Chapter 16 #3
Her mother washed. Emmy dried. The rhythm of it was old and familiar—her mother's ink-stained hands in the soapy water, Emmy's reaching for the dish towel that always hung from the same hook.
Through the kitchen window, she could see the Henderson skeletons glowing in the yard, a strand of Christmas lights strung between their ribcages in the shape of a heart.
At least Grant wasn't here to see it. Small mercies.
"Have you thought about Christmas?" her mother asked.
Emmy dried a plate carefully. "I was actually thinking I might do something quiet this year. Stay home. Work on my résumé."
"Your résumé." Her mother's tone was perfectly neutral, which was how Emmy knew she wasn't buying it.
"I just—I don't want to make things uncomfortable. For anyone." She picked up another plate. "Grant's usually here, and Bailey might come, and after everything that happened—"
She could hear how careful she sounded. How measured. Like she was arranging place cards at a dinner party instead of trying not to say I can't sit across from him for three hours and pretend I'm fine.
"Oh." Karalyn rinsed a glass, held it up to the light, rinsed it again. "They're not together anymore, actually."
She said it the way she said everything important—casually, half-turned toward the sink.
Emmy's hands stopped on the plate she was drying.
"How do you know that?"
"West mentioned it." She set the glass in the drying rack.
Her heartbeat had gone strange—fast and uneven, like a bird hitting a window.
"What happened?"
"Hmm." Her mother handed her a serving bowl, taking her time with the transfer.
"You always did follow him around. Even when you were small.
And he always seemed happy enough to let you.
" She rinsed another dish, unhurried. "When you graduated and he came back to play for Boston, I thought it was only a matter of time. "
Emmy's breath caught.
She was starting to make her peace with loving him—or something that might resemble peace, one day. It was her mother saying he always seemed happy enough to let you—like it went both ways. Like there was a version of this story where it could have.
A hot, awful pressure bloomed in Emmy's throat—not just shock but want, the raw stupid grief of wanting a thing she'd already ruined, and the shame of wanting it at all when she was the reason it was gone.
"It doesn't matter," Emmy said.
"Of course it matters."
"They broke up because of me." She heard how small it sounded. "The press, the leak, all of it—I did that. I blew up his life and his relationship and his privacy, and he hasn't spoken to me in three weeks because I'm the person who caused all of it."
"Emmy—"
"I need to fix it." She set the bowl down too hard. It rang against the counter. "I need to—if they broke up because of what I did, then I need to fix it."
Her mother dried her hands on the dish towel, folded it neatly, and hung it back on its hook.
"You can't fix other people's relationships, sweetheart. That's rather the lesson, isn't it?"
But Emmy was already reaching for her coat.
She found Bailey outside Mass General at seven-forty the next morning.
It had taken Emmy twenty minutes and one ethical compromise to find Bailey's schedule.
She still had access to the Elite Connections server—Cecelia hadn't thought to revoke her login, or hadn't bothered, which amounted to the same thing.
Bailey wasn't in the system. But a pediatric anesthesiologist at Mass General was, and his profile listed his rotation schedule in meticulous detail, and Emmy knew enough about how surgical teams were staffed to work backwards from there.
Matchmaker math. The last useful thing the job had taught her.
The morning air was sharp enough to sting, and Emmy's breath came out in clouds as she stood near the entrance, hands in her coat pockets, watching the automatic doors cycle open and closed.
Hospital staff emerged in waves—scrubs under parkas, lanyards swinging, the tired-eyed shuffle of people who'd been saving lives since before dawn.
Bailey came out alone, zipping up a dark puffer jacket, her hair in the sleek ponytail Emmy remembered from the auction. She looked exhausted—but moving like someone who'd learned to function on it a long time ago.
She saw Emmy and smiled. A little tired, a little wry.
"Emmy Woodhouse," Bailey said. "I was wondering if I'd see you again."
"Can I talk to you? Five minutes. I know you've been on your feet all night."
Bailey searched her face. Then she nodded toward a bench near the entrance, sheltered from the wind by a concrete overhang.
They sat. Emmy didn't waste time.
"I came to tell you that what happened—the press, the leak, the whole disaster—that was my fault. All of it. Grant didn't do anything wrong. He's a good man who got caught in something he never asked for because I was too ambitious and too careless to protect the one person who trusted me."
Bailey listened without interrupting. Her hands were folded in her lap. She wasn't wearing gloves, and her knuckles were pink from the cold.
"I know you two aren't together anymore," Emmy said.
"And I know it's probably because of the mess I made.
The press, the cameras, your name getting pulled into something that had nothing to do with you.
" She took a breath. The cold air burned her throat.
"Grant is worth it, Bailey. Whatever happened—whatever I broke—please don't let my mistakes be the reason you walk away from someone like him. "
The automatic doors hissed open behind them, releasing a burst of heated air.
"Emmy," Bailey said. "It wasn't you."
"It was. I said his name to a gossip columnist because she was being nice to me and I was feeling sorry for myself and..." She swallowed. "I practically wrote the article for her."
"I don't mean the leak." Bailey's voice was gentle and direct. "I mean the reason we ended. It wasn't the press."
"Are you sure? Because—"
"We just didn't work out." Bailey said it simply.
"Like any relationship in the beginning, you have to find your footing.
And it just wasn't right. I like him. But we're better off as friends.
" She paused. "And he—I think he wanted it to work.
But it would have been work. And both of us work hard enough as it is. "
"Because of me." Emmy's voice came out hoarse. "Because of what I did—the press, the exposure—I made it impossible for him to just be in a normal relationship without—"
"Emmy." Bailey's expression was kind and slightly amused, which was worse than anger. "Do you really think you're so powerful that one mistake could break a man who's survived worse than a tabloid headline?"
"Grant Knight is not broken," Bailey said. "He's not damaged. He's not incapable of love because you hurt him. He's a grown man whose heart was somewhere else before I ever met him."
Emmy opened her mouth. Closed it.
Emmy stared at her. The wind cut across the hospital entrance, and a strand of hair blew into her face. She didn't brush it away.
Bailey stood. Pulled her jacket tighter. She looked down at Emmy with an expression that was neither pitying nor cold—just honest.
"You came here to fix something," Bailey said. "That's very you, from what I understand. But this isn't yours to fix."
Emmy couldn't speak. The cold seeped through her coat, through her jeans, settled into her bones like it meant to stay.
Then she zipped her jacket to the chin, pulled out her phone, and walked toward the parking garage without looking back. The kind of clean exit Emmy had never learned to make.
Emmy sat on the bench for a long time.
She replayed Bailey's words. Somewhere else. Before I ever met him.
For one terrible second, she let herself feel it—the possibility that uncoiled in her chest like a fist opening. That "somewhere else" meant somewhere specific. That it meant her.
Then she shut it down. Because that was exactly the self-serving delusion she'd built her entire career on—the matchmaker who saw love everywhere except where it actually lived. Emmy Woodhouse, making herself the center of someone else's story. Again.
No. Grant's heart was somewhere else because she'd hollowed it out.
Three months of treating his privacy like currency, his trust like collateral, his quiet steady presence like something she was owed.
She'd used him up. And now he couldn't give himself to Bailey or anyone else because Emmy had taken the part of him that was available and spent it on her career.
Already gone.
Because of her. All of it, because of her.
Emmy stood. Her legs were stiff from the cold. The hospital entrance cycled open, closed, open, closed—a mechanical breath that didn't care about her revelations.
She walked home. Thirty-five minutes through streets that were starting to look like a holiday card—wreaths on doors, frost on windows, a Salvation Army bell somewhere in the distance.
She walked through it carrying the full weight of a truth she'd assembled wrong, every piece of evidence pointing somewhere she couldn't follow.
She'd tried to fix the one thing she could reach. And what she'd found was that the damage went deeper than she'd imagined. Not a crack she'd caused. A wound. And she was the one holding the knife.