Chapter 24 Andrea
— · —
Andrea
I put my bag down, sat at my desk, stared at the dark office. He had to. He couldn’t just disappear forever. People don’t just vanish from their own company without a word.
The elevator dinged behind me.
I spun around so fast my chair rolled, and the relief that flooded through me when I saw him was so sharp it almost hurt.
He was here, he was alive, he was walking onto the floor.
I was already standing, already opening my mouth to say something, I didn’t even know what, when I registered the rest of the picture.
He wasn’t alone.
Lorraine was beside him. Her arm looped through his, red hair perfect against a black dress, walking in step with him like they’d arrived together. Like they’d been together this whole time. Like the three days of silence had been spent with her instead of in a hospital room.
My mouth closed. The words I’d been about to say died somewhere in my throat.
They walked toward my desk together, close, his jaw locked, eyes forward, not looking at me. She was looking right at me, and she was smiling, and the smile was wrong, too wide, too warm, bright in a way I’d never seen from her before.
“Andrea!” She sounded delighted. Like we were friends, like she was thrilled to see me. “We really wanted you to be one of the first to hear the great news.”
She reached into her bag, pulled out a magazine, held it out to me with both hands like she was presenting a gift.
I looked down. Opened to the page she’d marked.
The headline punched the air out of me.
Finneas Kingsley and Lorraine Ashtor announce their engagement.
I stared at it. Professional photos, glossy, both of them polished and posed side by side.
Spring ceremony. A lifelong friendship blossoming into love.
His face beside hers and they were both smiling at the camera and I was holding the magazine with hands that had started shaking so hard the pages rattled.
This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real. I’d been in this man’s bed. I’d read to him in his library, fallen asleep in his garden, told him I was falling for him in a bathtub while he was inside me. This wasn’t fucking real.
Lorraine leaned into him, her palm going flat on his chest, right over his heart, right where I’d put my hand a hundred times, and she pressed her lips against his cheek. Slow. Lingering. Taking her time so I could see every second of it.
I couldn’t move. I stood there holding the magazine with my hands shaking, watching another woman kiss the man I loved three feet from my desk, and my body wouldn’t respond.
My brain was screaming at me to throw the magazine, to scream, to do something, but I was frozen, my feet rooted to the carpet, the glossy pages rattling between my fingers.
She pulled back and smoothed his lapel with her fingers like she’d done it a thousand times.
“Well then, I should let you two get to work. So much to do with the wedding planning, you have no idea.” She squeezed his arm, looked at me one more time with that bright wrong smile that had victory underneath it like a blade under silk.
“Goodbye, darling. I’ll call you later about the venue. ”
She walked to the elevator, pressed the button, stepped in without looking back. The doors closed behind her and the floor went silent.
My hands were still shaking. The magazine was still open. I could feel my pulse everywhere, in my fingers, my neck, the place behind my eyes where the pressure was building into something that was going to crack me open if I didn’t let it out.
I threw the magazine at his chest.
“What the fuck is this?”
It bounced off him and hit the floor, pages splaying open to their engagement photos.
“Andrea...”
“Three days.” My voice was shaking, I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t control it, and the anger was rising so fast it was making my vision blur.
“Three days you didn’t answer my phone calls.
I sat in my house throwing up every morning thinking your mother was dying, and you were, what?
Posing for engagement photos? Picking out a fucking venue? ”
“My mother needed me.”
“Your mother needed you. That’s your answer. Your mother needed you so badly you couldn’t send me one text in seventy-two hours.”
He stood there with his hands at his sides, eyes on the floor, giving me nothing.
“Were you sleeping with her?” The words came out cold, flat, and I barely recognized my own voice. “This whole time. While you were in my bed, were you in hers too? Were you fucking her behind my back the entire goddamn time?”
His head came up, eyes sharp for the first time since he walked onto this floor. “No. I would never...”
“You would never? Because you just walked onto this floor with her arm through yours and a magazine announcing your wedding. So don’t stand there and tell me what you would never do because everything I thought I knew about you just blew up in my face.”
His jaw was working, the muscle jumping under his skin, and he looked like he was in pain but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if he was hurting because I was drowning and he was the one who held me under.
“Are you marrying her?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The word hit me in the chest. I grabbed the desk because my knees were going.
“Why?”
“Because I have to.”
“You have to? That’s what you’re giving me?
You have to?” My voice was rising and I couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to stop it.
“You’re a grown man, Finneas. You’re a goddamn king.
Nobody makes you do anything. So don’t stand there feeding me bullshit excuses like I’m some idiot who’s going to nod and walk away. ”
Nothing. Eyes on the floor.
“Look at me!” He didn’t. “Fucking look at me when I’m talking to you!”
His eyes came up. Red-rimmed, hollow. I didn’t care. I didn’t care because my chest was caving in and he was just standing there letting it happen.
“You lied to me. You looked me in the face and you lied. Every day, every night, you were lying. And I believed you because I’m a goddamn idiot who thought you were different, who thought you actually gave a shit about me, and the whole time you were planning this behind my back.”
“It wasn’t like that...”
“Then what was it like? Tell me! Explain it! Because right now all I see is a coward who couldn’t be honest with me for five fucking minutes!”
He flinched. Good. I wanted him to flinch. I wanted every word to land like a fist because he deserved it, he deserved all of it, every ugly furious thing I had in me.
“You were never going to choose me, were you?” My voice cracked on the word choose and I hated myself for it. “This whole time, the porch, the dog, the library, the birthdays, all of it was just you killing time until mommy picked your bride for you.”
“Andrea...”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare say my name like that, like you’re sorry, like this hurts you. You don’t get to be hurt right now. I get to be hurt. Me. The person you just destroyed.”
He stood there. Silent. Taking it. Not fighting, not explaining, not doing a single goddamn thing to save this, and the silence was worse than anything he could have said because silence meant he’d already made his choice and I wasn’t it.
“Was any of it real?” I asked. The screaming had burned out of me. What was left was small, raw. I hated how it sounded. “Any of it. Please, Finneas. Just tell me the truth.”
He looked at me. His face was wrecked, devastated, and for half a second I thought he was going to crack, thought he was going to say something real.
“No,” he said.
“You son of a bitch.” I was shaking so hard I could barely stand. “You absolute fucking coward.”
He just stood there. Jaw locked. Eyes wrecked. Not speaking, not moving, not doing a goddamn thing while I fell apart three feet in front of him.
“Say something!” I screamed. “Stop standing there like a fucking statue and say something to me! Fight for this, explain it, lie to me again, I don’t care, just open your mouth and say something because I cannot take you standing there in silence while my whole life burns down!”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. I watched him try to form words, watched the struggle cross his face, and for one second I thought he was going to break, thought whatever was holding him together was going to crack and the real answer was going to come pouring out.
“Andrea Grey,” he said. His voice had changed, gone rough, formal, wrong, like it was coming from somewhere deep in his chest that wasn’t him. “I reject you as my mate.”
The pain split me open.
Not slowly, not gradually, not the creeping ache of heartbreak I’d felt before.
This was instantaneous, violent, a tearing behind my sternum so brutal my legs buckled and both hands slammed flat on the desk to keep me from hitting the floor.
My vision went white. My ears filled with a high ringing that drowned out the room.
The warm thread I’d carried in my chest since the day I met him, the pull I’d felt toward him for two years without knowing what it was, ripped out of my body with a force that made me scream, or gasp, or make some sound I’d never made before, I couldn’t tell because the pain was everywhere and I couldn’t separate myself from it.
I bent over the desk. Forehead almost touching the wood.
Breathing in counts because counting was the only thing between me and the floor.
One, two, three, four. The hole in my chest pulsed, raw, gaping, synced to a heartbeat that wasn’t connected to his anymore.
I could feel where the bond had been the way you feel a tooth after it’s been pulled, the empty socket throbbing, the phantom shape of something that should still be there.
I forced myself upright. Locked my knees. My arms were shaking so badly the desk was rattling under my palms but I stood because I was not going down in front of this man. I was not giving him that.
I pulled open my desk drawers. Grabbed my bag, the photo of Hilda by my monitor, my phone charger, the pink pens. My hands were trembling so badly I dropped the charger twice, had to pick it up off the floor both times, and I could feel him watching me do it and I didn’t look up.
“Andrea, you can still work here...”
I laughed and the sound that came out of me was something broken, a crack in glass, sharp enough to cut. “I’d rather burn this building down than see you for another day. I quit.”
I picked up the bag, walked past him, kept my head down because if I looked at him the thing holding me together was going to snap and I was not breaking in this office.
Not in front of his glass walls, not under the fluorescent lights, not on the floor where I’d spent two years being the best goddamn assistant he’d ever had while he lied to my face.
The elevator. I pressed the button and waited and the seconds stretched into hours.
“Congratulations,” I said, my back to him, my voice level by a force of will I was going to pay for later. “You’re a match made in heaven. I’m sure you’ll spend the rest of your life hating each other.”
I stepped in as soon as the elevator opened, but not before I delivered them one last wish.
“I wish you a miserable life.”
The doors closed and I counted seventeen seconds on the way down.
I know because I counted them the same way I counted my breaths over the desk, because counting was the only thing keeping me upright.
Seventeen seconds of my jaw locked, my hands fisted around the strap of my bag, the floor numbers ticking down while the hole in my chest screamed.
The doors opened to the garage. I walked to my car, got in, locked the doors, put my hands on the steering wheel.
Then I couldn’t count anymore.
The sobs came so hard I couldn’t breathe.
My forehead hit the wheel, my chest heaving, my whole body convulsing with a grief so total it erased everything else.
I couldn’t see. Couldn’t think. The pain from the rejection pulsed through me with every heartbeat, a phantom limb where the bond used to be, aching for something that had been ripped away by the one person it was connected to.
I cried until my throat was raw, my eyes swollen shut, my fingers numb from gripping the wheel.
I cried until the sobs turned into dry heaves, the heaves into silence.
The silence was worse, because in the silence I could hear his voice saying “no” and I couldn’t make it stop.
I sat in the quiet after. Engine off, phone dark. My lock screen was a photo of Fin on the porch, the dog lying beside my book, dark eyes half-closed. The dog was the man. I’d lost both at once.
I put the phone face-down on the passenger seat, started the car, drove home.
My house was contaminated. The couch, the kitchen, the porch.
Every room held a version of him I couldn’t look at without the pain flaring.
I made it to the bathroom before I threw up.
Kneeled on the tile, heaving, emptying a stomach that had nothing in it.
When it passed I sat on the floor with my back against the tub and my palms pressed over my eyes.
I should call someone. Mary, Hilda, anyone. I couldn’t form words. Couldn’t explain what happened without explaining everything, the wolves, the bond, the rejection I could still feel throbbing behind my ribs like a wound that wouldn’t close.
I dragged myself to the couch and lay down.
The porch light was on because I always left it on for Fin, warm yellow through the window, and the realization that I was still leaving it on for a man who just told me none of it was real made me press my face into the cushion until I couldn’t see it anymore.
Sometime around 3 am the nausea came back.
I got to the bathroom just in time, kneeling on the cold tile again, my stomach cramping around nothing.
I sat on the floor afterward, shivering, forehead against the tub, and my brain tried to do math I wouldn’t let it do.
The timing. The weeks. The nausea that started before the stress, before the hospital, before any of this.
I pressed my hands flat against the tile and shut my eyes and refused to count backward.
Not tonight. I couldn’t hold one more thing tonight.