Chapter 30 Lena
LENA
The world passed by the car window in a blur of gray and green, and I felt none of it.
Parsons drove in silence. He hadn’t said a word since I’d climbed into the back seat, hadn’t offered comfort or condolences or even a tissue for the tears I couldn’t seem to stop. Professional to the end. Just like his employer.
His employer. The word felt wrong. Too small for what Raphael had been to me.
What I’d thought he’d been.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and watched the trees rush past. Late winter morning, the sky heavy with clouds that couldn’t decide whether to rain or simply hang there, sullen and gray.
Everything looked washed out. Faded. Like the color had drained from the world along with everything else.
My throat felt raw where the collar used to sit. I kept reaching for it without thinking, kept finding nothing but bare skin. He’d taken it back. Unclasped it like it meant nothing, like the weeks of wearing it had been a joke I wasn’t in on. Let it fall to the floor like garbage.
Like me.
The contract is fulfilled. The debt is paid. We’re done.
His voice echoed in my skull, cold and flat and utterly devoid of the warmth I’d heard the night before.
Had that warmth ever been real? Had any of it?
The way he’d held me, the way he’d looked at me like I was precious, the way he’d whispered my name against my skin. Had all of it been performance?
It was adequate.
I closed my eyes against the memory. Against the image of his face, stone-hard and empty, looking at me like I was a stranger. Like I was nothing. Like the woman he’d made love to hours before had simply ceased to exist.
I’d given him everything. My body, my heart, my virginity. I’d said I loved him and meant it with every fiber of my being. And he’d looked at me the next morning and told me I was convenient.
A warm body with a debt to pay. Nothing more.
The tears came faster. I let them fall. There was no one to see. No one to care. Parsons kept his eyes on the road, his silence somehow worse than judgment would have been.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. It had been buzzing for hours, I realized. I’d silenced it sometime in the night, not wanting anything to interrupt what I’d thought was the most important night of my life. What a joke. What a pathetic, naive, stupid joke.
Now I pulled it out and stared at the screen with eyes that felt swollen and raw.
Seventeen missed calls. Twelve from Clara. Three from the hotel’s front desk. Two from a number I didn’t recognize.
Dread coiled in my stomach, cold and heavy, temporarily pushing aside the grief. That many calls meant something was wrong. Something beyond my own personal catastrophe. Clara wouldn’t call twelve times about nothing.
I should call back. I should find out what happened.
But first, I needed to pull myself together. I couldn’t let anyone see me like this, couldn’t let them know how thoroughly I’d been broken. I was still Lena Hughes. I was still the woman who had just saved her family’s hotel. I had to remember that. Had to hold onto it.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand. Straightened my spine against the leather seat. Forced myself to breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
The contract was fulfilled. That was what mattered. The $20 million debt was paid. The hotel was saved. I’d done what I set out to do. I’d sacrificed a year of my life, and now it was over.
It was over.
I could rebuild from this. I could focus on the hotel, on making my father proud, on proving that I was more than everyone thought I was. More than Raphael thought I was. More than my father had ever believed.
The thought steadied me, gave me something solid to hold onto. I wasn’t just a warm body. I wasn’t just convenient. I was Lena Hughes, and I had just saved my family’s legacy. No one could take that from me.
Not even him.
I dialed Clara’s number.
She answered on the first ring. “Lena? Oh my God, Lena, where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling, we’ve all been frantic, we couldn’t reach you anywhere, nobody knew where you were—”
“Clara, slow down.” My voice came out steadier than I expected. “I was… I’ll explain later. What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” Her voice pitched higher, cracking on the words.
“Lena, it’s your father. He… we tried to reach you all night.
The hospital called, and then we called you, and you weren’t answering, and we didn’t know where you were, and Marjorie was crying, and Sophie kept trying different numbers—”
The dread in my stomach turned to ice. Sharp, jagged ice that seemed to pierce through every organ.
“Clara.” I gripped the phone so hard my knuckles went white. “What happened to my father?”
Silence on the other end. A shuddering breath. The sound of someone trying to find words that shouldn’t have to exist.
And then, in a voice I barely recognized: “He’s gone, Lena. He passed early this morning. Around four a.m. You weren’t there. We couldn’t find you.”
The words didn’t make sense at first. They were just sounds, syllables strung together without meaning. My father. Gone. Passed. Four a.m.
Four a.m.
At four a.m., I had been in Raphael’s bed. In Raphael’s arms. Crying out his name while my father drew his last breath alone in a hospital room.
“No.” The word came out as a whisper. “No, that’s not… he was stable. He was getting better. The doctors said he was improving. They said—”
“There was a complication. His heart.” Clara was crying now, I could hear the tears in every syllable. “Lena, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. We tried to reach you. We tried everything. I must have called a dozen times. The hotel staff tried. Marjorie was frantic. Nobody knew where you were.”
My phone. Silenced. Because I hadn’t wanted to be interrupted while I gave myself to a man who would throw me away the next morning. Because I’d chosen him over everything else, and while I was choosing him, my father was dying alone.
The irony was so cruel it almost made me laugh. Almost. Instead, the sound that came out of me wasn’t laughter at all.
I don’t remember the rest of the drive. I don’t remember Parsons pulling up to the hotel, or the door opening, or my feet hitting the pavement.
I just remember Clara’s arms around me, holding me up when my legs wouldn’t work anymore.
Her hair smelled like the jasmine shampoo she always used.
Her sweater was soft against my cheek. She was saying things, comforting things, but I couldn’t hear them over the roaring in my ears.
I remember the lobby, familiar and foreign at once, the marble floors I’d walked a thousand times now feeling like they belonged to someone else’s life. Staff members with red-rimmed eyes avoiding my gaze. Whispers that stopped when I walked past. The weight of their sympathy crushing me.
I remember being guided somewhere quiet, somewhere private, and then I remember nothing but grief.
My father was dead.
My father was dead, and I hadn’t been there. I’d been in the bed of a man who’d used me and discarded me, moaning his name while my father’s heart gave out.
The guilt was worse than the grief. The guilt was a living thing, wrapping around my throat and squeezing.
The days that followed blurred together.
Funeral arrangements that I moved through like a ghost. Condolence calls that I answered with words that meant nothing.
Flowers that I couldn’t look at without wanting to scream, their sickly-sweet perfume filling every room until I thought I might suffocate on it.
Clara stayed by my side through all of it, handling the details I couldn’t face, fielding the questions I couldn’t answer. She was the only reason I ate, the only reason I slept, the only reason I didn’t simply stop existing.
Where were you that night, Miss Hughes?
I was being fucked by a man who never cared about me at all.
I didn’t say that, of course. I said I’d been away, dealing with business matters. People nodded sympathetically and didn’t push. Death gave you permission to be vague.
One week after the funeral, the lawyer came.
His name was Hartley, and he’d handled my family’s legal affairs for as long as I could remember.
Gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, the perpetually apologetic expression of a man who delivered bad news for a living.
He wore a black suit that was slightly too tight across the shoulders and carried a briefcase that looked older than I was.
“I’m sorry to do this so soon after the service, Miss Hughes.” He settled into a chair across from me in the hotel’s private office, briefcase balanced on his lap. “But there are time-sensitive provisions in your father’s will that require immediate attention.”
Clara sat beside me, her hand finding mine under the table. I squeezed it gratefully. The office still smelled like my father’s cigars, even though he hadn’t smoked one in months. The leather of his chair, now my chair, creaked when I shifted.
“Let’s get it over with,” I said.
Hartley nodded and opened his briefcase. Papers shuffled with the practiced efficiency of a man who had done this too many times. Glasses adjusted. Throat cleared.
“The estate is relatively straightforward. Your father’s personal assets, including the hotel, are bequeathed to you as his sole heir.”
I waited. There was clearly more coming. Hartley’s expression had that particular tightness that meant he was about to say something I wouldn’t like.
“However.” He paused. “There is a condition attached to the hotel bequest.”
“A condition?”
“Yes.” More paper shuffling. “Your father amended his will six months ago to include a provision regarding the hotel’s ownership. Specifically, that you must be legally married within one year of his death, or the hotel will revert to a charitable trust.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. Married. Within one year. Or I lose everything.