Chapter 25
ALEC
Ishould have told her in the shower.
The thought has been circling since we left the brownstone.
She was leaning against my chest under the hot water, her guard completely down, her body still warm from mine, and it was right there.
The words were right there. But I wanted the quiet restaurant, neutral ground.
I wanted to control the context, the framing, to show her proof that my life actually is the life she thinks it is.
I wanted the security of a public place where the odds of her getting up and storming out were tipped in my favor.
Selfish, I know. Normally I’m not afraid of delivering difficult news. But with Ella, I need all the advantages I can get. So instead of saying what needs to be said, I kissed her shoulder and kept the truth sitting in my chest like a stone I swallowed on purpose.
Her hand rests on my forearm while I drive, her fingers warm and idle on my skin. The turquoise scarf is draped loosely around her neck. She’s talking about the neighborhood, and her voice has that easy warmth it gets when she’s happy and relaxed.
I’m going to tell her tonight. Over dinner. And then I’m going to tell her I’m in love with her, because I can’t build one on top of the other and I won’t say I love you until she knows who’s saying it.
“So where is this place?” She shifts in her seat to face me. “You said it’s your favorite.”
I nod. “Lucia’s. Family-run Italian. I go there about once a week when I’m in town.
The owner, Gino, has been there since before I moved to the neighborhood.
” I stop at a light. “The décor hasn’t been updated since probably the mid-nineties.
The menu is handwritten. The bread is the best I’ve ever had, and if Gino likes you, he brings out his grandmother’s limoncello after dessert. ”
“Sounds amazing.” Ella’s face does the thing I’ve come to recognize. The brightening that starts in her eyes and works outward, the specific delight she takes in details that tell her who someone really is. She looked at my cast-iron skillet the same way. My running shoes. The bookshelves.
“I’ll bet Gino knows you by name,” she says.
“He knows my order.”
“Which is?”
“Pappardelle al cinghiale. Wide ribbon pasta with slow-braised wild boar ragu. It’s one of the specialties. I order it every time.”
She laughs. “Wild boar? I’m going to need to have a talk with your cardiologist, Alec Beckett.”
I shoot her a wry look. “You’d actually snitch on me?”
“Purely in the interest of saving your life.”
I almost smile. Almost. But the weight behind my sternum doesn’t shift, and even Ella’s laugh can’t reach it.
She turns back toward the window. Studies the block as we pass. “I can picture you here,” she says. “Walking these sidewalks. Getting the corner table at Lucia’s. Gino bringing you bread without asking.” She pauses. “It’s very you.”
It is very me. That’s the point. That’s why I chose this place tonight instead of anywhere else I could have taken her. Twenty-two-dollar entrees and handwritten menus and a man who calls me Alec, not Mr. Beckett. Every detail telling the same story: the money didn’t change me.
She’ll understand. She knows me now.
Two blocks from the restaurant, I find a spot on the street. I parallel park, kill the engine. Ella is already reaching for the door handle, eager, her energy tilted forward the way it always is when she’s anticipating something. I come around to her side and she steps out onto the sidewalk.
The evening air is mild, the warmth that lingers on concrete after the sun drops. Her hand finds mine. I can see Lucia’s sign a half block ahead, the old neon script glowing amber against the red brick.
The first flash goes off before I register the source.
Then the second. The third. A cluster of bodies stepping out from between parked cars, and the sound hits before the sense does. Shutters clicking in rapid bursts. Voices overlapping. Aggressive, professional, pitched to provoke.
“Mr. Beckett! Over here!”
“Alec, can you confirm the HoloTech deal to acquire Meridian?”
“Care to comment on the acquisition, Mr. Beckett? Can you give us a number? Is it still expected to close at nine billion?”
“As CEO, will you also be taking control of Meridian if the deal goes through?”
Then they turn their attention to Ella. “Who’s your companion, Alec? Is this official?”
There are four reporters. Maybe five. Financial press, not tabloid.
Camera bodies with long lenses, the equipment of people who stake out sources for business stories.
They’re here because HoloTech’s acquisition of Meridian Defense Systems has been front-page financial news for the past several months.
The deal I left hanging when Dr. Vaughn ordered me to take time off.
Someone must have tipped off these vultures that HoloTech Security’s CEO was spotted in Brooklyn Heights.
They are not here for my love life. But the woman on my arm is a bonus they didn’t expect, and I can hear the shutters accelerating as they get the shot.
My hand tightens on Ella’s.
Everything sharpens. The flashes. The voices.
The specific angle of the cameras. Threat assessment is what I do for a living.
Evaluate, prioritize, neutralize. The instinct kicks in cold and fast, and for one efficient second I’m processing the scene the way I’d process a security breach: containment, damage control, extraction.
Then I look at Ella.
Her hand has gone rigid in mine. Her face is turned toward the photographers with her lips parted and her brows drawn together as she tries to make the words she’s hearing fit the man standing beside her.
CEO. HoloTech. Nine-billion-dollar acquisition.
I watch the confusion land first. The furrow on her forehead as she tries to parse why strangers with cameras are shouting at the tech nerd she knows as Alec. Just Alec. The guy with the meditation app and the heart condition and the dad who drove a forklift.
Then the recognition. It arrives in stages, and I can see each one because I am a man who notices everything about this woman and right now that gift is a punishment.
Her eyes flick to me. Back to the photographers.
Back to me. The furrow smooths out and what replaces it is worse.
Her mouth closes. Her jaw sets. I can see her rewinding.
The suite in Barbados. The resort. The dinners, the private beach, the boutique, the effortless way luxury moved around us like weather I never acknowledged.
Her hand loosens in mine. Not a pull. A release. Her fingers simply stop holding. She lets go, folding her arms across her chest like a shield.
The hurt comes third. It’s quiet. It doesn’t announce itself.
Her blue eyes meet my stare and the trust that has lived in them since she fell asleep on my chest in Barbados is gone.
Replaced by something flat and careful. She’s recalculating.
Everything she thought she knew, running back through it with new numbers.
Then the anger. Not rage. Not heat. Cold and inevitable and familiar. She’s felt this before. The feeling of being the person on the outside. Fuck. I’ve done this to her.
Ella’s chin lifts. Her shoulders square. And the openness that has defined her face since the day I met her closes like a door I can hear locking from the inside.
I’ve already lost her.
I move on instinct, even though I’m late making my limbs work.
I get between her and the cameras. My hand goes to the small of her back, guiding her, turning her toward the car.
The photographers keep firing. I hear my name again, my company name, a question about Meridian’s board vote.
I don’t respond. I get Ella to the passenger door.
Open it. She gets in without looking at me.
The irony is not lost on me. I build security systems for a living. My instinct is to protect her, and protection is what destroyed this. Every day I shielded her from the truth, I was building the weapon that just went off in her face.
Damn it.
I round the car. Get in. Pull away from the curb. The photographers fall behind in the mirror.
Two blocks of silence.
“Ella.”
She doesn’t turn from the window.
“I was going to tell you tonight. That’s why I picked the restaurant. That’s why I brought you here, and to my brownstone, to my neighborhood. I needed you to see my actual life before I told you the rest.”
Nothing. Her profile is still. The scarf is bright against her neck, turquoise silk catching the glow of passing streetlights, and the sight of it there, my gift on her skin, makes my chest constrict.
“My company is called HoloTech. Cybersecurity. I founded it eleven years ago.” I keep my voice level.
Facts first. “The Meridian acquisition they were asking about is a deal we’ve been working on for months.
It’s been in the financial press. That’s why the photographers were there.
They weren’t looking for you. They were looking for a business story. ”
She’s listening. I can tell because her breathing has changed, but she doesn’t speak.
“The company is valued at roughly fourteen billion dollars. My personal net worth is in the range of nine to ten billion.”
The numbers hang in the air between us. I hear them the way she must be hearing them. Obscene. Incompatible with the man she believed I was.
“I didn’t tell you because of what happened to me before.
Victoria. I know that isn’t fair to you.
” I stop at a light. Red. The car idles.
“Please try to understand. After HoloTech took off, the money changed every relationship I had. Every woman I dated, every new person who entered my life, the number was always the first thing they processed. I stopped being a person and started being a portfolio.”
The light turns green. I drive.
“You were the first person in years who looked at me and just saw a man. A grumpy, difficult man who you somehow ended up liking anyway.” I’m reaching.
I can hear myself reaching. “I was afraid that if you knew everything, I’d lose what we had.
I’d become the number to you too. And I couldn’t stand the thought of that. ”
Silence.
“I was going to tell you tonight. Over dinner. That was the plan.”
More silence. Then she speaks, and her voice is steady and low, and the steadiness is the thing that tells me how bad this is. Ella’s voice shakes when she’s excited. It rises when she’s happy. It goes soft when she’s being vulnerable. This voice is none of those things. This voice is controlled.
“When I told you about the lottery.” She’s still facing the window. “On the beach. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“I told you I won two million dollars and I was terrified of what it might do to my life. I told you about my parents. About being afraid the money would change me.” She pauses. “And you sat there and said nothing.”
“Ella, I...”
“You let me confide in you about being afraid of money while you were sitting on how much? Fourteen billion dollars?” She turns from the window. Looks at me. Her eyes are dry and clear and worse than tears. “Do you understand how that feels?”
I don’t answer. Because yes, I understand. And there is nothing I can say that doesn’t sound like an excuse.
“The dinner on the beach,” she says. “The custom menu. The private setup. I assumed you’d pulled some strings with the resort.
Called in a favor, maybe. Something normal, something sweet.
” Her voice stays level. “That was your money. All of that was just what dinner looks like when you’re a billionaire. ”
“The restaurant was me wanting to do something special for you. That was real.”
“I believe you.” She says it simply. No sarcasm.
“I believe it was real for you. But I was sitting at that table not knowing who was paying for it or what it actually cost or what it meant that a man could arrange all of that with a phone call. You had information I didn’t have, and you made the decision that I didn’t need it.
” She looks at me. “Jake used to do that. Decide what I was ready to hear.”
The name lands like a blade between my ribs.
“I’m not Jake.”
“No. You’re not. Jake thought I was too much. You thought I was too fragile to handle the truth.” She turns back to the window. “Different reasons. Same result. I’m the one who doesn’t get to decide what she knows about her own life.”
Shit. She’s right. I know it but knowing it doesn’t make my regret any less bitter to swallow. “I’m sorry, Ella. I should’ve told you before now.”
I drive. I don’t know where I’m driving. The route to Lucia’s is behind us and I’m just moving through Brooklyn now, turning when I have to, the streets passing without registering.
“On the beach that night, after dinner, I told you we were the same. You and me.” Her voice is quieter now. “I said we weren’t the kind of people who use money as power. I said I trusted you because you saw me, not what I have or what I’m worth.” She stops. “And you just held my hand and agreed.”
I did. I remember every word she said that night, the torchlight on her face, the certainty in her voice as she drew a line down the middle of the world and put us on the same side. I held her hand and I said nothing because her words built a wall I couldn’t climb over without losing her.
Except I lost her anyway. Worse than I would have then. I see that now.
Anything I say here is too little, too late.
“Take me back to your place.” The words are quiet. Final. “I need to get my things.”
“Ella. Please.”
She stares at me and the bleakness in her eyes feels like a door closing. Shutting me out. “Take me back now, Alec. I need to get my bag from your apartment and I need to go.”