Chapter 6
Chapter Six
SEBASTIAN
The house is supposed to be empty when I get back.
That's the first mercy I expect from the night, and apparently even mercy has better things to do. I step through the side entrance just after nine, still wearing the clothes I put on too many hours ago, still carrying the feeling of Jessica’s front door closing in my face.
My hand is empty now. It keeps registering that fact before the rest of me can make sense of it.
Chloe’s ring isn't in my pocket. It's with her sister, which means it's closer to Chloe than I am.
That should feel like something. Hope, maybe. A thin, sick kind of hope. Instead, all I can feel is the exact gone-ness of the ring from my palm and the fact that I had to hand my wife’s wedding band to another woman because my wife couldn't bear to come to the door.
I deserve that.
The foyer lights are low. One of Chloe's sweaters is still folded over the back of the entry bench, soft gray cashmere, one sleeve hanging loose.
I stop beside it. For one irrational second, I want to pick it up and press it to my face like a man in a much worse film than the one I'm currently starring in against my will.
I don't. There're limits to how much ruin I can let myself perform in the foyer.
Then I hear movement from the sitting room. I go still.
“Chloe?”
Her name leaves me before caution does. It hits the quiet house and comes back empty.
A lamp switches on. Not the overhead. Not the warm wash Chloe prefers when she reads in there. One lamp, near the far window, cutting gold across the edges of polished wood and pale upholstery.
Katrina Haviland is sitting on my wife’s sofa. For several seconds, I don't move.
She looks almost exactly as she did in the photographs from last night.
Smaller, maybe, without the machinery of lights and cameras built around her, but not diminished.
Her dark hair falls in loose waves over one shoulder.
She's wearing cream trousers, a soft pink sweater, and an expression that's been practiced into harmlessness.
My body has no room left for surprise, so it goes cold instead.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
Katrina rises with a little smile. “Sebastian.”
No. Absolutely not.
I close the distance to the sitting room but stop before I cross the threshold, because some part of me understands that once I step into that room, once I allow this to become a conversation instead of an intrusion, it'll be one more thing I handled too politely.
“How did you get into my house?”
Her smile falters, but only at the edges. “I know some people.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It was easy,” she says, as if that explains anything. “Your staff all know me. And Janine's been so lovely through this whole mess.”
My mother’s name lands like a match struck in a room full of fumes.
I draw a breath through my nose. It does nothing.
“I don't feel comfortable,” I say, each word measured because I can feel the alternative, “with you making yourself at home here without explicit permission.”
Katrina’s mouth parts slightly. Hurt, or a performance of it. I'm no longer confident I can tell the difference.
“I came because I was worried about you.”
“You should've called.”
“I did.”
“My wife left me last night after photographs were taken of me leaving your hotel suite after midnight.” My voice stays level. I'm almost impressed by it. “You can understand why your concern isn't my first priority.”
Something flickers in her eyes. Irritation, fast and bright. Then she softens again.
“Sebastian, I didn't ask those photographers to be there.”
“I didn't say you did.”
“You’re thinking it.”
“I’m thinking a number of things.”
She steps around the sofa. The lamp catches the shimmer at her ears, tiny diamonds, or something designed to look like them. “You look awful.”
“I’m aware.”
“You shouldn't be alone tonight.”
"Don't."
“She left you.”
The words strike, though I give her nothing. No flinch. No visible wound.
Chloe did leave. She packed a bag, took herself out of the house, and laid her ring beside my things with more dignity than I showed her all night.
She left because I gave her reason to believe that the private vows I made to her could be humiliated in public and then explained away as optics. Katrina's not allowed to touch that.
“Do not talk about my wife.”
Her brows lift. “She's not here with you now."
Every muscle in my jaw tightens. She moves closer. Too close for this room. Too close for this house.
“Sebastian,” she says softly, “how long're you going to keep pretending you don't feel this?”
I stare at her. It takes me a moment to understand what she means. Not because the words are complicated, but because they are so utterly detached from the night I've just lived that my mind refuses to accept them at first.
“Feel what?”
Her smile turns faint, almost sad. “What’s happening between us.”
There's a high, clean silence in my head.
“Nothing's happening between us.”
She looks up at me through her lashes, and for the first time I see the calculation naked. Not hidden behind charm or professional warmth or the easy confidence of a woman accustomed to being wanted. Just calculation.
“You don't have to do that with me.”
“Yes,” I say, “I do. Because apparently I haven’t been direct enough.”
Her expression closes a fraction. I step farther into the room, not toward her, but toward the nearest chair, putting a piece of furniture between us because the optics of standing close to Katrina Haviland have already cost me more than I can measure.
“I take responsibility for that,” I continue.
“If I allowed friendliness, gratitude, professional admiration, or basic courtesy to be misread, that's on me.
I should've set clearer boundaries. I should've seen where this was going sooner.
I shouldn't have gone to your suite last night, and I damn well shouldn't have turned off my phone.”
Her mouth flattens.
“But understand me now,” I say. “Nothing is happening between us. Nothing has happened between us. Nothing will happen between us. I'm in love with my wife.”
Katrina looks at me for a long moment. Then she laughs once, soft and ugly.
“God, you really believe that’s enough.”
My hands curl at my sides.
“She walked out on you,” she says. “I know you want to be noble, but there's a difference between devotion and denial.”
“You need to leave.”
“No.” She takes another step. “You need someone who understands the life you lead.”
“I have a wife.”
“You have a woman who can't stand in the light with you without looking wounded by it.”
The words find their mark because they're not entirely false, and that makes me hate them more.
Chloe looked wounded under those lights because I let her be wounded there.
Because I watched my mother move her like scenery and told myself I'd fix it later.
Because later's been the most expensive word in my marriage.
“That wound's mine to repair,” I say. “Not yours to interpret.”
Katrina’s eyes flash.
“She's never going to understand what you carry. The company. The brand. The legacy. Every choice you make has a consequence for thousands of employees, millions of guests, an entire family history. You need a partner who knows how to stand beside that.”
“My wife stood beside it for years.”
“Quietly,” she says. “Yes. I’m sure she did.”
The contempt's so smooth it almost passes for pity.
I take one slow breath. “Careful.”
“She isn't built for this.”
Something in me goes very still. Katrina sees it. She should stop. Anyone with a working sense of self-preservation would stop. She doesn't.
“You need someone the public can understand. Someone who fits the story. Someone who doesn’t have to be hidden away after every difficult event because she can’t handle the pressure.”
“My wife was never hidden because she couldn't handle pressure,” I say. “She was hidden because people around me found it convenient to hide her, and I let them.”
It costs something to say it out loud. Not enough. Not nearly enough.
Katrina tilts her head. “Then let her go. If you love her so much, stop dragging her through a life that keeps breaking her.”
The room narrows.
“You don't know anything about what has broken my wife.”
“I know enough.”
“No.” My voice cuts sharper. “You don't.”
She moves closer again, and this time I don't step back. I should. I know I should. But anger has a gravity of its own, and mine's finally found something to orbit. Katrina’s face softens in a way that makes my skin crawl.
“You want children,” she says.
Every sound in the house seems to vanish.
“What?”
“You want a family. An heir. Someone to carry all of this forward.” Her gaze flicks around the room, taking in the built-in shelves, the portraits, the old Austen silver Chloe once called aggressively ancestral. “More importantly, you need someone who can ensure your lineage is secured.”
Cold moves through me so quickly it's almost like calm.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Her eyes hold mine.
“I know about the miscarriages.”
For a moment, I can't place myself in the room.
The floor's beneath me, the lamp's on, Katrina's standing near my wife’s favorite chair, and still, somehow, I'm back in a hospital room with bad fluorescent lights and Chloe shaking so hard I thought her bones might come apart under my hands.
Three losses. Three rooms. Three versions of hope dying before I could get my hands around anything solid enough to save.
My voice, when it comes, isn't recognizable. “Who told you that?”
Katrina has the decency to look cautious now. Far too late.
“I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“Who told you?”
“It’s not exactly difficult to hear things in your circles.”
“That's not an answer.”
“People talk.”
“Not about that.”