Chapter 31
Elena
Iwake to empty sheets in a room I barely know.
The space is massive. I didn’t pay much attention to it the first time he’d motioned toward it during a tour of the house, and I certainly wasn’t paying much attention last night when he was on me, taking up most of my vision.
But in the soft light of the early morning, even the cacophonous space feels almost… comforting.
But the lack of him in bed with me doesn’t.
The sheets are still faintly warm — proof he was here not long ago.
But it’s a little jarring, especially after the conversation we had last night, to wake up in his bed for the first time and find him already gone.
The air is strange, heavy with the weight lifted off his chest and placed half onto mine.
I sit up slowly, my hand instinctually going to my belly as I swing my legs off the side of the bed.
A sliver of brightness is visible beneath and around the edges of the door to the en-suite. I stare at it for a moment before pushing up off the bed, my eyes still heavy with sleep, and pad over to the door.
I push it open gently. Too gently.
The light spills a little more, revealing Harry, his back to me, leaning his hip against the counter.
He’s still in his pajama bottoms, the waistband hanging low on his hips, his hair rumpled.
The overhead light casts shadows across his face in the mirror, exaggerating the tightness in his jaw.
His brow is furrowed, his mouth a flat line.
I open my mouth to say his name, but I pause, my gaze snagging lower in the reflection.
That’s not his phone.
It’s mine.
Panic hits me too quickly. “What the hell are you doing?”
The words come out before I can check them, before I can second-guess myself. They’re a sharp snap that cuts through the fragile quiet as I push through the door fully. Harry turns, looking up, startled — but not ashamed.
If anything, he looks determined.
“You left it out,” he says, as if that somehow justifies it. “It buzzed five times in a row. I thought it might be something urgent.”
“So you just opened it?” I press. “That doesn’t give you the right, you could have woken me up—”
“I could have,” he admits, slowly setting the phone into my open hand, screen on, messages up. “But I saw the name Ross.”
The name hits like a brick to my head. My stomach tightens, then sinks, the breath loosening from my tightening throat. I stare down at the screen in my hand, our last messages clear as day for Harry.
Ross:
It’ll be okay.
Me:
Maybe. Sometimes I just wish things had turned out differently.
I blink at it, nausea brewing in my gut. Fuck. Fuck. We’d just gotten off the phone when we sent those. There is no context laid out in texts for him to know what it was about — not that it would make it much better.
“Ross,” he says again, quieter this time, probing.
It’s like he’s baiting me to give answers, to tell him more, and I can’t find the words.
Not after last night. I shouldn’t have let it go so far without adding it to the conversation, but I couldn’t just…
throw it in there amidst the murder questions.
I let out a slow, careful breath and set my phone face up on the counter. “He’s an old friend.”
His eyes blow a little wide as he leans back, his shoulders somehow broadening as he crosses his arms over his chest. He looks at me like I’ve surprised him. “An old friend?” he parrots.
I swallow. “Yes.”
“You told him yesterday morning,” he says quietly, leaning a little forward, his face closer to mine, “that you wished things had turned out differently.”
I drag my teeth over my lower lip, taking a deep, shaky breath. This looks bad. I know it does. “I know.”
“That sounds a lot like regret, Elena.”
My chin wobbles as the overwhelming feeling of being a child scorned by my parents swarms me. It’s my own fault. I know that. But it doesn’t make it better. “It’s not regret over you,” I insist. “I mean, fuck, okay, maybe a bit, but it’s not how it looks. I was talking on the phone with him—”
“I know. I saw the call, over an hour.”
I wince. “I was just getting shit off my chest about the scan and you not being there, and my stress was through the roof, and we hadn’t talked yet—”
“You talked to him about me not being there for the scan?” he asks incredulously, his brows raising. “How much, exactly, does this ‘old friend’ know about me?”
I blink at him. “A-a lot,” I admit. “He’s my friend.”
“He wasn’t at the wedding,” Harry muses, his lips forming a hard line. “A friend would have been there. A man lurking in the shadows wouldn’t have. A man you didn’t want your family knowing about wouldn’t have.”
“Did you read back? He had to work last minute, he was invited—”
“Are you sleeping with him?”
The question is so sudden that it feels like I’m falling. It takes me a second too long to catch up. “Are you seriously asking me that?”
“You hesitated.”
“Harry.”
“You left a paper trail of affection for someone else. That doesn’t exactly inspire trust, Elena,” he says, pointing at the phone as he repeats himself. “Are you sleeping with him?”
“No.”
His gaze flicks between my eyes, searching, clearly not believing me.
“He’s not a threat to you. But you don’t get to do this, you don’t get to go through my phone at six in the morning behind a half-closed door, not when I thought we were on better terms after last night. That isn’t fair,” I insist.
“So I’m just supposed to be okay letting you speak to some man I haven’t met, some man you claim is a friend, saying things like that, and feel okay about it?” he counters. “Do you understand how that looks? It reads like you wish you’d ended up with him. It reads like you’d rather be in his bed.”
“I don’t!” I snap. “I wouldn’t!”
His jaw tightens, a muscle twitching by his ear. He looks down, like he’s not entirely sure, before meeting my gaze again. “Is she mine?”
I blink rapidly. Silence descends, thick and screaming. I’m too thrown to even process it fully.
He didn’t just ask that. He didn’t. He couldn’t have—
“Elena.” He looks at me like he doesn’t even recognize me.
It’s too much. He doesn’t trust me. After last night, he doesn’t trust me.
Maybe he shouldn’t.
I grab my phone and take a step back, my eyes burning. “I need space,” I breathe. “Jesus Christ, I need space.”
“El—”
“Don’t,” I snap, my voice cracking. “Don’t. Of course she’s fucking yours, Harry. Of course she is. But don’t ever say that to me again.”
I turn before he can get a word in, grabbing a random shirt from the hamper by the door and pulling it over my head, needing something to cover me.
I don’t slam the door behind me, I don’t stop down the hall — that would feel like drama, and this isn’t drama.
This is bone-deep exhaustion and a slap in the face.
I slip down the stairs, barely focused, just putting every bit of brain power into getting to the cottage. I don’t care that the flagstones are freezing beneath my feet, I don’t care that the wind whips at the tear tracks on my face. I just move until I’m in my own space, and then my focus shifts.
I find one of my suitcases. I shove a few random outfits, underwear, and pajamas into it. I grab my toiletries, my prenatal vitamins, and my chargers.
I just can’t be here right now.
How the fuck am I meant to talk to him about Ross now? After that, I can’t exactly easily tell him that Ross isn’t just a friend. I can’t just drop the bomb on him that I have an ex-husband. I should have told him before now, should have just mustered up the courage, but I was too much of a wuss.
It’s my fault.
But it’s his, too.