10. Scarlett
— ? —
Scarlett
The handshake is the part I’ll remember.
Not the boardroom, not the contracts, not the careful dance of the last two hours.
Just the moment the developer reaches across the table and takes my hand instead of Reid’s, looks me in the eye, and says it was a pleasure doing business with me.
Me. By name. The way no one in this city bothered to do for ten years.
“Pleasure’s mine,” I tell him, and I mean it more than he’ll ever know.
We ride down in the elevator, Reid and I, and the second the doors close he lets the professional mask drop and grins at me like a kid who got away with a heist.
“You enjoyed that,” I say.
“I enjoyed watching you take that room apart without raising your voice once.” He loosens his tie. “He came in wanting to talk to me. He left asking when he could meet with you again. You did that in ninety minutes.”
“I’ve been doing that for a decade. The only new part is that this time my name’s on the paperwork.”
“You’re on pace, you know.” He says it quieter, watching the floor numbers tick down. “Everything you said you wanted that first night at the Carlisle. The work, the name, the divorce. You’re getting there faster than even I thought you would.”
“The divorce is moving.” I shrug, light, though the word still tastes strange in my mouth, freedom dressed up as paperwork.
“Cleanly, for once. No surprises. His lawyers stopped fighting the second the scandal hit. Turns out a man drowning in his own headlines doesn’t have much fight left for a contract. ”
“Good.”
“Good,” I agree, and for a moment the elevator feels like the safest place in the world, just the two of us and the hum of the cables and the future getting closer with every floor.
Then the doors open on the lobby, and my father is standing there.
Maxwell Ashworth, silver-haired and impeccable, the picture of a man who has never once doubted he belongs wherever he plants his feet.
He sees me, and his face arranges itself into the expression I’ve come to think of as diplomatic concern, the one he wears when he wants a thing he knows he can no longer simply demand.
“Scarlett.” He steps forward. “I’ve been trying to reach you for three days.”
“I know.” I keep walking. “I’ve been busy.”
“Too busy to return a single call from your own father?” He falls into step beside me, and Reid drifts back half a pace, giving me the floor without leaving it. “I had to find out from Eleanor Whitmore’s assistant which building you’d be in today. Do you understand how that looks?”
“I genuinely could not tell you how that looks, Father, because I stopped tracking how things look to you somewhere around the third headline.”
“That’s exactly what I want to talk about.” He catches my arm, gentle, the way he used to steer me toward the right people at parties. “What you did to your sister, Scarlett. At that gallery. The whole city watched her get dragged out of a building. Do you have any idea what that’s done to her?”
I stop walking.
“What it’s done to her?” I repeat.
“She’s pregnant. She’s alone. And her own sister is the one who orchestrated her public ruin.”
His voice drops into the reasonable register, the one that always made me feel like the unreasonable one for having feelings at all.
“I’m not saying what she did was right. But she’s family. She’s hurting. And I think it’s time you found it in yourself to forgive her and put this ugliness behind us before it destroys what’s left of this family’s name.”
For a long moment I just look at him.
At this man who raised me, who taught me which fork to use and how to charm a room and how to make myself small enough that no one ever felt threatened. At this man who never once, in twenty years, asked me how I was hurting.
And the thing I’ve been holding shut my whole life finally gives way.
“Forgive her.” My voice comes out low and shaking, and I don’t recognize it, because I have never in my life let him hear it shake.
“She slept with my husband for two years, Father. She got pregnant by him. She stood in a courtyard and gloated about taking my life, and then she threw herself at a staircase to make it look like I’d hurt her child. And you want me to forgive her.”
“Scarlett, lower your voice.”
“No.” The word cracks out of me, and a woman by the reception desk turns to look, and I don’t care. “You have never once told Margot to lower her voice.”
“You’ve never told Margot to forgive, to compromise, to think of the family.
You let her take everything and you called it her good nature, and you let me carry everything and you called it duty.
And now she’s finally lost the one thing she wanted, her gilded little life, and your instinct, your very first instinct, is to come find me and ask me to make it stop hurting her. ”
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out. I have shocked him, I realize. Twenty-seven years old and this is the first time my father has ever heard me say no and mean it, and he has absolutely no idea what to do with the sound.
“I am done,” I tell him, quieter now, which is somehow worse. “I’m done being the one who bends. I don’t want to fix this. I don’t want to forgive her. And right now I don’t want to talk to you, or her, or anyone with our name on their birth certificate.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I have never meant anything more.” I turn for the doors. “Goodbye, Father.”
I walk out into the gray afternoon with my heart slamming and my hands trembling and a strange wild lightness spreading through my chest, because I said it. After a lifetime of swallowing every word, I finally said it out loud, and the building didn’t collapse and the sky didn’t fall.
Reid catches up to me on the sidewalk, his hand finding the small of my back.
“You all right?”
“I have no idea.” A laugh shakes out of me, half disbelief. “I think I just told my father to go to hell in a hotel lobby.”
“You did. It was magnificent. I’ve never been prouder of anyone in my life.”
“Don’t make me cry on the street, Vanderbilt, I have a reputation now.”
He’s laughing, steering me toward the lot where he left the car, and for one more second the world is good.
The deal is closed. The divorce is moving. I finally found my voice.
We’re almost to the car, the late light catching the chrome, and I’m thinking about nothing more dangerous than where we should get dinner.
The engine roars before I see the headlights.
It comes from across the lot, fast and wrong, and Reid’s hand fists in my coat and hauls me back against the concrete wall as a black SUV slams into the side of his car with a crunch that I feel in my teeth.
Metal buckles. A headlight bursts. The SUV rocks back on its wheels, engine ticking, and for a moment the whole lot goes silent except for the hiss of a ruptured radiator.
The driver’s door swings open.
Vincent half falls out of it.
He’s a wreck. His shirt is untucked, his tie gone, his eyes red and swimming, and when he finds his feet he sways like the ground is moving under him. The smell of him reaches me from ten feet away, whiskey and sweat and a sourness underneath.
“There you are.” His words slur into each other. “Been trying to find you. You won’t answer. Nobody answers.”
“Vincent.” I step away from the wall, and Reid moves with me, his body angling between us. “You’re drunk. You just rammed a parked car.”
“His car.” Vincent jabs a finger at Reid, the gesture nearly tipping him over. “His car. Course it’s his car. Everything’s his now, isn’t it? My company, my reputation, my wife.”
“I’m not your wife. I haven’t been your wife in every way that matters for years, and in a matter of weeks I won’t be on paper either.”
“You’re still my wife!”
He lurches forward, and there’s a desperate, grasping edge to it, his hand reaching for my wrist. “You don’t get to just leave.
You don’t get to walk off with him and leave me with nothing.
Come home, Scarlett. Come home and we fix it, we fix all of it, I’ll tell them the truth, I’ll tell them you did the work, I’ll give you whatever you want, just... ”
“Don’t touch me.” I twist out of his reach, my voice level and even. “Look at yourself, Vincent.”
“You followed me here. You’ve been calling a number I never gave you, showing up at my door in the middle of the night, and now you’ve rammed a car into a wall in a parking lot to get to me.
Do you understand what that is? That’s stalking.
That’s a man who’s lost so completely he can’t think of anything to do except chase the one person who got away clean. ”
“I’m not like that.”
“You’re pathetic.”
The word comes out flat and certain, and it hits him harder than a scream would.
“You used to walk into a room and own it. Now you can’t even stand up straight.
You’re going to sober up in a holding cell if you keep this up, and then I’m going to take out a restraining order, and you’ll get to read about that in the papers too.
The wounded husband turned stalker. That’s the headline you’ve earned.
” I hold his swimming gaze. “You’ve lost. The only question left is how much louder you want to make the sound when you hit the ground. ”
For a second the words land. His face crumples. And then the alcohol burns through whatever shame was surfacing, and his expression twists into a worse shape.
“You think he’s any different?” He laughs, wet and broken, swinging toward Reid. “You think he won’t get bored of you? You’re a project to him. A way to stick it to me. The second he gets what he...”
“That’s enough.” Reid steps in and shoves him, one flat hard push to the chest, and Vincent staggers back three steps and folds onto the asphalt.
“Get off me!”
Vincent scrambles, more fury than coordination, grabbing at the wrecked fender to haul himself up.