15. Lily
— ? —
Lily
The drive back feels like entering a war zone.
My phone hasn’t stopped buzzing since we left the cabin, a relentless assault of notifications that makes my screen look like it’s having a seizure.
Interview requests from every major network.
Apologies from people who cut me dead a month ago.
Messages from people who haven’t spoken to me in years, who ignored me at parties, who whispered behind my back, suddenly very interested in reconnecting with their dear friend Lily.
Funny how a famous name can resurrect dead friendships overnight.
I scroll through a few names and feel my lip curl. Meredith Ashworth, who once told me at a charity luncheon that I should “know my place.” Derek Halpert, who laughed when Edward made a joke at my expense. Cynthia Whatever-Her-Name-Is, who openly flirted with my husband at our anniversary dinner.
Now they want to reconnect.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
“You’re going to break your phone,” Lucas observes.
“I’m going to break several things before this day is over.”
The Maxwell PR team is managing what they can, but there’s too much attention, too many angles, too many journalists digging into every corner of my past. TMZ has already found my college roommate.
The Times is running a feature on Eleanor Maxwell’s decades-long search for her missing granddaughter.
Someone leaked my wedding photos - the ones where I’m smiling like I mean it, before I knew my marriage was a carefully constructed prison.
“They used the photo from our honeymoon,” I say flatly. “The one in Santorini.”
Lucas glances over. “Which one?”
“The one where I look happy.” I stare at the image on my screen - me in a white sundress, Edward’s arm around my waist, the Mediterranean sparkling behind us. “I remember that day. I thought I was the luckiest woman alive. I thought he loved me.”
“Lily-”
“Three days later, I found the first text from her on his phone. He said it was nothing. A work colleague being inappropriate. I believed him.” I laugh, and it sounds bitter even to my own ears. “God, I was so stupid.”
“You weren’t stupid. You were trusting. There’s a difference.”
“Is there? Because from where I’m sitting, they feel like the same thing.”
Lucas drives with one hand on the wheel, his other wrapped around mine so tightly it almost hurts. I don’t ask him to loosen his grip. The pressure anchors me. Reminds me that whatever chaos waits in the city, whatever vultures are circling, I’m not facing it alone.
“You’re quiet,” he says after a long stretch of highway.
“I’m processing everything.” I watch the scenery blur past, but my body keeps betraying me, still sore in places I’d forgotten I had, still wearing the ghost of his mouth on my throat from 3 a.m. like a bruise I don’t want to fade.
It’s obscene, the timing of it. My grandmother is twelve hours dead.
The city ahead is a firing squad of cameras.
And here I am in the passenger seat of a borrowed car, watching the tendons in his forearm shift every time he works the wheel, thinking about that same forearm braced beside my head last night while he took me apart slowly enough to make me beg.
His thumb moves on my palm. Just that. An absent, comforting stroke, the kind you’d give anyone you were trying to steady.
My thighs press together before I can stop them.
He notices. Of course he notices, he’s been cataloging me like scripture since the cabin, and the corner of his mouth tips up without him looking away from the road.
“You’re thinking very loudly over there,” he says.
“I’m grieving.”
“You can do both.” His thumb drags one more deliberate circle, slow, and heat licks up my spine in a way that feels almost disrespectful given the day. “Nobody’s body got the memo that it’s supposed to shut down when everything hurts. Sometimes wanting someone is just proof you’re still alive.”
“That’s a very convenient philosophy for a man with his hand on my leg.”
“When did my hand get on your leg?”
It has. I don’t know when it happened. It’s resting warm just above my knee, and neither of us moves it, and for one stolen mile the grief and the cameras and the dead woman in the morgue all blur into background noise behind the single bright fact of his palm on my skin.
Then I make myself say it, because it’s true and because saying it is the only way to put the want down.
“She died watching me press send on an email.” My voice cracks on the words. “That was her last moment on earth. Watching me choose destruction.”
“She died watching you choose freedom.” Lucas lifts our joined hands, presses a kiss to my knuckles. His lips are warm against my skin, and I feel the touch all the way down to my bones. “There’s a difference, Lily.”
“Is there?”
“Yes.” His voice goes fierce in a way that makes my chest tight. “She spent twenty years searching for you. Twenty years hiring investigators and following dead ends and refusing to give up. And in the end, she got to see you win. She got to see you rise. That’s not destruction. That’s justice.”
My eyes burn. I blink rapidly, refusing to cry again. I’ve cried enough in the last twenty-four hours to fill an ocean. My face is probably permanently puffy at this point. Very attractive. Very heiress-appropriate.
“You’re allowed to feel complicated things,” he continues, softer now. “Grief and victory can coexist. They usually do.”
“When did you get so wise?”
“I’ve had a lot of therapy.” He flashes me a sideways smile, but there’s something raw underneath the humor.
“Three different therapists, actually. The first one was Victoria-approved, which meant she was useless. The second one was too scared of my family to push back on anything. The third one finally told me I was allowed to be angry.”
“Were you? Angry?”
“Furious.” The word comes out sharp. “At Victoria for being a monster. At my father for dying and leaving me alone with her. At Edward for being the golden child who could do no wrong. At myself for never being brave enough to break free.”
“You broke free now.”
“Only because of you.” He squeezes my hand. “You gave me a reason to finally choose.”
“That’s a lot of pressure to put on a woman who can barely choose what to eat for breakfast.”
He laughs - a real laugh, surprised out of him - and something loosens in my chest.
“Also,” he adds, still grinning, “you tend to develop emotional intelligence when your family has the collective empathy of a shark tank.”
I laugh too - surprised by it, almost startled by the sound coming out of my own mouth. It feels wrong to laugh when my grandmother’s body is barely cold. It feels wrong and necessary and human, all at once.
“There she is.” His smile softens into something that makes my throat tight. “I missed that sound.”
“What sound?”
“Your real laugh. Not the polite one you learned for society functions - the one that never reaches your eyes, the one that sounds like a wind chime in a hurricane. The real one.” He squeezes my hand. “You stopped laughing like that about six months into your marriage. I noticed.”
“You noticed a lot of things.”
“I noticed everything about you.” His voice drops, rough and honest in a way that makes heat pool in my stomach.
“Every time you walked into a room. Every time you smiled and it didn’t reach your eyes.
Every time Edward dismissed you or Victoria cut you down or the world made you feel small. I noticed all of it.”
“Lucas-”
“I hated myself for not doing anything about it. I should have said something. Done something. Instead, I just... watched. Like a coward.”
“You weren’t a coward.”
“I was.” His jaw tightens. “I saw what they were doing to you, and I told myself it wasn’t my place to interfere. That you were Edward’s wife. That you’d chosen him. That maybe you were happy and I just couldn’t see it.”
“I wasn’t happy.”
“I know that now.” He glances at me, and the pain in his eyes makes my chest ache. “I think I knew it then, too. I just didn’t want to admit it, because admitting it would have meant doing something about it.”
“You were trapped too,” I say softly. “Edward had something on you. You told me that.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“It’s not an excuse. It’s a reason.” I turn to look at him, really look at him, and something shifts in my chest. This man, who watched me suffer in silence for three years. Who carried his own secrets and his own shame. Who finally chose me when it cost him everything.
“You’re here now,” I tell him. “That’s what matters.”
Heat creeps up my neck when his eyes flick to mine, dark and intense and full of things I’m still learning to read. Even now, even after everything we’ve done together, after the ways he’s touched me and the sounds he’s drawn from my body, he can still make me blush with a single look.
God, I’m pathetic.
“Eyes on the road, Burton.”
“Yes ma’am.”
But he’s smiling, and so am I, and for one suspended moment the chaos feels very far away. Like we’re just two people driving down a highway, hands intertwined, the rest of the world held at bay by the simple fact of being together.
My phone buzzes again. Then again. Then a cascade so intense it nearly vibrates off my lap.
It doesn’t last. Reality never does.
“What happens now?” I ask, and the weight of everything comes crashing back.
“Whatever you want.” His thumb traces circles on my palm, slow and soothing. “You’ve won, Lily. The Burton empire is dust. You have your grandmother’s fortune, her legacy, her name. You can do anything. Be anyone. Go anywhere.”
“Anywhere?”
“Anywhere in the world. You could buy an island. A castle. A small European country, probably.”
“I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand.”
“Then we’ll go to New Zealand.”
“We?” I raise an eyebrow. “Pretty presumptuous, Burton.”
“Am I wrong?”
I don’t answer. I don’t need to. He knows.
“Victoria’s still out there,” I say instead. “Hiding, probably plotting her comeback.”
“Let her plot. She has nothing left.”
“She has money. Connections. Decades of favors to call in.”