14. Alex #2
He’s fed me some version of that sentence for ten years.
Work harder. Need less.
Love nothing you can’t survive losing.
He turned his grief into a set of rules and handed them down to me like they were the only way to survive. For years, I followed every one of them without asking what they were costing me. Now Belle sleeps in my bed most nights, and with every night she does, those rules make less and less sense.
Edward checks the room, then his watch.
“My flight leaves shortly.”
“Safe trip.”
“You aren’t seeing me off?”
“I assumed you know the way out.”
His mouth tightens, the closest thing to a flinch I’ve gotten out of him all lunch. He stands and buttons his coat.
“Decide before someone decides for you.”
“I already told you. Stay out of it.”
“I heard you.”
“Good.”
He rests one hand briefly on the back of my chair. It’s the closest Edward Hartley ever comes to affection. Then he walks away.
I stay at the table. Relief hits harder than it should. I hadn’t realized how tense I was until some of it finally lets go. If Edward is heading back to Seattle, I might get a few weeks before he finds another reason to insert himself into my life. I’ll take them.
The office is quiet by the time I give up on the Pinehaven report. I’ve read the same paragraph enough times to know I’m not taking in a word of it.
The board wants an answer. Edward wants a marriage. Everyone wants an heir except the man expected to produce one.
I lean back and close my eyes.
Shaw.
No.
The answer comes too fast for me to pretend I need to think about it. There is nothing wrong with her. She is intelligent, composed, and knows exactly how to move through rooms like ours. She would fit into this world without anyone having to teach her how it works.
She came to dinners and galas with me because neither of us ever confused the arrangement with anything warmer than convenience. There was never a future in it. There was barely a present. I can’t picture standing across from her at an altar and meaning a single word of what I’d be saying.
The more uncomfortable truth follows right behind it, the way it always does the second I stop keeping busy enough to outrun it.
I can’t picture standing across from anyone who isn’t Belle.
My eyes open.
Fuck.
The thought should feel absurd. Instead, it feels obvious, a fact that’s been sitting in plain sight so long I stopped seeing it.
I never made room for anyone else. There were women.
There were dinners. Arrangements that asked nothing of either of us beyond the evening itself and dissolved by morning.
Nothing ever stayed. I told myself for a decade that I preferred it that way, that the emptiness was a discipline I’d chosen on purpose, the same way I chose everything else Edward taught me to choose.
Maybe some part of me always knew exactly why nothing else fit.
The space was already occupied. It had been occupied since Montana, and it never once emptied out.
I can’t marry someone else.
I can’t marry Belle either. Not now. Not with Mark still standing between us like a wall neither of us has finished tearing down.
Not with my father in the ground and Danny’s scars and ten years of questions I’ve never once let her finish answering, and the lies she still won’t explain because I’ve never once given her a version of me safe enough to hear them.
I run my thumb over the scar through my eyebrow, the way I do when I’m working something loose that doesn’t want to move.
Maybe I’ve spent too long asking the wrong question.
Maybe she made the wrong choice for every right reason a twenty-year-old has when she believes there’s no good option left on the table. God knows I’ve made enough of those myself, in rooms with far more information than she ever had.
Could I forgive her for leaving?
The answer should take longer than it does.
It doesn’t.
Yes.
The word sits inside my chest with an ease that unsettles me more than the question did.
If she tells me she panicked. If she tells me she thought running was the only way to keep Liam safe.
If she tells me she made a mistake at twenty that has cost both of us everything since.
I can forgive a mistake. Even one that cost me years. Maybe even one that cost me my father.
That last thought lands like a hand closing around my throat.
That’s the part Danny will never accept easily, and I can’t make decisions about Belle as though Danny doesn’t exist inside every single one of them.
Whatever happened tore through him as thoroughly as it tore through me.
He woke from that fire with half his body rebuilt in scar tissue and Belle’s disappearance welded to every explanation anyone ever gave him for why.
I need to talk to him. Really talk, not between board calls, not while he’s disappearing into New York galleries and calling it work when we both know better. I need to tell him what I’m starting to suspect. That we may have built the wrong villain out of the right grief.
Then I need to speak to Belle. I need the truth, whatever shape it takes, and I need to give her mine in return before I ask for hers. So we can finally figure out what is next for us.
Us.
The word unsettles me more than Edward’s ultimatum did an hour ago, because somewhere between finding Belle and trying to destroy her, I’ve started imagining a future again without deciding to.
I look around the office. A skyline I once would have called proof that I had won something.
If Edward wants to take all of it because I refuse to marry a woman he finds convenient, he can try.
I had nothing once. A truck. Work boots.
My father’s construction company, which barely covered its own invoices most months.
I survived that. I have more money now than I could spend across several lifetimes, investments Edward can’t reach, property, accounts, options he doesn’t hold the keys to.
This company was never my life. I built it because there was nothing else left standing to build after they buried my father, and Danny came home wrapped in bandages, and Belle disappeared.
If keeping it means losing her again, Edward can have the fucking company.
The thought should terrify me. Instead, I feel lighter than I have in longer than I can remember, like something I’ve been carrying without noticing its weight has finally been set down.
I reach for my phone. Danny first. Then Belle.
Before I can dial, Polanski’s name fills the screen.
I answer. “What did you find?”
A pause, longer than Frank usually leaves. “A lead, boss.”