Chapter twenty five - Theo’s POV
Present Day
Fucking Brad. The comment about Imogen—“I’d have taken one for the team”—landed like a punch to my gut.
I saw red, my hands curling into fists so tight my knuckles ached.
The urge to drive my fist into his smug face was a living thing.
But the groomsmen’s expectant grins, the wedding bands on their fingers, my sister’s joy radiating from inside the hall…
it all formed a cage. I couldn’t. I forced my hands into my pockets, the fabric straining.
“Okay Okay… But did you?” Brad pressed, his grin widening.
I had to shut this down. Now. I needed the conversation to end, for them to turn their leering attention elsewhere. The lie was a circuit breaker, a terrible, necessary sacrifice. “It was nothing,” I said, my voice flat and foreign to my own ears. “A wedding convenience.”
The words tasted like ash and betrayal. A convenience?
Gin, who was a whole damn universe. Gin, whose smile was a logistical nightmare for my heart.
Gin, who was the most inconveniently, profoundly necessary person I’d ever known.
The backslaps from the guys felt like body blows.
Their laughter was a grating, hollow sound.
I’d thrown her to the wolves to save my own skin, and the victory was vomit in my mouth.
“If you’ll excuse me guys, I need to get a drink.” I escaped, the festive lights of the wedding blurring as I stalked back to the bar. I ordered a double whiskey and threw it back, the burn doing nothing to cauterize the shame.
The thwack to the back of my head was sharp. “You’re a moron.”
I turned to find Sloane, her beautiful face a mask of bridal fury. “Sorry?” I mumbled, already knowing it was hopeless.
“Oh, now he’s sorry!” Her voice was a low, dangerous hiss. I put the glass down and walked out, her heels clicking a furious tattoo behind me. She pushed me into a wall in the quiet hallway, her strength fueled by rage and champagne.
“Because of you, Imogen is catching a flight back home tonight!”
The words didn’t just land; they detonated.
My heart didn’t just stop; it seized. The noise of the wedding—the music, the laughter—muffled into a distant, underwater roar, replaced by a high-pitched tone of pure panic.
The floor seemed to lurch. I stumbled back, collapsing into a chair as my legs gave out.
“What?” The word was a breath, a plea.
“She was distraught. She said something about being nothing… a fucking wedding convenience. What the fuck, Theo?”
She’d heard me. The realization was an ice bath. My stupid, cowardly lie hadn’t just been said to the groomsmen; it had been overheard by her. It had become her truth.
“Brad was being a jerk—I just wanted him to shut up!” It was a weak defense, and I knew it. I was scrambling.
“She heard you.” Sloane paced, her dress swishing, a vortex of angry silk.
“Why does she care?” The words burst out, laced with my own bruised ego, my own misinterpreted pain. “This wasn’t anything to her! At the salon, she told her friends it was just fun, that I wasn’t ready, that my life had no room for her. How is that love?”
Sloane stopped dead, her eyes widening with dawning, exasperated comprehension. “Wait. You were at the salon? You overheard that?”
I nodded, the memory a fresh sting. I’d been standing there with fucking flowers, ready to lay my chaotic life at her feet and ask her to help me build a new one, when I heard her writing me off as a flight risk.
“You know she was just protecting herself, right?” Sloane said, her voice dropping, laced with a pity that cut deeper than her anger.
“No, I don’t know that!”
“Come on, Theo!” She shoved my shoulder, her frustration boiling over.
“She’s been in love with you since we needed training bras! She’s spent a lifetime teaching herself not to ask for what she wants because she never thinks she’ll get it! She was pre-emptively breaking her own heart because she was sure you’d do it first! And you just proved her right.”
The pieces—her deflection at the salon, her fear of labels, the way she’d flinch sometimes at my touch as if waiting for the recoil—clicked into a devastating picture. It wasn’t indifference; it was a fortress. And I’d just handed her the evidence she needed to seal the gates forever.
Panic, pure and electric, shot through me. I fumbled my phone out, my fingers clumsy. Called her. Straight to voicemail.
Theo - can we talk before you leave?
No immediate reply. The three blinking dots never appeared.
“I have to go.” I booked an Uber, kissed Sloane’s tear-streaked cheek, and ran.
The ride to the hotel was a torture of stopped lights and my own hammering heart. I willed the driver to go faster, willed my phone to buzz with a reply. Silence.
The door to our room—our room—was shut. I used my keycard, a futile hope sparking that she might still be there, packing, giving me a chance.
The silence that greeted me was absolute and condemning. The room was empty in a way that felt violently hollow. It still smelled faintly of her—that vanilla and citrus shampoo. But her suitcase was gone. The bathroom counter was clear of her makeup bag.
I walked in, a stranger in a crime scene I had created.
I sat on the bed—the bed where I’d learned the geography of her, where she’d looked at me with sleep-soft eyes and I’d felt, for the first time, truly home—and stared at the wall.
The wall where she’d stood in nothing but a towel, all her beautiful, unselfconscious curves, looking at me like I was something wonderful.
Now I was nothing. A liar. A coward.
My gaze fell to the carpet. A single, silver bobby pin glinted near my foot. A tiny, devastating relic. I picked it up, the metal cool in my palm. This was all I had left. A forgotten piece of the whole.
The reflection hit me then, a brutal wave.
Being with her scared me because it meant being seen—truly seen—and found wanting.
It meant trading a life of easy exits for the terrifying, beautiful risk of staying.
It meant vulnerability, which felt like weakness.
I’d spent a decade running from the quiet, steady thing I craved most, mistaking movement for freedom.
And when I finally had it—her, in my arms, trusting me, believing in me with that goddamn pen—I’d been so busy trying to look like I could walk away that I never noticed she was the only place I ever wanted to stay.
And now she was gone, because I’d been too much of a fool to hold on, and too much of a coward to tell the truth.
I closed my fist around the bobby pin, the tiny points biting into my skin. The room, once a sanctuary, was now a monument to my failure. The silence was no longer empty; it was full of her absence, and it screamed.