Chapter 21 Abbie
ABBIE
Two weeks later
The VTG tower hasn't changed. I stand on the sidewalk with my briefcase and coffee while people stream around me. A bike messenger nearly clips my elbow. The lobby has new floors. The twisted bronze sculpture by the elevators still looks like a pretzel having an existential crisis.
A beauty brand wants Elliot and a VTG artist on the same fragrance rollout. The meeting is on forty. I know exactly whose signature is on that meeting invite. My phone buzzes. Gray.
I see you.
I look up at the building again, squinting against the glare, but I can't pick out any individual windows from down here. He could be anywhere. He could be watching me from forty different angles.
Creepy, I type back. Very horror movie of you.
Lobby in two minutes. I'll walk you up.
I know how to operate an elevator. I don’t need an escort in the building where I used to work.
I could tell him that. Instead I type Fine and shove my phone in my pocket and walk through the revolving doors before I can talk myself out of it.
The lobby smells the same: coffee, printer toner, eucalyptus. My throat tightens.
Gray is waiting by the elevators. He's in a charcoal suit today, no tie, the top button of his white shirt undone.
His hair looks professionally styled and also like he's been running his hands through it, and when he sees me his whole face changes, goes soft around the eyes, the corners of his mouth ticking up like he can't help it.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey yourself." I stop a few feet away, maintaining professional distance even though my body wants to close the gap. "You didn't have to come down."
"I know."
"I'm perfectly capable of finding a conference room."
"I know that too." He's smiling now, that slow smile that always made me feel like we were sharing a private joke. "Maybe I just wanted to see you before we have to pretend to be normal business colleagues for two hours."
"Bold of you to assume I can pretend that well."
"You're excellent at pretending." He reaches out and takes my briefcase before I can object, tucking it under his arm. "You convinced me for weeks that you didn't want to kiss me."
"That wasn't pretending. That was self-preservation."
"Felt like torture from my end."
"Good." I can't help the smile that escapes. "You deserved it for being my boss."
"I did." He's not joking anymore, his voice gone serious in that way that always catches me off guard. "I deserved a lot worse than that."
The elevator dings and the doors slide open, empty, and my feet stop working. It’s the same elevator. The brass trim, the scratch by the floor indicator.
"Abbie."
I blink. Gray is watching me, his head tilted, his expression careful.
"You okay?"
"Fine." The word comes out too fast. "Just... remembering."
He nods slowly, and I see the moment he makes a decision. "Actually, can we take the next one? There's something I want to ask you first."
"We're going to be late."
"They can wait. They're all still doing the small talk thing where everyone pretends they don't know the budget and acts surprised by the pastry selection." He steps back from the open doors, and they slide closed. "Two minutes. Please."
His voice isn't nervous, exactly, but it's deliberate. Like he's been rehearsing this.
"Okay," I say slowly. "What is it?"
Gray takes a breath. He looks at the elevator bank, then back at me, and his hands are loose at his sides in a way that seems intentional.
"I want to show you something. In the elevator. But I need you to be okay with it first."
"That's not ominous at all."
"It's not—" He laughs, but it's tight. "I'm doing this badly.
I've been planning this for weeks and I'm still doing it badly.
" Another breath. "I want to pause at the eleventh-floor landing.
Just for a minute. We can step out whenever you want.
And if you say no, we take the elevator straight up and I never mention it again. "
I stare at him. "You want to recreate the worst forty minutes of your life?"
"I want to show you that it's not the worst forty minutes anymore.
" His jaw is tight, but his voice is steady.
"The claustrophobia isn't gone. I don't know if it'll ever be completely gone.
But I've been doing the exposure work for over a year, Abbie.
Therapy twice a week, exposure exercises, all of it.
And I wanted to do this here, with you, so you'd know—" He stops.
Swallows. "So you'd know I'd be stuck anywhere with you.
That you're the person I want beside me when the walls close in. "
Over a year of work. I hadn’t understood what this part of his therapy cost him.
"You don't have to prove anything to me," I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I intended.
"I'm not proving anything. I'm showing you who I am now." He holds my gaze. "But only if you want to see it. Your call."
I think about saying no.
"Okay," I hear myself say. "Let's do it."
The next elevator arrives empty. We step inside together.
Gray selects eleven. The elevator starts to climb. I watch the numbers tick upward, eight, nine, ten, and at eleven the elevator settles. The doors open onto the quiet landing. We pause there, in the same car that once trapped us between this floor and the next.
I watch his chest rise and fall. His hands stay loose at his sides.
"Over a year," he says quietly. "Twice a week sometimes, when it was really bad.
A lot of exposure work, small spaces, elevators in other buildings, closets.
My therapist made me sit in my car with the windows up for twenty minutes at a time.
" A ghost of a smile. "I hated it. I hated every second. But I kept thinking about this moment."
"This moment specifically?"
"You and me. Here. Me showing you that I can be someone who doesn't need rescuing.
" He turns to face me fully, hope and fear in his eyes.
"The first time you saved me, I fell in love with you.
Took me a while to figure out what it was, but it started right here.
Forty minutes between eleven and twelve, and you made me count my own tattoos, and I thought, this woman. This is the one."
My eyes are burning. I blink hard and look up at the fluorescent lights. "It's the lights. They're too bright."
"Sure."
"I'm not crying because you're being—" I gesture vaguely. "You know."
"Emotionally available and reflective of my therapeutic progress?"
"Shut up." But I'm laughing, or maybe I'm crying, or maybe both at once. "God, I hate you."
"No you don't."
"No," I admit. "I don't."
I grab his collar and pull him down to my mouth.
He tastes like coffee. My back hits the elevator wall, his hands spanning my waist. He makes a sound, low, rough, desperate, and his lips trail down to my neck and I gasp, actually gasp like a woman in a regency novel, and my fingers are in his hair and I want...
I want... I put my hand flat on his chest.
He stops, stepping back so fast he nearly hits the opposite wall. He bows his head and exhales slowly.
"Sorry," he manages. "Got carried away."
"We both did." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Too high, too breathless. "Not like this. Not in here."
"Okay." He's still facing the doors, giving me space, and I can see the tension in his shoulders as he pulls himself together. "Whatever you want. Always."
He selects forty. By the time the doors open to the waiting assistant, we have our breathing under control. The meeting is fine. I answer questions, shake hands and agree on a launch timeline.
I don't remember any of it. What I remember is Gray's hand on my waist. The sound he made when I kissed him.
The way he stepped back the instant I asked, no hesitation, no pressure.
After ninety minutes, I leave Gray discussing distribution rights and take a different elevator down to eleven, alone.
I know where I am going. The coffee machine. Same machine, same sticky buttons, same empty sugar dispenser.
There's a Post-it note stuck to the side. Faded yellow, the edges curling. Gray's handwriting. I turn my eyes away before the words register.
I don't read it. I just stare at the machine and try to remember how to breathe normally.
"Abbie?"
I turn. Theo is standing in the hallway, tablet under his arm, looking like he'd rather be literally anywhere else on the planet.
"Theo." My voice comes out flat. "Fancy meeting you here."
"I was hoping to catch you." He glances over his shoulder like he's worried about witnesses. "Do you have two minutes? I know you probably don't want to talk to me, but—"
"You're right. I don't."
"Please." He holds up both hands, peace offering. "Two minutes. Then I'll never bother you again."
Instead I cross my arms and lean against the wall. "Talk."
Theo shifts his weight. I've never seen him look this uncomfortable.
"I'm sorry," he says. "For all of it."
"That's vague."
"I know." He runs a hand through his hair. "I'm sorry for not telling you things you deserved to know. I'm sorry for letting Gray spiral without saying something sooner. I'm sorry for—" He stops. Swallows. "I'm sorry for the Europe thing. And for not being honest about... other things."
"The Europe thing. What about it?"
"He cancelled the next expansion phase the week you left. Returned Richard’s investment. He needed to be here, focused, while he was trying to—"
"While he's trying to what, exactly? Because from what I can tell, he's been making a lot of decisions without telling me about them. And apparently you've been helping."
"That's fair."
"Don't tell me what's fair, Theo. Don't stand there and manage me like I'm a stakeholder who needs handling. I'm not in the mood."
"I'm not trying to manage you. I'm trying to explain."
"Then explain. What else don't I know? What else has been happening for the past year while I was specifically asking for space and assuming that meant I'd be told the important things when I came back?"
Theo looks past my shoulder.
"The therapy was Gray's idea. The delegation, the stepping back from day-to-day. That was him, not the board. He wanted time to work on himself so he could be someone worth coming back to. His words."
"Great. Good for him. What else?"
"Abbie—"
"What else, Theo? Because you have a very specific look on your face right now, and it’s the 'I have bad news and I'm hoping you'll let me off the hook before I have to say it' look."
"The baby." He says it fast, like ripping off a bandage. "Delaney's baby. You need to know the truth about that."
My hand tightens on my bag.
"What about it?"
"It's mine."
The words hang in the air. I replay them. They still don't make sense.
"What?"
"The baby. Delaney's son. He's mine. Not Gray's. He was never Gray's."
"You let the press say it was his."
"I know what everyone assumed. I let them assume it. That was my choice, and it was wrong, and I've had to live with that for over a year now."
"You let people think Gray had a child with another woman. You let them humiliate me—"
"I know."
"Do you? Do you actually understand what you're saying right now?
Because I sat in that apartment for months, Theo.
I read articles speculating about whether my husband was secretly a father.
I watched strangers online debate the timeline of my marriage, whether he'd cheated, whether I knew.
And the whole time, you knew it wasn't even true? "
"I didn't know how to fix it without making everything worse. Keeping quiet seemed like—"
"Seemed like what? The easy option? The convenient option?"
"The only option that didn't blow up everyone's lives."
"Everyone's lives except mine, apparently. Except my marriage. That was acceptable collateral damage?"
"That's not fair."
"Fair? You want to talk to me about fair?
" I step closer, and he actually backs up.
Good. "You let a lie persist for over a year that directly impacted my relationship with my husband. You let strangers tell me he had a child I didn’t know about.
You let the whole world believe it. And now you're standing here telling me it was complicated? "
"It was complicated. It still is."
"When did Gray find out?"
"Abbie—"
"When did he find out, Theo?"
"A few months ago. I told him in the eleventh month of your separation. He suspected it was me after he fired Delaney. I finally admitted it. The board’s replacing me. I’m finishing a supervised handover, not keeping the job as if none of this happened."
"So he's known for months. He's known this whole time we've been... whatever we've been doing. Reconnecting. Talking. He's known and he didn't tell me."
"He wanted to. He's been trying to figure out how to untangle all of it, the public story, the legal stuff with Delaney, the—"
"He's been kissing me, Theo. He's been showing up and making promises and talking about trying again, and the whole time he's been sitting on this."
"He wanted to do it right. Get everything sorted so it wouldn't blow back on you."
"That's not his decision to make. That's not your decision to make. I don't need to be protected from information about my own life."
"I know. I know that. That's why I'm telling you now."
"Why you? Why not him?"
"Because the part about the baby being mine. That's my responsibility to own. I'm not going to let Gray take the hit for something I did. Something I should have handled differently from the start."
"How noble of you."
"I'm not trying to be noble. I'm trying to be honest. Finally."
"Finally. Great word choice."
"Did it ever occur to either of you," I say slowly, "that I might have handled this better if I'd known? That maybe, just maybe, having all the information would have helped me make decisions about my own future?"
"It occurred to us. But Gray was scared."
"Of what?"
"Of losing you completely. Of you thinking he'd been lying to you all along when really he'd been trying to protect you from—"
"From the truth. He was trying to protect me from the truth. Which is just another way of saying he didn't trust me to handle it."
"He's doing his best. He's just—"
"Doing it in the wrong order," I finish. My voice sounds far away. Hollow.
"Yeah." Theo looks miserable. "I thought you should hear it from me. The part about the baby, at least. Since it's my responsibility."
I push off the wall. My legs feel like they belong to someone else, but they carry me past Theo, past the coffee machine with its faded Post-it note I don't read, toward the stairs.
"Abbie—"
"I need to go."
I walk out of the eleventh floor and down the stairs and through the lobby with its new marble floors, and I don't stop until I'm in my car with the door closed and my hands shaking on the steering wheel.
Months. He's known for months.
I press my palm flat against my stomach, just once, just for a second, and then I pull out of the parking garage and drive.