25. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
The drive to the hotel takes eighteen minutes.
I spend every single one of them trying to figure out what I’m going to say. I rehearse speeches in my head, discard them, start over. Nothing sounds right. Nothing captures the enormity of what I just watched, what I’m feeling, what I want.
I park in the first spot I find and practically run to the entrance.
The doorman takes one look at my face, tear-streaked, wild-eyed, still in the jeans and sweater I wore all day, and opens the door without a word. I must look insane. I don’t care.
The ballroom is still buzzing when I push through the doors. People in formal wear everywhere, champagne glasses in hand, the low hum of gossip filling the air. Everyone is talking about what just happened. I catch fragments as I push through the crowd.
“…can’t believe he said that…”
“…Myer girl looked like she was going to explode…”
“…never seen anything like it…”
I don’t stop. I keep moving, scanning the room for the only face that matters.
I find him near the bar.
He’s alone, which is unusual for Griffin at an event like this, a man usually surrounded by people wanting his attention. But there’s a space around him now, like everyone can sense he needs a moment. He’s staring at his phone, his expression unreadable.
I stop ten feet away.
“Griffin.”
His head snaps up.
For a moment, he just stares at me. Like he’s not sure I’m real. Like I might be a hallucination brought on by stress and desperation.
“Hannah?” His voice cracks on my name. “What are you… how did you…”
“Blake sent me the video.”
He goes pale. “I didn’t know he was going to… I mean, I asked him to record it, but I didn’t think you’d watch it tonight. I thought maybe someday, if you ever wanted to see…”
“Griffin.”
He stops talking.
I close the distance between us. Ten feet. Five feet. Two feet.
We’re standing close enough to touch.
“You didn’t know I was watching,” I say.
“No.”
“You said all that, did all that, without knowing if I’d ever see it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He looks at me like the answer is obvious. Like I should already know.
“Because it was true. Because it needed to be said. Because I’ve spent over a year trying to show you that I’ve changed, and words are cheap, and I needed to do something that proved it.”
“You just destroyed your relationship with Richard Myer. In front of the whole company.”
“I know.”
“That partnership was years of work, Griffin. Everything you’ve been building toward.”
“I know.” He reaches out, his hand hovering near my face, not quite touching. “It wasn’t worth more than you. Nothing is worth more than you.”
My throat is so tight I can barely breathe.
“I found the box,” I whisper.
His hand drops. “Yeah?”
“The sticky notes. The receipts. The photos.” My voice shakes. “The ring.”
“Hannah…”
“You kept everything.”
“Of course I did.” He says it like it’s simple. Like it’s obvious. “You’re the most important thing that ever happened to me. Why wouldn’t I keep everything?”
“I didn’t know.” The tears are falling now, and I don’t bother wiping them away. “All those years, I thought I was the only one who cared that much. I thought you were just going through the motions, checking boxes, doing what you thought you were supposed to do.”
“I was an idiot.” He steps closer. “I was so focused on building the company, proving myself, being successful enough to deserve you… I forgot to actually show you that I loved you. I thought you knew. I thought it was obvious.”
“It wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t obvious at all.”
“I know that now.” His hands come up to cup my face, gentle, reverent. “I know I failed you in a thousand ways. I know I have years of damage to undo. But Hannah, I swear to God, I will spend the rest of my life making it right. If you’ll let me.”
I look up at him. This man I married. This man I divorced. This man who just set fire to his professional reputation in front of everyone who matters because I’m more important than any of it.
“I’m still scared,” I admit.
“I know.”
“I don’t know if I can trust this yet. Trust you.”
“I know that too.” His thumbs brush my cheekbones, wiping away tears. “I’m not asking you to trust me tonight. I’m just asking for a chance to keep earning it.”
“What if I never get there? What if the damage is too deep?”
“Then I’ll love you anyway. From whatever distance you need. For as long as I live.”
My chest breaks open, and it’s not the bad breaking. It’s the breaking that lets light in.
“I watched you,” I whisper. “On that stage. You didn’t know I was there. You didn’t know I would ever see it. And you still said all of that. You still chose me.”
“I’ll always choose you.”
“Even when it costs you everything?”
“Especially then.” His forehead drops to mine. “You’re worth everything, Hannah. You always have been. I was just too blind to see it.”
I close my eyes and breathe him in. His cologne. His warmth. The solid reality of his hands on my face.
“I’m not saying yes,” I murmur. “Not yet. I’m not ready for that.”
“Okay.”
“But I’m not saying no either.”
His breath catches. “What are you saying?”
I pull back enough to look at him. To really look at him.
“I’m saying take me home. I’m saying we have a lot to talk about. I’m saying…” I take a shaky breath. “I’m saying I want to try. For real this time. No more walls. No more running.”
The smile that breaks across his face is like watching the sun come up.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t make me regret it.”
“Never.” He pulls me into his arms, crushing me against his chest, his face buried in my hair. “Never, Hannah. I swear.”
I hold on just as tight.
Around us, the gala continues. People are definitely staring. Someone’s probably taking pictures that will end up in a gossip column by morning.
I don’t care.
For the first time since the night everything broke, I’m exactly where I want to be.
We don’t go back to his place.
We don’t go back to mine either.
Instead, Griffin drives us to a diner three blocks from the hotel, a twenty-four-hour place with cracked vinyl booths and thick white mugs of coffee that go cold before you drink them. We slide into a corner booth, still in his suit and my jeans, and we order cheeseburgers at ten o’clock at night.
“This is weird,” I say.
“Good weird or bad weird?”
“I don’t know yet.”
His hand finds mine on the cracked tabletop. “We can leave. Go somewhere nicer. I just thought…”
“No. This is good.” I look around at the fluorescent lights, the truckers at the counter, the waitress who’s clearly seen stranger things than a couple in formalwear ordering breakfast. “It’s real. I like real.”
“I’ve been thinking about that a lot,” he says. “Real versus staged. How much of our marriage was me playing the role of good husband instead of actually being one.”
“Griffin…”
“No, let me say this.” He squeezes my fingers. “I thought I was doing everything right. Making money. Building success. Giving you a nice life. And I was so proud of myself, so convinced I was being a good partner, that I never stopped to ask if any of it was what you actually wanted.”
“I wanted you,” I say quietly. “Present. Paying attention. Choosing me when it mattered.”
“I know that now.” His thumb traces circles on my palm. “It took losing you to figure it out. And I hate that. I hate that I couldn’t see it when you were right in front of me, telling me what you needed.”
“You were ambitious. I knew that when I married you.”
“Ambition isn’t an excuse.” He shakes his head. “I used it as one. Told myself you understood, you supported me, you knew how important the work was. But I never asked if the cost was worth it to you. I just assumed.”
The cheeseburgers arrive, enormous and greasy and exactly wrong for the hour. We eat in silence for a few minutes, processing.
“What do you want now?” I finally ask. “From us. From this.”
“Everything.” He says it without hesitation. “I want to wake up next to you. I want to eat breakfast with you and Eliza. I want to fight about whose turn it is to do dishes and make up in embarrassing ways. I want to grow old with you.”
“That’s a lot.”
“I know.” He sets down his fork. “What do you want?”
I think about it. Really think.
“I want to trust you again. I want to believe that when things get hard, you’ll choose me instead of the easy path.”
“I will.”
“I want to know that I’m not competing with your work for your attention. That I matter more than any deal or project or opportunity.”
“You do. You always will.”
“I want…” My voice catches. “I want us to be a real family. You, me, Eliza. I want her to grow up seeing her parents love each other. Choose each other.”
“That’s what I want too.” He reaches across the table again, both hands this time, cradling mine. “More than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.”
“Then we try,” I say. “Slowly. Carefully. No rushing. No skipping steps.”
“Whatever you need.”
“I need you to keep showing up. Keep proving it. Not with grand gestures. With the small stuff. The everyday stuff.”
“I can do that.”
“Can you? Because it’s easy to be romantic in crisis mode. It’s harder to be consistent when life gets boring.”
“I know.” His eyes hold mine. “And I know you have no reason to believe me. But I’m different now, Hannah.
Losing you broke a piece of me, the part that thought I could take you for granted and you’d always be there.
That part is gone. What’s left is a man who knows exactly what he almost lost and will do anything to keep it. ”
I want to believe him.
I think I might actually believe him.
“Okay,” I say. “We try.”
His whole face transforms, joy and relief and, underneath them, reverence. Like I’ve handed him a precious thing.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. We have a lot of work to do.”
“I know. And I’m ready.” He brings my hands to his lips, pressing a kiss to my knuckles. “I’m so ready.”
We talk until midnight.
About Eliza. About logistics. About what “trying” actually looks like in practice. We agree to date, properly, from the beginning, like two people getting to know each other instead of two people with a mountain of history between them.