.
" I laugh, and it sounds terrible — wet and shaky and ridiculous.
"He learned how I take my coffee within the first week and hasn't gotten it wrong since.
Not once. And this is a man who has an assistant for everything. He makes it himself."
My father is very still.
"And he built you an apartment too," I say. "Connected to the studio. Wide doorways. Big windows. A PT gym. For when you're ready to leave here. So you won't have to go back to the old house alone."
His face does something I haven't seen since before the accident. Something cracks open behind his eyes and for a second I see the man who used to carry grocery bags in from the car singing off-key to whatever was on the radio.
"He did that?"
"He did that."
Silence. The clock on the wall. The nurses' station down the hall. My own breathing, still a mess.
Then my father says, very gently, "Aria. That does not sound like a man who's planning for one year."
I shut my eyes.
Because of course. Of course he sees it immediately.
The studio. The apartment. The estate. Everything Everett keeps building for a future he hasn't said out loud yet.
Because that's who he is. He doesn't say things — he builds them.
He doesn't tell you what you mean to him — he shows you, in hardwood floors and north-facing windows and doorways wide enough for a wheelchair.
"I know," I whisper.
"No," my father says softly. "I think you're only just letting yourself know."
I laugh. It's not dignified. Nothing about my face right now is dignified. I'm pretty sure I have mascara on my chin.
"I'm scared."
"Of course you are." He squeezes my hand. "Love is terrifying. Your mother scared the hell out of me for thirty years."
That gets a real laugh out of me. "She had that effect on people."
"She had that effect on me. Everyone else thought she was delightful." He shakes his head. "I was the one stupid enough to propose to a woman who could outargue me in two languages."
I smile, and for a second he's so entirely himself that it hurts in the best way.
"Tell him," he says.
I go still.
"He deserves to know this stopped being an arrangement for you." He pauses. "And from what you've told me, I think it stopped being one for him a long time ago too."
I don't say anything for a moment. I just sit there holding my father's hand in a room that smells like antiseptic and clean sheets, and for the first time in... I don't know how long... the weight of everything I've been carrying feels like something I'm allowed to put down.
"When did you get so wise?" I ask.
"I've always been wise," he says. "The brain just needed a tune-up."
I laugh — a real one this time. The kind that loosens something in my chest.
He pats my hand. "Now go home and tell your husband you love him before I do it for you."
"You wouldn't."
He raises his brows. "Levi gave me his number at the wedding. Don't test me."
"Of course he did."
I lean forward and kiss his forehead. He smells like soap and warmth and every good thing I almost lost and somehow still have.
At the door, I look back once. He's already picked up his book, sunlight on his hands.
More present than absent today. Not all the way healed — maybe never exactly the way he was before.
But here. Sharp enough to see right through his daughter's billion-dollar marriage and gentle enough not to make her feel stupid about it.
That's my dad. That's always been my dad.
By the time I pull out of Brookhaven's parking lot, I know exactly what I'm going to do.
I'm going home. And tonight, before anything else gets the chance to blow this up, I'm going to tell Everett Kauffman I love him.