Chapter 34
HOLDEN
“What do you want, Holden?”
Her voice came through the door, but she sounded so muffled and wrecked that it damn near undid me. There were only two inches of wood between us, but it might as well have been a goddamn canyon.
My chest clenched and I could barely breathe. I rested my palm against the door, my forehead following a moment later. “I just need five minutes, Ellora. Please. That’s it. That’s all I’m asking for. Just five minutes.”
“You’ve already taken enough,” she muttered, her voice cracking, but the anger was there too, raw and alive. “I don’t have another minute for you, let alone five.”
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, fast enough that I knew she still had to be right there. Right on the other side of a door I would have broken down to get to her if I didn’t think it would make her call the cops on me. “I didn’t know. I swear to you, I had no idea your shop would be affected.”
She let out a bitter laugh, but I could hear that she was crying. “Oh, please. Do you really expect me to believe that?”
“Yes,” I said immediately, desperate for her to hear the truth before she turned and walked away. “I didn’t even know where your store was until Second Story Sunday. I walked up and saw the street name. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know before, Ellora. I didn’t—”
“Stop saying that,” she snapped, sounding like the tears were quickly drying up. “You’re supposed to be this big, brilliant developer, and you didn’t know? You didn’t notice the name of my store plastered all over your plans?”
Her words were sharp, and the truth was that she was right. I should’ve known. I should’ve looked at all the names of the shops and the tenants before I signed the papers. I should’ve known exactly what was what.
“I was looking at the big picture,” I admitted quietly. “Numbers. The renderings of what it was going to look like after. My team handled the details. I didn’t realize you were involved until I was standing right there.”
“Right,” she said flatly. “You were too busy looking down on us from your fancy penthouse to notice the details of the lives you were wrecking. Is that it?”
I closed my eyes. God, she’s not wrong.
“I would never do something like that to you on purpose.” It was a promise but a qualified one.
I’d known I was doing it to someone. I just hadn’t known who, but even so, now that I knew, she needed to know that I wasn’t just letting it go.
This wasn’t some empty promise. “As soon as I found out, I started trying to fix it.”
“Fix it?” she repeated, her voice trembling before she scoffed. “Does that mean you’re not going to kick me out of my shop? You’ll cancel the project just because you found out I have a thrift store on that block?”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. It’s just not as simple as all that. There are contracts, investors, and my board is breathing down my neck. I’m doing everything I can to stop it.”
“If that was true, it would’ve been stopped by now,” she said after a long pause. “I’ve seen what you can do, Holden. I’ve seen how fast you can pull things together, so unless you’re here to tell me that the project is over, which you’re obviously not, you should just leave.”
“It’s complicated, Ellora. This isn’t just paying a doctor for a day to go to a beach. The amount of people involved? The amount of money? It’s going to take time, but I’m trying. I swear to you that I’m doing everything in my power.”
“Your power is considerable,” she murmured. “I want to believe you. I do, but I can’t. Not after all this. Not after you didn’t even have the decency to tell me yourself.”
“That was a mistake. I should have. I just…” I banged my forehead lightly against her door. “What can I do to prove it to you? How do I make you believe that I’m trying?”
“Leave me alone.” Her voice was quieter now, shaking like she was trying not to cry. “Talk is cheap, Holden.”
“Ellora—”
“My mother loved that place,” she said. “Every inch of it. The scent of sugar and butter drifting from the bakery downstairs. The bakery that’s now gone. The creak of the floorboards. The people around us. It’s all I have left of her and now you’re just going to tear it down.”
Her words hollowed me out, but I finally managed to force out a reply.
“I’m not tearing it down, not if I can help it.
I’m not losing you, but I know that talk is cheap, so I’ll leave you alone.
Just know that it’s not because I want to and it’s not because I’m backing down.
It’s so that I can get this done. In the meantime, please try to trust me? ”
She didn’t answer. I pressed my ear to the door, but all I heard was the faint padding of her footsteps retreating.
Once it went completely silent on her side, even the sound of her footsteps now gone, I kept standing in the hall, staring at the door like it might somehow open out of pure mercy. But it didn’t. It just sat there between us like a punishment.
I stayed long enough to hear glass clinking and feminine voices starting up.
At least that was something, knowing she wasn’t in there alone.
I finally turned and walked away when I heard Bree’s voice.
I didn’t know who else was in there with her, but Bree was a good person.
She wouldn’t leave Ellora while she still needed her.
But right now, she needed space and I needed a goddamn miracle, and the only way to get it was to keep my promise to her. I had to make this happen, even if I really had done everything in my power and achieved jack shit with it.
My driver was waiting for me downstairs and I climbed into the back of the car without a word, turning to stare out the window as he took me home. At this hour, the city was quiet, which only seemed to make my thoughts louder.
After I got home, I poured myself a drink before I even took off my jacket.
I tossed that one back, poured another, and tossed it back too.
Because the first two hadn’t done a damn thing except make me aware of how spectacularly I’d torched my life, I poured another and carried the whiskey with me to the couch.
Half a bottle later, Jimmy showed up uninvited, took one look at me slumped on the couch with my sleeves unbuttoned and my jacket at my feet on the floor, and reached for the whiskey. “Well, shit. You look like the ghost of bad decisions present.”
A humorless laugh escaped me. “That’s generous. I feel more like the corpse of poor planning. Are you going to grab a glass?”
He did just that and helped himself to a tumbler filled to the brim. When he saw me notice, I shrugged. “It looks like I need to catch up.”
After refilling my glass too, he sat down across from me and looked right into my eyes. “I take it she didn’t welcome you back with open arms when she found out you were trying to do the impossible for her.”
“She told me to go to hell. More or less.” I rubbed the side of my neck and looked away from him, my gaze skipping across the city lights outside. “Honestly, she’s right to. I should’ve seen this coming. I’m supposed to be the guy who notices the details and somehow I missed her store.”
Jimmy whistled low. “Yeah, that’s, uh, that’s a big one, man.”
“A big one?” I laughed, but it came out more like a cough mixed with some kind of disbelieving gurgle. “It’s a goddamned catastrophe. I fell in love with someone whose livelihood I’m actively destroying. How’s that for irony?”
He shrugged. “I’d call it karma, but sure.”
I glared at him, but all he did was raise his glass. “Too soon?”
“Way too soon.” I slumped back into the couch again, watching the city lights blur through the glass.
“The board won’t budge and neither will she.
She doesn’t believe that I didn’t know, and even if I could somehow prove it to her, I still didn’t tell her the truth when I realized.
All of which is in addition to the fact that I’m about to take the one thing she and her mother built together and literally tear it down. ”
“It’s not a great day to be you.” He took a big gulp of his drink before he looked at me again. “What are you going to do?”
My head shook slowly from one side to the other. For the first time in an exceptionally long time, I was at a loss. “I don’t have a plan.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“Yeah, I’m aware,” I said flatly. “I’m going to have to go to war with my own company, Jimmy. I’m going to have to rip up contracts and stall construction, and that’s just for a start. It’s a clusterfuck of historic proportions.”
He swirled the liquid in his glass. “You fucked up. There’s no question about that, but crying and feeling sorry for yourself won’t fix it. You need to figure out how to make the board see this your way.”
“Yeah, well, unless I can magically turn corporate greed into empathy, I’m screwed.”
He smirked. “Then get creative. You’re good at that when you’re not being a lovesick idiot.”
I let out a long breath, staring at the condensation sliding down the side of my glass.
“Thanks, but I thought you were of the opinion that I was just being an all-round idiot today. Lovesick or not. Weren’t you the one who warned me earlier about this being a billion-dollar deal and that I was in too deep to get out? ”
“Now that you mention it, that does sound like me,” he said cheerfully. “On the other hand, back when things were going well between you and Shannon, you were a lot more pleasant to work with, and now this student of yours makes you a fucking joy. It’s in my best interest to support you.”
“Ellora,” I stressed. “Her name is Ellora.”
“Either way, somehow, I fucked up too and you became one of my best friends.” He ran a hand through his hair and shrugged when I arched an eyebrow at him.
“Yeah, man. Don’t ask. I honestly don’t know how that happened, but the point is that I’m in a position where I care about your happiness. She made you happy.”
Somewhere between guilt and exhaustion, the faintest spark of an idea started forming at the back of my mind. It was just out of reach though, like a word on the tip of my tongue.
Maybe there was a way to make everyone happy. Or at least less miserable. I knew there was something, but I just couldn’t quite get there. Eventually, I sighed and shook my head. “I’m not giving up. Not on her. Not on this.”
Jimmy raised his glass again. “In that case, it might be time to stop drinking and start plotting, Romeo.”
I clinked my glass against his. “Here’s to miracles.”
“You might not need one.” Jimmy leaned back, resting his elbow on the armrest of the couch. “The project can keep going forward. Just change what the project is. Come up with something that’ll make those greedy ghouls happy and that doesn’t fuck over your girlfriend.”
“Well? Any ideas as to what that might look like?”
He casually lifted a single shoulder, acting like he hadn’t just dropped a grenade in my lap. “That’s what you’re going to have to figure out.”
“Gee, thanks.” That was what I’d been trying to do, but in the silence of my penthouse before he’d arrived, none of the possibilities I’d been able to come up with had been good.
Now he was here, but the problem remained.
Change the project. Make everyone happy. Don’t destroy the woman I love in the process.
Easy.
Except it wasn’t.
As the night stretched on and the whiskey burned down to the last drop before Jimmy finally left, I knew one thing for sure. Ellora deserved better than the mess I’d made and I was damn well going to find a way to fix it.