Chapter 16
TESSA
The Plaza event was flawless.
Tessa stood at the edge of the ballroom and watched two hundred guests move through their evening like choreography.
The canapés had arrived on schedule. The main course had been executed without a single return.
The dessert—Lucy’s creation, seven layers of chocolate and raspberry—was currently receiving gasps of appreciation from every table.
She had done it. Months of planning. Weeks of sleepless nights. And now, watching the client move through the room with a smile that suggested satisfaction, she felt something she hadn’t allowed herself to feel in years.
Pride. Not the professional kind, though that was there too. The kind that came from building something with her own hands and watching it work exactly as she had imagined.
The client approached her for the third time, a woman in her sixties with silver hair and an elegant bearing that suggested decades of hosting events exactly like this one.
“My dear.” Mrs. Porter took both of Tessa’s hands. “This has been beyond anything I expected.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m already telling everyone about you. My daughter is planning her wedding next spring. You’ll be hearing from her.” She squeezed Tessa’s hands. “You have a gift.”
“That’s very kind.”
“It’s true.”
Mrs. Porter moved on to her other guests.
The pride stayed, but under it, exhaustion crept in after weeks of pressure finally releasing.
Her phone buzzed.
Gabriel: How’s it going?
Tessa: Perfect. Almost done.
Gabriel: Come over after? I want to celebrate with you.
Tessa: It might be late.
Gabriel: I’ll wait.
She pocketed the phone and went back to supervising the breakdown.
It took longer than expected. It always did. By eleven fifteen she was in a cab heading toward Gabriel’s building.
The city blurred past the windows. She thought about calling him. Hearing his voice in her ear while the city scrolled by. But something held her back. A desire to sit in the accomplishment for a moment longer before sharing it.
This was hers. The event, the success, the future it would open. She had built it without help, without connections, without anyone paving the way.
And now Gabriel wanted to celebrate with her. The boy who had been born into everything she had had to fight for, who had somehow become the man who saw her as an equal.
Strange, how life worked.
She arrived at eleven thirty. The doorman waved her up without comment. She had been here often enough now that nobody questioned her presence.
Gabriel opened the door in jeans and bare feet, champagne already in hand.
“To you. To the best caterer in New York.”
“You’re biased.”
“I’m accurate.” He handed her a glass. “How does it feel?”
“Exhausting. Relieving. Like I need to sleep for a week.”
“You can sleep here. I’ll watch over you.”
“Creepy.”
“Romantic.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
He kissed her, and she tasted champagne on his lips.
“I’m going to shower. I smell like a commercial kitchen.”
“You smell like victory.”
“Victory smells like grease and sweat.”
“My favorite combination.”
She laughed, kissed him once more, and headed for the bathroom.
She stood under the hot spray and felt the tension leave her shoulders. One muscle at a time.
Somewhere between rinsing out the conditioner and reaching for a towel, she remembered: Mrs. Porter’s daughter. The spring wedding. She needed to write that down before it slipped.
She wrapped herself in one of his towels and padded down the hall toward the kitchen. The study door was open. She ducked in to find a pen and paper.
The desk was immaculate. Of course it was. This was Gabriel. No stray papers, no scattered supplies. Everything in its place.
She opened the top drawer.
A frame sat inside. Glass and wood. Face up.
THE OATH.
There were three signatures at the bottom and three names she recognized. And a date. Three years after he’d walked away from her.
And the words. No serious relationships. No emotional complications. No exceptions. Until the age of forty.
She read it twice.
He’d told her there had been one woman after her. One. And when it ended, he’d felt relief. She’d held onto that word. Relief meant she was the exception. Relief meant no one after her had broken him.
But relief didn’t draft a legal document. Relief didn’t name a company.
Whoever that woman had been, she hadn’t done this.
That left only her.
She turned the frame over in her hands. Not a folded piece of paper. Not something in a box with a tassel and a graduation photo. Someone had put it under glass. Someone had decided it was worth preserving.
If the Oath was old news, nobody had told the frame.
It was years after he’d let her go. Years after his mother had cornered her in the Ashford hallway. Years after Camille Sterling had told her she’d never be good enough for her son.
It seems his mother was right. Long after the goodbye, he’d signed a document promising never to love a woman again. He hadn’t just walked away. He’d built an entire life around making sure he never made the mistake again.
“Tessa.”
His voice reached her from the hallway, closer than she’d expected. He said her name the careful way—not the way he said it in his kitchen or his bed—and she knew by the pitch of it that he already felt something was wrong.
She didn’t put the frame down. The thought crossed her mind and her fingers didn’t follow.
He appeared in the doorway. His eyes went to the frame first, then to her, and in the second it took him to understand what she was holding, she watched every easy thing about him disappear.
“Tessa. Let me explain.”
“Does your mother know about me?”
He didn’t answer fast enough.
“You called my mother, Gabriel. You called her, introduced yourself, asked her for a recipe because you wanted to get it right.” She set the frame down on the desk, very carefully, because if she had been less careful, she’d have thrown it.
“What if I called yours? What would she say when I told her my name?”
“Does she know we’re dating?”
He didn’t answer.
“Gabriel. Does she?”
“No. She doesn’t.”
“I want you to listen to me. I’m only going to say this once.”
“I’m listening.”
“Your family didn’t approve of me then, and your mother made sure I knew it. I broke up with you the next day because I half-believed her. I’ve spent decades trying to prove her wrong.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. You don’t know the half of it.
You went home to your dorm and three years later you signed this.
” She gestured at the frame. “You named your company after this. Oath. The thing you built with your friends to make sure you’d never make the mistake of loving a woman like me again.
And the entire time we’ve been together, this has been sitting in your drawer. ”
“Tessa—”
“I asked you about Oath Capital. I asked you what the name meant. You told me it was a marketing line. You sat across the table from me at Marco’s and you watched me believe you.”
“Tessa.”
“That’s the part I’m going to need you to think about. Because your mother told me years ago I wasn’t worthy of a Sterling. And now her son loves me, and I’ve been to his apartment, and the Hamptons, and I’ve said I love you in your bed. And your mother doesn’t know I’m back in your life.”
He stepped toward her. She stepped back.
“Tessa. Please. The Oath is dead. Ronan broke it. It was a stupid college pact—”
“You named your company after it.”
“Tessa—”
“You named your company after a promise to never love a woman like me. And you let me fall in love with you without telling me that. And she doesn’t know my name.”
“Tessa—”
“And in my bed coming back from the Hamptons, I asked you for no secrets. You stilled for half a second. I saw it. And I told myself it was nothing.”
“I told Knox at lunch yesterday. I was going to tell you the night I called your mother for the recipe.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you were stressed. Because the event was on Saturday. Because I was waiting for the right—”
“Don’t say right moment.”
He didn’t say right moment.
“I don’t want to be a woman whose name your mother doesn’t know.
I don’t want to be a relationship you’re protecting from your mother.
I’ve spent my whole life proving I belong in rooms full of women like Camille Sterling.
And the one thing I won’t do is be in another room where she gets to decide whether I exist.”
“That isn’t what’s happening here.”
“Then what is, Gabriel. What am I, exactly, that your mother doesn’t know my name?”
He had no answer.
She walked past him toward the bedroom where she had left her clothes.
“Tessa. Please.”
“Don’t follow me.”
She dressed quickly. She grabbed her bag, her jacket, her shoes. He stood in the doorway, watching her. He didn’t try to stop her.
She walked past him through the apartment, down the hallway that had started to feel like home.
It didn’t feel like home anymore.
He didn’t follow.
She made it to the elevator before the tears started.
She walked from his building to her own.
Forty blocks. Her shoes didn’t survive it. The dress didn’t either, by the time she crossed the bridge. The wind took her hair apart. New York at midnight gave her wide berth, the way the city gave a clear path to a woman who looked like she might break something.
She didn’t cry on the bridge. She cried on her own street, in front of the bodega where the McDonald’s-card man had thanked Gabriel three weeks ago. The man wasn’t there tonight. She was glad. She wouldn’t have been able to look at him.
Her apartment was dark when she let herself in. She didn’t turn on the lights. She sat on the edge of her bed in the dress she had worn to the Plaza, holding her phone in her hand, waiting for it to ring.
It did.
Gabriel: I’m sorry.
Gabriel: I should’ve told you.
Gabriel: Please let me explain.
She read each one. She didn’t answer. She turned the phone face down on the nightstand, the way she had taught herself to do years ago, when she had needed to stop expecting things.
There would be time for explanations later. Maybe. If she could figure out how to stop feeling like she had swallowed broken glass.
Right now, she needed to breathe.
And to remember how to be alone.