Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A lderton-Du Ponte closed at eight, which meant the hallways went from lively to quiet after the sun set. I helped close up the restaurant Thursday night, which meant wiping down all the tables, running the dishes through the washer in the back, sweeping and mopping the floors, and I finished up around nine-thirty. I even helped the line cook clean up his station, because the only thing waiting for me when I clocked out was my quiet apartment, and I didn’t want to turn my brain off yet.
While he went for the light switches, I grabbed the bucket we’d been throwing the dirty rags in all day. “I’ll take these over to the laundry,” I told him. “You all set?”
He nodded. “Have a good night, Lovey.”
Alderton-Du Ponte used Massey Suites’ laundry facility for their wash. All departments were in charge of taking their own linen to the laundry room. I swung the rag bucket back and forth as I walked down the Alderton-Du Ponte hallway. My shift had been long, and my body felt worn thin, twisted like a towel. I’d been bounced all over the Alderton-Du Ponte grounds these past few days, and I couldn’t wait until the Spring Has Sprung fundraiser to pass for everything to go back to normal.
But a week after the fundraiser was the Everview auction, and then my normal would be different. I’d have a house to go home to, not my apartment. A house that, according to the auction’s website, needed a lot of work. Probably more than the hefty number that sat in my bank account.
But at least I’d be attacking it with a leg up. If I hadn’t discovered Aaron’s secret ruse to woo Fiona, I’d put everything I owned into just buying the house, if I’d been able to pre-qualify for that loan at all. No, I couldn’t worry about renovations or repairs or anything like that. It would all work out. It had to.
Except the knot in my stomach wouldn’t loosen. It stayed there, tightening with every passing moment, refusing to give me peace.
When I came out of the walkway from the country club and into the hotel lobby, I looked to the front desk, blinking in surprise. “What are you doing here?”
Paige, who slumped over the front desk and not-so-discreetly texted underneath the counter, jumped up. “Hey! Mr. Roberts asked me to cover the front desk until Justin came in for the night shift. I’m here til eleven.”
“ Eleven .” I quirked my lips to the side, peering up at the clock that hung on the lobby’s wall. “Want me to wait for you?”
She shook her head. “Go home. Get some rest before your shift in the morning. We’re on lifeguard duty, so we’ll need all the energy we can get.” The front desk’s phone began ringing. Paige straightened, fumbling for the receiver, anxiety hitting her in an instant. “H-Hello?”
I propped my elbow on the counter, mouthing what she was supposed to say.
“Oh, uh, front desk speaking!” Paige shot me a stressed look. “Extra towels? Of course! How many would you like?”
I swung the bag of rags lightly as I listened, but I couldn’t hear anything more than a male voice on the other end. When Paige hung up, I asked, “How many towels?”
“Two body towels and an extra bathmat.” She gave me her widest puppy dog eyes. “Are you going to offer to run them up there?”
“I kind of have to, since you can’t leave the front desk unattended.”
She gave a small gasp when it occurred to her. “Oh.”
Knocking my knuckles on the front desk once, I stepped away. “What room number?”
“803. And use the east elevator—I’m supposed to lock the other one. You’re the best!”
803. Right next to 801. Aaron’s room.
I pressed my lips together as I headed toward the laundry room. It was almost ten o’clock at night—I shouldn’t even be thinking about knocking on Aaron’s door. To do what? Say hello ? I could check in to see how everything settled with Fiona, if she took up the offer of a spa day after the incident with the flowers. Surely, he hadn’t proposed yet. That sort of news would’ve been around Alderton-Du Ponte in a heartbeat.
Don’t even think about it, Lovisa Hahn .
I dumped the rags in the dirty laundry bin and loaded up from the fresh linen shelf. With a plethora of towels in my arms, I used the elevator that was attached to the laundry room, stepping on and pressing the eighth floor.
I closed my eyes, body weary. This week had been long—Monday, I’d showed Aaron the theater, and nearly concussed myself in the process. Tuesday I’d been in the tearoom. Today, I’d been in the restaurant.
I don’t have to worry about you, do I, Lovisa? The tilt to Mr. Holland’s words still echoed in my mind, crawling under my skin. I wondered if Grant knew his father had known about our relationship. I wondered how long Mr. Holland had known. It made me wonder a lot of things.
The elevator doors slowed on the third floor, and I stepped back further into the box, creating a wide berth of space for whoever to get on.
And when the doors parted to reveal the person waiting on the other side, my stomach dipped.
Aaron Astor stood in a pair of dark joggers and a baggy hoodie, and at first glance, looked the picture of casual wear. Before I could be too impressed by the rumpled look, I spotted the Malstoni logo on the hoodie’s breast. Even his comfy clothes were designer.
He started to step on the elevator when he looked up at me, blinking as he froze. “You are following me,” he said, but instead of the accusatory tone, this time his lips tugged.
I arched a brow. “Didn’t realize I needed to point out the obvious, but I was on the elevator first.”
Now, Aaron’s mouth pulled up into a closed-lipped smile. “You’re here late,” he murmured as he stepped into the elevator. He cast a glance toward my armful of towels before reaching for the eighth floor—and dropping his hand when he realized I’d already pressed the button. “Running errands?”
When the doors closed, they sealed us in. “He’s a mind reader,” I teased. “What are you doing on the third floor?”
Aaron lifted a bucket, one I hadn’t notice he’d been holding. “Didn’t realize I needed to point out the obvious, but getting ice.”
I made a face at him for throwing my words back at me. “There’s an ice machine on the eighth floor.”
“It’s broken. For an expensive hotel, there really are quite a few things wrong with it, aren’t there?”
“Judgey, are we?”
“Hey, I’m just?—”
Before I had a chance to say anything, the elevator came to a jerky rest on the seventh floor. We both awkwardly stood staring at our reflections in the doors, waiting for them to magically part. They didn’t.
Instead, all the lights flicked out, plunging us into pitch darkness.
“Lovisa?” Aaron’s voice was a disembodied, curious sound.
“Yeah?”
“When I said that there are quite a few things wrong at the hotel,” he began, faltering. “It seems I’ve jinxed it.”
I would’ve laughed if we weren’t engulfed in blackness. “Hit the open button.”
“I can’t see the open button.” A second later, there was a slapping sound as his hand, presumably, hit the side of the elevator. And then the click of the buttons on the panel. Nothing happened. “It just stopped. Is that… normal? We’re not about to plummet to our deaths, right?”
I only had a second to flash through worst-case scenarios before my confusion cleared. Use the east elevator, Paige had said. “She locked the elevator,” I realized aloud, closing my eyes at the implication.
“She locked the elevator,” his voice repeated.
I blinked, but the darkness was so thick that my vision was unchanged. “There are two elevators, and protocol is to lock one after nine on the weekdays, so only one is running.”
“You can just lock an elevator from the outside? That seems unsafe.”
“She’s supposed to lock it on the ground floor once she makes sure it’s empty.” I let out a breath as I gripped the towels tighter to my chest. “She doesn’t work the front desk normally. She—she didn’t know.”
I could almost feel Aaron shift on his feet. Had he moved closer? “You’re not afraid of elevators, are you?”
“No.” I looked in his direction. “Are you?”
“No.”
Great, so neither one of us would panic like some cliché rom-com. Instead, our mutual level-headedness made this an awkward hell.
The ice in Aaron’s buckle rattled as he shifted it in his grip. “Not even the emergency button works? Do you have your phone on you?”
“Company policy is that we don’t carry our phones with us.” The response came automatically. “But I do have my walkie.”
“Is there a reason you aren’t using it?”
I would’ve hit him if I could’ve seen him. I unclipped it from my belt. Holding down the button, I lifted it to my mouth. “Is anyone there?”
Nothing.
“I’m stuck in the elevator at the hotel. Does anyone copy?”
And again, no one responded. I closed my eyes again, letting out a breath through my nose. Since it was after hours, there probably wasn’t anyone left at the country club, at least not with their walkie-talkies on and in range. Alderton-Du Ponte’s walkies were different than the hotel radios, too, so Paige, in blissful unawareness at the desk, wouldn’t even realize until I never came back from the laundry room.
Hopefully she’d realize.
There was a thud, and I jumped. “What was that?”
“I sat down.” A beat later, Aaron’s hand came up and brushed along the side of my thigh. It was a simple bat as he felt around for me, but my body tensed. “Might as well sit. You’ll get dizzy from the dark.”
“Is that a thing?”
“I don’t know. But it sounds like it could be.”
I laid my hand against the wall to guide me, sliding to the ground. Thank God I didn’t sit on him—I would’ve preferred death, honestly—but our shoulders brushed as I settled in, just as they had that day on the piano bench. “Sorry,” I said hastily, jerking back until we were no longer touching.
Aaron’s chuckle was ghostly in the elevator.
I laid the towels on my lap and squeezed my fingers into them. “Paige will notice if I don’t come back,” I told him, speaking that thought aloud as if to convince myself. “We won’t be in here long.”
“Could be worse,” he mused, and there was another shifting sound. I imagined him stretching his legs out in front of him. “You could be stuck in here with Fiona.”
“ You could be stuck in here with Fiona.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I cringed. “Except that probably would’ve worked in your favor.”
Aaron didn’t reply to that. I was almost hyperaware of him beside me. I could hear his light inhale through his nose, the exhale, and it almost made me nervous. He was all comfy and clean-looking, and I was just coming off an eight-hour shift in the restaurant, where I no doubt smelled like food and grease.
But the longer time went on, the thicker the stagnant air became. “Did Fiona enjoy her spa day?”
“I believe so.”
“Have you talked to her since?”
“Yes.”
I waited, but he didn’t go on. “Did you ever find out who sent the?—”
“Do you have any siblings?”
I turned my head in Aaron’s direction, lips parting in disbelief. The subject change couldn’t have been less subtle. Why? Talking about Fiona wasn’t that difficult of a conversation. “No, I don’t. It was just my mom and me.”
“No dad?”
“Nope. Lame one-night-stand whose parents gave my mom money to buy him out of being a father.” I snorted a little. “You have siblings, right?”
Aaron hummed a little under his breath. “I have five brothers. My next oldest sibling is thirty-five. Ten years older.” He settled firmer against the side of the elevator; I could feel the panel behind me shift as he leaned against it. “Their age gap is pretty close, though. Forty-one, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-six.”
His eldest sibling was forty-one and he was twenty-five—it seemed like an extreme jump. Aaron’s always been the odd one out with his brothers, since he’s the youngest. They… they didn’t like him. What Annalise had said made a bit more sense with that age gap. “Were you an accident baby?”
“I was a save the marriage baby.”
My shoulders dropped. Oh .
“My father had an affair with one of his secretaries. Got her pregnant. My mother stayed, and they had me, and he stayed.” And then Aaron drew in a sharp breath. “I shouldn’t have said any of that. My mother would be horrified to learn that I said it to a…”
I raised an eyebrow. “A staff member?”
“I told you to stop saying that,” Aaron scolded as he knocked a hand against the side of my thigh. I jumped at the contact. “I was going to say a stranger.”
But am I a stranger? I wanted to ask. I didn’t feel like one. The atmosphere in the elevator felt entirely different in the dark. The energy quieter. It felt, I realized, much like it had the night by the fire back in June. That we were just two strangers talking. Before, I’d hogged the mic, shared my problems and laid myself bare.
Tonight, I decided it would be about him.
I turned toward Aaron, imagining I could see his face in the darkness. “Is it a brother or sister? The… other baby.”
“Sister. I think that made it worse for my mom. She always wanted a girl.”
“It’s a lot of pressure. To be a save the marriage baby.”
“Is it?” His shoulders rose with a deep inhale, brushing mine. I could feel the long pause as he held his breath, almost too long, before he let it back out. It seemed to be like a reset button for him, that breath, because when he spoke next, his voice was lighter. “They’re still together, so it seems it worked for them.”
Perhaps you’d change your mind if you knew how sad and twisted my insides are . These past few days showed me just how much he’d meant that. “Do you resent your parents for cutting you off?”
“No.” Again, he spoke with zero hesitation. “They did what they thought was right. Same with my brothers, they… they’re just doing what they think is best.”
Even after everything, he wasn’t upset with them in the slightest? That almost made it worse. That their hooks were so deep that he could wave away any crappy thing they did. “And you marrying Fiona for her money? Is that you doing what you think is right?”
I didn’t know why I had to say it. We were having an okay moment, and I had to let the judginess drip into my voice. I couldn’t help it, though. It felt like a fatal flaw, one I couldn’t look past no matter how much I didn’t like Fiona.
If I thought Aaron would snap at me, or let out an exasperated sigh, I was wrong. Instead, his voice became much quieter. “You liked me before. In front of the fire. We talked then. We laughed then. You liked me before—we could go back to that.”
“We—we already talked about that. That was before?—”
“Before you saw how desperate I am?”
My breath caught, and I blinked toward him in the darkness.
“Five older brothers.” Aaron sounded hollow. He let the words linger for a moment, as if they spoke for themselves. “Five brothers who had already secured their legacies before I could even spell my name. Every title at Astro belongs to one of them. Every ounce of respect, earned or inherited, went to them. I was a mistake my father was ready to walk away from, and a bargaining chip my mother used to make him stay.”
There was no bitterness in his voice, not really. Just the dull ache of someone who’d lived with that truth too long.
“I didn’t get into an Ivy League school. Didn’t earn the right grades at the college I did attend. I wasn’t a prodigy. I wasn’t impressive. I was just… there. I got a desk at Astro because my grandmother took pity on me. That’s the only reason I had a job.”
Growing up, I’d been used to looking at things through the lens of a cellist, to equate everything to the instrument, but in that moment, Aaron was not a cello string on the verge of snapping. Strength swelled in his voice like the discordant clash of piano keys played with too much force—jarring, unsteady, teetering on the edge of chaos.
“My parents didn’t cut me off because of what I did,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “They cut me off because I failed them. Because I was never what they needed me to be. I wasn’t the son they could be proud of. Their other sons were successful, and I must be, too.”
“And marrying Fiona is suddenly going to make you successful?”
“My only hope of impressing them, of getting them to finally see me, is to run a company of my own. I’m not marrying Fiona for her money —I couldn’t care less about her money. She can keep it all, and take mine, too. It’s the winery—the business . That’s what I want. What I need . I can help run it well, and maybe I’ll become an impressive enough son for my parents to want to invite home for Christmas dinner.”
A pang hit my heart. “Aaron?—”
“So, no, Lovisa, I’m not asking you to pity me .” His voice almost became ragged, and though his words were sharp, it wasn’t from anger—it was from horribly disguised desperation. “I’m not even asking for you to understand me. Judge me. Resent me. But at least know that I’m equally aware of how pathetic I am.”
The elevator fell quiet, silent save for the gasping breaths Aaron took, like a pianist who’d raced through a piece too fast. I could hear him struggle to calm his breathing, the shaky way he released the air before drawing in more, but he couldn’t. I wished, more than anything, I could’ve gotten a glimpse of it—his mask falling off.
But I had to rely on sounds, and he sounded like a composition unraveling—one that had started with careful precision before spiraling into something frantic, trying to keep pace with an impossible tempo. He sounded like music played on shaking hands, a song that had lost its rhythm, a piece that fell apart before it could reach its final note.
I wondered if this was what I had sounded like the night in front of the fire in June, when all the pain I’d kept inside rushed out like its own raging river. I wondered if this was how Aaron had felt, then—leaning in, searching for a solution for someone that he shouldn’t have cared about.
I reached over and found his hand where it rested on the trembling ice bucket, stilling him. “Aaron.”
He let out a breath that sounded like a weary sigh.
His fingers were cold underneath mine, the chill from the ice swallowing his warmth. I pressed down on his knuckles, sharing my heat. “You can’t just make your own company from scratch?” I asked him in a quiet voice. “Wouldn’t that impress your parents more?”
His laugh was shallow. “I have no originality to me, my dear. I am not anything near that special.”
There was no teasing to his words now, no bitter amusement to his self-deprecation. He truly meant what he said. I thought of him performing the Rachmaninoff piece, the piece of his heart—thought of us eliciting the notes together. Getting me to perform for the first time in five years. That’s not true , I wanted to say. That moment was special to me, and it was all your doing .
“You said you wanted to know me—here’s the truth.” Aaron turned toward me, and I knew it because his leg bumped into mine as he shifted, his shoulder pushing in deeper, almost as if he were leaning in. “I don’t want to marry Fiona. She’s rude, and she’s haughty, and she’s awful to be around. But I’m out of time. I turn 26 in fourteen days—fourteen days before I have to be married, according to my grandmother’s will. Or then I’ll really have nothing left.”
I could hear the panic in his voice, a tremble in the chord. The desperation to please his family, to impress them—he couldn’t see that it was wringing him dry. He chased his family’s approval the way I was chasing my mother’s dream house, even at the extent of his own happiness. What dreams had he laid down for this one?
It was almost breathtaking how sharp the pain was behind my chest at that realization—that, while in drastically different ways, Aaron and I were like two sides of the same coin. He could understand me, because his life was like this. And I could understand him.
And in the darkness, where my brain could do nothing but connect the dots, I remembered our conversation from last June.
Do you ever feel like you wake up and realize that this isn’t the life you thought you’d have? I’d asked him. That you just… resent it all?
Aaron hadn’t hesitated. All the time.
What do you do about it?
Absolutely nothing.
“Jump,” I whispered.
Aaron paused. “What?”
“Jump,” I repeated, and this time, my hand slid up to grip his wrist. I could feel his pulse underneath the skin. “Don’t marry Fiona just because you want to make other people happy. Don’t choose a life that you’ll resent.”
“It isn’t that simple?—”
“It is.” I turned fully toward him, too, leaning closer as if that would help me see him better. My other hand dug into the towels, pushing them to the floor. “You told me to jump, back in June. You think marrying Fiona and becoming part of their family business is the magic fix-all you need, but what if it isn’t?”
Aaron shook his head; I would’ve sworn I felt the air move. “Me telling you to quit your job is worlds different from what you’re telling me to do. I can’t just?—”
“You will be miserable the rest of your life if you marry Fiona.”
His voice was sharp. “Lovisa.”
In the dark, I forgot who I was speaking to. His desperation had jumped over to me now, and for some reason, an eighteen-year-old Lovisa popped up in my mind’s eye. “You will be,” I insisted. “And you’ll feel so lonely, because you’ll have no one you can share it with. You couldn’t tell her your struggles or worries, because she would never understand.”
Aaron’s other hand came and wrapped around my wrist, about to pull my grip off. “ Lovisa ?—”
“You have to jump.” I put my hand down, meaning to brace myself on the ground, but instead, my palm came down on the soft material of his pants—on his thigh. The mental image of my younger self vanished like smoke, replaced by the very real man beside me. I didn’t pull away, something foreign seizing me now. A different sort of need, one I barely understood. It was more than just fear for him. It was the bone-deep ache of seeing someone spiral into something they’d regret. Because he would . “Don’t marry her if you don’t love her.”
“I have to marry someone!” he burst out, voice echoing in the elevator. His hand came down on top of mine, but didn’t remove my fingers. His cold skin almost seemed to brand mine, sending small shocks up my arm. “What my grandmother left me—it’s not five dollars, Lovisa. It’s five million dollars . I—I can’t just—I have to ?—”
“Don’t marry Fiona.” And then I said the stupidest thing possible. Plainly. Clear as day. As if it meant nothing. “Marry me.”
Silence.
The oxygen evaporated from the small elevator box. If I’d thought it’d been silent before, you could’ve heard a pin drop now. I blinked at the darkness, half convinced I’d hallucinated, that I hadn’t just said what I thought I did.
But, oh God. I had.
I had.
Heat rushed up my neck, my pulse hammering so hard it drowned out everything else. Why did I say that? What had possessed me to?—
Because I meant it. In the split second, where rational thought conceded to the almost suffocating tension, I meant it.
Marry me .
The lights flicked on, the elevator lurching back into motion, but I hardly registered it, because Aaron’s face was inches from mine. Somehow, in the urgent back and forth, we’d found ourselves close—closer than we would’ve gotten had the lights had been on. Aaron’s mask was nowhere to be seen, leaving him defenseless under the stark fluorescent glow. My hand was still on his thigh, and I should’ve pulled it off, but my confession had frozen me solid.
His wide eyes were wholly on me, as if nothing else existed. I could almost see my words echoing in his mind.
Marry me.
The thought slammed into me. I saw myself in Aaron—the way he deflected, the way he pretended like none of it mattered. And maybe that was why I cared, because hearing the way he spoke sounded too familiar. He was too similar to the young Lovisa Hahn who laid down everything she loved to chase her mother’s dream. Aaron was doing that now, but instead of another’s ambition, he sought their approval. Their acceptance. The way he wanted to believe he could be fine without love, without something real. But I’d heard it in his voice. The unraveling. The resignation.
My words had been a compulsive, desperate grab for him. A last-ditch effort to fix something before it broke.
Aaron’s fingers tightened on mine, his eyes flicking—slowly, almost imperceptibly—to my parted lips. His chest hitched.
Maybe it was the adrenaline from our back-and-forth. Or the spell of the elevator’s darkness. Or the fact that Aaron sat so close. Or the fact that his eyes were on my mouth first. Or, heck, maybe it was my stupid proposal.
There was no music in my head, no thoughts of the cello or the piano or any other instrument. There were no notes, no compositions, no thoughts other than?—
Kiss him .
I might’ve, too, if the elevator doors hadn’t opened on the eighth floor. Instead of opening to an empty hallway, the mirrored panels parted to reveal legs standing on the other side.
Years of working at Alderton-Du Ponte kicked my autopilot into gear, at least enough that it had me turning away from Aaron. Dazed, I traced the legs up—dark blue pajama pants with little footballs printed on them—to the torso—a fitted white shirt that left little to the imagination—to the face.
The elevator was stationary, but it felt as if it’s suddenly plummeted, my stomach following suit.
His hair was shorter, and he’d let his patchy 5-o’clock shadow grow into a meager patch of stubble, and his frame seemed broader. His hands hung at his sides, but I could remember what they felt like around me, and could perfectly recall what those parted lips felt like against my own.
I’d told Mr. Holland our paths wouldn’t even cross. And even then, I’d known I was lying. I just figured we’d bump into each other at the fundraiser, or even in the hallway, not like this .
In an elevator.
On the floor.
With my hand on a man’s thigh.
A man I’d just blurted a proposal to.
But Grant Holland loved to always prove me wrong.
Clad in pajamas, Grant’s eyes landed on Aaron first. I basked in that split second, wishing I could’ve paused and stayed there forever. Forever suspended in the moment before his eyes shifted over, finding where I sat in the corner of the elevator.
But they shifted, and they found me.
Recognition bloomed like a flower in Grant’s expression, beautiful and bright and poisonous. “Lovisa?”