19. Emma #2
“Breakfast is ready,” I manage. “Should I bring you a plate?”
“I can grab something in a few minutes. I just want to sit and catch my breath.”
She waves a hand toward the door, not unkindly, just distracted.
“It’s been a lot. You can go.” Dismissed.
I go.
I pass Alex in the hallway without looking at him, walk straight into my room, straight into the bathroom, and lock the door behind me before whatever’s building in my chest has a chance to break somewhere he could see it happen.
I don’t understand what I just watched.
I don’t let myself understand it, not yet, standing under water that’s too hot, both hands braced against the tile, breathing like I’ve been running.
I need to hear it from him before I let myself believe what that ring already spelled out.
Yesterday he wanted to talk about the future. Was this the future he wanted to discuss?
Then he vanished.
Now he is back with a woman wearing his ring.
There has to be something else.
Some explanation I cannot see through the panic.
When I finally turn the water off and wrap a towel around myself, he’s sitting on my bed like he has every right to be there.
“We need to talk,” he says.
“What else is there to say?” My voice comes out flatter than I mean it to, all the fight already burned out of it.
He crosses the room instead of answering, and I back myself against the wall without meaning to, hair wet and clinging to my neck, water still tracking down in slow lines.
His eyes follow one all the way down.
He reaches out and catches it with one finger before it disappears beneath the towel.
My body responds before my mind can stop it.
I hate that most of all.
“What do you want from me, Alex?” I wrap both arms around myself and step sideways, out from under his hand, hurt sitting so close to the surface I can feel it everywhere.
He smiles. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen on his face.
“Not what you’re not already giving me.”
For a second, I cannot breathe.
“Are you serious?” The words come out of me in something close to a scream before I’ve decided to raise my voice at all. “You’re saying that to me with your future wife sitting in your bed. In your house.”
“She knows the score.” He says it as if he’s confirming a delivery time. “Though I’m not entirely sure how thrilled she’ll be to learn my mistress lives down the hall, so let’s keep that quiet for now. We should be fine.”
Mistress.
Each word lands somewhere different. My chest. My throat. The backs of my knees.
“Tell me you’re joking.” My voice cracks straight down the middle. “Tell me this is some stupid nightmare and I’m still asleep.”
“This is your doing, Belle.” His voice doesn’t rise.
It doesn’t need to. “I gave you a chance to explain. I’m not going to stand around like an idiot putting my entire life on hold for a woman who’s spent ten years proving she runs the second things get difficult.
I have people depending on me. People who stayed, instead of leaving. ”
I stare at him. “I told you I wasn’t leaving.”
“You also told me you’d explain.”
“I will.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
A humorless laugh.
“Exactly.”
“Even now.” His eyes are flat, unreadable. “I’d bet money you’re already thinking about how to get out that door.”
“What do you want me to do?” My hands are shaking. “Stay and watch you play house with someone else?”
“Did you think I’d sit here and pine for you the way you apparently expected? Celebrate your absence?” His jaw tightens. “What exactly did you think changed, since the last time you decided to disappear?”
“Everything changed.”
“No, Belle. Nothing did.” His gaze holds mine. “You still keep secrets. You still decide what I get to know and when I get to know it. You still expect trust, you refuse to give back.”
“I am trying to protect you.”
The words escape before I can stop them. Something hard passes over his face.
“Of course you are.”
I close my eyes.
Too much.
Not nearly enough.
“I’m happy to fuck you whenever you need it.” He says it so plainly it doesn’t even sound cruel, like he is offering a lift. “But that’s the extent of it. I need a woman who can give me an heir, and we both know that isn’t you.”
I open my eyes.
For a second, I think I misunderstood.
Then he continues.
“Can you imagine my grandfather’s face?” A humorless laugh. “The mother of his great-grandson being the reason his only son is in the ground.”
I look at him like he’s slapped me, because he might as well have.
“You don’t believe I killed your father.”
His silence answers first.
Then, “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
Something inside me goes very still. Yesterday he was touching me as though losing me might kill him. Today he does not know whether I helped kill his father.
“I keep my promises. Unlike some people.” His voice goes cold and final. “Keep your end of this and Liam stays safe. Cross me, and everything he has disappears. You do not want to test that, Belle.”
My anger cuts cleanly through the hurt.
“Do not threaten my brother.”
“I’m reminding you of the arrangement you made.”
“No. You’re threatening an eighteen-year-old because you’re angry at me.”
His jaw tightens. “I’ll give you a few days to understand your reality.” He’s already at the door. “When you’ve calmed down, you know where to find me. Don’t be difficult.”
And he’s gone.
I stand there in a towel, listening to the silence he leaves behind.
For the first time since Alex found me again, I do not recognize him at all.
By the time I’ve pulled myself together enough to get dressed, Vanessa’s already back in the kitchen, perched on the island in one of Alex’s sweatshirts, working her way through an eclair like nothing in this apartment has ever gone wrong.
“This is amazing.” She waves the pastry at me. “Don’t tell me you made all of this.”
She catches me looking at the sweatshirt. Not many days ago it was mine, or close enough, and I was sitting in that exact spot.
“Oh, don’t mind me. Men just have the softest sweatshirts, I swear. I don’t know why they can’t make women’s clothes out of the same material.” She laughs. “Alex doesn’t care. I’ve stolen a few before.”
Before.
The word finds another bruise.
“So who really made these?” She winks at me, conspiratorial. “You can be honest. Some of it’s got to be delivered, right? Where’s the packaging, who’s it from?”
“All me,” I say, and manage something that resembles a smile.
“Wow.”
She looks over the danish, cinnamon rolls, and eclairs, openly impressed.
“The reality of everything is just crashing down on me today. I was too nervous to eat before, but now that my brain’s working again, there’s just so much.
The venue. The dress. I haven’t even told my girlfriends yet, and God, the bridesmaids, there’s going to be an actual tournament for maid of honor.
Problems you only have with too many best friends. ”
She sighs, theatrical.
“I’m an only child, so I don’t even get the easy out. No sister to fall back on. Do you have siblings?”
“One.” The word comes out steadier than I expect. “He’s at college.”
“Are you close?”
“Very.”
And for a second, thinking of him, I actually mean the small smile that comes with it.
“Is he far?”
“No. Here in Texas.”
“Then you must get to see him all the time.”
She says it so easily, so certain that’s simply how sisters and brothers work.
I think about every game I missed. Every visit Alex found a reason to delay, every excuse dressed up as logistics, security, timing, when the truth was always so much smaller and uglier than that.
I came here for Liam.
Somehow I let Alex become the center of every day instead.
“I used to see him constantly.” My voice comes out even. “I raised him. He’s my baby, honestly, more than my brother. But work’s kept me here, and I haven’t been able to get away.”
“Your boss sounds like an actual nightmare.” Vanessa laughs, no idea how close to true that lands.
The sound that comes out of me is half laugh, half disbelief.
“Seriously though, you should have days off. You should go see him.”
I stare at her.
Go see him.
Not ask.
Not wait for Alex to approve security.
Not let another game pass while I sit in this penthouse waiting for a man who has just told me exactly what place I occupy in his life.
“You know,” I say, “I really think I should.”
“There you go.”
“How old were you?” She tilts her head. “When you started raising him, I mean. Sorry, it’s just, you look too young to have done that for someone who’s already in college.”
“He was a newborn. Our parents died in a car accident, and it’s just been the two of us ever since.” I hear my own voice, distant, like someone reading it off a page. “I’m the only mother he’s ever known.”
“Twenty-five, and I am already panicking about being a mom someday.” She shakes her head, genuinely moved. “Look at you, raising a baby basically by yourself. It’s actually really nice talking to you. You’ve given me a lot of confidence, honestly.”
She smiles, warm, completely unaware.
“Alex wants kids soon, and I’ve been quietly freaking out about it. You’ve inspired me, Emma.”
She hugs me. Something inside my chest breaks so quietly I barely feel the exact moment it happens, just the aftermath, standing there with my arms coming up automatically to return the hug of a woman who has no idea what she’s just done.
She is kind.
That makes everything worse.
If Vanessa were cruel, I could hate her.
Instead, she is standing in Alex’s kitchen, wearing his sweatshirt, thanking me for making her less afraid to have his children.
“I wasn’t even sure he was the marrying type,” Vanessa goes on, oblivious, already reaching for the next pastry.
“We’d dated a few times over the years, but he always kept things at arm’s length.
Our families have known each other forever, though, and my grandmother practically danced when he proposed.
She’s eighty. She should not be dancing. ”
She laughs at her own joke.
I can barely hear it.
“Have you talked about where you’ll live?” I don’t understand why I am punishing myself with these questions.