6. Skye
— ? —
Skye
Jaime crosses the room in three strides. I flinch and he uses that half-second to block the exit.
“Five minutes.” His voice is wrecked, scraped raw. “Please. I’ve been looking for you.”
“So you bought a company to corner me?”
“I bought six companies trying to find you.”
The words land wrong. I must have misheard. “Six.”
“Six.”
“You bought six companies.”
“Yes.”
Billions of dollars and thousands of employees. Entire livelihoods becoming collateral damage in his obsession.
“That’s...” I don’t have a word for it. Insane feels too small. “How? I erased everything. I changed my name. How did you-”
“I stopped looking for you and looked for Shelby.”
My blood goes cold.
“I had someone track her too. But she made herself untrackable before she ever moved near you, and that was a full year after you disappeared.” He says it like he’s impressed.
Like my best friend’s paranoia was a worthy opponent in some twisted chess match.
“By the time she finally moved, people had written her off as a dead end.”
“So how-”
“After three years, I finally stopped chasing your name directly.” He takes a step closer, away from the door.
“Started chasing her paper trail instead and this was way easier because I just have to talk to people who already know me. Every company she’d worked for.
Every place she’d interviewed. Every friend she’d ever referred for a job. All of it went on a list.”
“And you started buying.”
“Only those who wouldn’t give me complete employees’ information for the sake of ‘privacy’, business talk for ‘I know you’re looking for someone important so you have to pay me for that information’.
” His eyes don’t leave mine. Dark and intent and absolutely certain.
“Your badge photo came through in the acquisition files. I knew your face before the page finished loading. I signed that night.”
The silence stretches between us. Outside the window, the city hums with ordinary life. People going to work. Living in a world where men don’t spend four years and six companies hunting down women who ran.
“That’s insane,” I whisper.
“Probably.”
“That’s stalking, Jaime. That’s actual, legal-definition stalking.”
“I know what it is.”
“You ruined people’s lives. Those companies had employees. Families depending on those jobs.”
“Every employee was retained. I’m not a monster.”
“You bought six companies to find your ex-fiancée. That’s exactly what a monster does.”
“Then I’m a monster who loves you.”
“You can’t just buy your way back into my life!”
“Then tell me another way.” He steps closer again, close enough that I can see the damage.
The sleepless shadows carved under his eyes.
The new lines around his mouth. The gray at his temples.
He looks older, worn down. Haunted in a way that almost makes me feel something.
“Tell me what you need and I’ll do it. Anything. Everything. Name it.”
I shove past him. My shoulder connects with his chest and the contact burns through me, and I hate that my body still remembers his. Hate that some traitorous part of me wants to lean into the warmth instead of running from it.
I walk out the door to the elevator that’s already open. I stab the close button repeatedly before he reaches me.
“Skye, wait-”
“Don’t follow me,” I say as the door closes in his face. But I know he’ll follow me anyway.
I walk out of the elevator to the lobby. The elevator beside the one I took opens. The receptionist looks up, sees us, and her eyes go wide.
I walk faster but he matches my pace.
Through the lobby and out onto the nearby street I parked on. The pigeons scatter and pedestrians gawk and the sun beats down on my neck like judgment.
“Skye!”
I whirl around so fast he nearly crashes into me.
“What do you want from me?” The words rip out of me, loud enough to turn heads.
A man in a business suit veers around us, phone pressed to his ear, eyes curious.
“You want forgiveness? You want me to pretend you didn’t destroy everything?
You want me to smile and shake your hand and say let’s be professional? ”
“I want you to listen.”
“I listened for years!” A woman with a stroller crosses the street to avoid us.
I don’t care. Let them all hear. Let the whole city know what kind of man Jaime Miller really is.
“I listened when you said she was just your assistant. I listened when you called me paranoid. I listened when you quoted my own therapist at me and made me apologize for seeing what was right in front of my face!”
He flinches.
“I know, and I’m sorry, and I will spend the rest of my life being sorry if that’s what it takes. But Skye, I need you to hear this. I never touched her. I never wanted anyone but you.”
I let out an ugly, raw laugh that feels like it belongs in a hospital room rather than on a public sidewalk.
“The photos said otherwise.”
“What photos?”
“Three weeks, Jaime. Three weeks after you begged my voicemail to believe you, her hand was on your face on the cover of every tabloid in the country.” The memory rises up.
Shelby’s phone screen glowing in the dark.
The headline in tabloid yellow. Leslie’s fingers cradling his jaw.
“She spent the night at your building. ‘Inseparable, day and night.’ Direct quote.”
His face changes as a sudden vulnerability breaks through his expression, making him look as though I have completely flattened him twice over.
“That fucking tabloid.” He drags a hand down his face, and whatever he sees behind his closed eyes ages him a decade. “That’s why you disappeared. You saw that and you-”
I hold up a hand. “Don’t do the thing where you explain it away. Don’t tell me it was taken out of context. Don’t tell me I misunderstood what I saw with my own eyes. I’ve heard every version of that speech, and I’m not listening to another one.”
“Skye-”
“Your truth has always been flexible. Bendy. Whatever shape it needs to be to make me the crazy one.”
He goes quiet, and I can see the machinery turning behind his eyes. The explanation loading. The same machinery that talked me out of my own instincts for years, that made me apologize for being right, that convinced me my gut was the enemy and his word was gospel.
He must see me brace for it. Because instead of speaking, he drops to his knees.
On the concrete. In his thousand-dollar suit. In front of the lunch crowd pouring out of the surrounding office buildings.
“What are you doing?” I hiss. “Get up.”
“Not until you hear me.”
“Jaime, get off the ground.”
“I never touched her.” He looks up at me, tears streaming freely now, his hands open at his sides like he’s surrendering to something bigger than both of us.
“I was a coward. I handled everything wrong. I should have fired her the first time she crossed a line. I should have told you everything. I should have believed you instead of managing you.”
A woman nearby stops walking. Her phone is already raised, camera pointed directly at us. “Holy shit. Isn’t that the tech guy? The billionaire?”
Her friend turns to look. “Why is he begging her?”
“I don’t know, but I’m recording this.”
“Same. This is insane.”
“Wait, I think I saw them both before. From a viral video years ago. At the altar and the guests like took videos from different angles.”
More people gather. A small crowd forming around the spectacle, swelling by the second. All of them with phones out, recording the moment Jaime Miller lost his dignity on a public sidewalk.
“Get up.” My voice shakes despite my best efforts. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
“I don’t care.”
“People are filming. This is going to be everywhere. Your board is going to see this. Your mother is going to see this.”
“I don’t care about any of it, Skye.” His voice rises, loud enough for the crowd to hear. “I don’t care if it’s on every news site by tonight. I don’t care if my stock price tanks. I don’t care if the whole world watches me beg. Tell me what I have to do. Tell me how to fix this. I’ll do anything.”
The crowd murmurs. Someone whispers oh my God. Someone else says this is better than reality TV. A third voice asks if anyone knows who the woman is and someone actually replies “His former fiancée.”
I look down at him as he sits there looking entirely broken and desperate, exhibiting a level of public vulnerability that the old Jaime never would have allowed.
The Jaime I knew controlled every narrative, managed every perception, never let a single crack show.
He would rather die than be seen as weak.
Than be seen as anything less than perfect.
This Jaime is cracked wide open, shattered on a sidewalk, and crying in front of strangers.
A new feeling stirs in my chest that is nowhere near forgiveness, yet it forces me to recognize that his current distress is genuine even if every other part of his life is a complete lie.
“There’s nothing to fix,” I say quietly. “We’re done. We’ve been done for four years.”
“Skye-”
“Get off the ground, Jaime. Go back to your office. Run your company. Leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Then learn.”
I turn and walk away. The crowd parts for me, phones still raised, whispers following me down. I don’t look back.
***
I pick up Josh from daycare ten minutes before close, bury my face in his curls, and breathe him in until my heartbeat slows. He smells like finger paint and apple juice and everything good in the world.
“Mama sad?” He touches my cheek with his sticky fingers.
“Mama’s fine, baby. Just tired.”
“I give you crackers?”
“You keep your crackers, sweet boy. Mama’s okay.”
But I’m not okay. I’m the furthest thing from okay.
I give him dinner, chicken nuggets and peas because it’s the only thing he’ll eat without a fight.
I give him a bath, let him splash until the floor is soaked and I don’t even care.
I read him three books and sing him two songs and rock him until his breathing evens out and his body goes heavy in my arms.
Then I put him down. And I cry until there’s nothing left.
***
The next morning, Shelby is waiting in the kitchen with two mugs of coffee.
“I saw the video.”
“Everyone saw the video.”
“Twelve million views and counting.” She hands me the cup. “You’re famous again. ‘Mystery woman makes billionaire cry on downtown sidewalk.’ Very catchy headline.”
“Great. That’s exactly what I needed. More attention.”
“The comments are wild. Half of them think you’re a heartless villain. The other half think you’re a feminist icon. Some are already linking your wedding video.”
“What do you think?”
“I think you should’ve kicked him while he was down there.” She leans against the table, arms crossed. “He’s upstairs, by the way. Been there since six.”
I take a long sip of coffee. It burns my tongue and I don’t care. “Then I guess I’m going in.”