Chapter 26
ELLA
The suitcase is still open on the bed where I left it.
I hadn’t finished unpacking. A few hours ago that felt like anticipation, the start of a weekend stretching out ahead of us in this brownstone where I had foolishly imagined I could actually belong. Now it just means there’s less to gather.
My sundress from the Barbados street market goes in. A tank top and a pair of shorts. My sandals. I don’t fold anything. I push it all in with hands that are steadier than they should be, and the efficiency surprises me, distantly, like noticing awful weather through a closed window.
I’m still wearing the green dress I’d planned to wear to dinner.
I don’t want to wear it now, but taking the time to change clothes will only make this whole disaster feel worse.
I need to get out of here. I need to be somewhere I can breathe.
Somewhere I can think. Somewhere I can let my breaking heart fall to pieces without Alec here to witness it.
The bathroom takes thirty seconds. My makeup bag is on the counter where I set it when we arrived. I shove all my things into it, then pick up the bag and throw it in my tote. Now the counter is just his again. His toothbrush alone in the holder. His razor by itself on empty space I’ve vacated.
Back in the bedroom, I reach for my phone charger on the nightstand, and silk shifts softly against my throat.
The scarf.
I’m still wearing it, too. Through the paparazzi and the car ride and the silence and the walk back into this apartment, I forgot it was on my body. My hands were too busy with the mechanics of leaving to register what was still touching my skin.
I feel it now. The turquoise silk, cool and light against my neck.
Almost nothing. Yet somehow, everything.
Alec’s fingers lifting my hair at the nape of my neck in a street festival in Bridgetown.
The painted sea turtle. The vendor with the silver rings.
The afternoon I fell even more in love with Alec without saying the words.
I reach up. Untie the scarf and lift it over my head. The silk slides across my skin one last time and then it’s in my hands, the little turtle looking up at me from a fold of fabric.
I can’t take it with me now. Keeping it would mean carrying a piece of him out the door, and I need to walk out of this brownstone with nothing of his on me. Nothing of his in my bag. Nothing that will catch the light in my suitcase next week and gut me when I’m not braced for it.
I set it on the bed. Not folded. Not arranged for him to find. Just there, on the white sheets where we made love this afternoon, and where it hopefully won’t be noticed until after I’m gone.
I zip the suitcase.
The wheels are loud on the hardwood. The living room opens up around me.
Alec is standing by the kitchen counter.
Not leaning against it the way he was an hour ago when he told me about his risotto and his body heat radiated toward me and I was briefly, intensely aware that there was a bedroom in this brownstone and we were not in it.
He’s standing with his arms at his sides, his body held in the rigid stillness of a man who has been listening to every sound from the bedroom and waiting for me to emerge.
He sees the suitcase. I watch it register on his face. The flinch. The brief close of his eyes. The set of his jaw when he opens them again. He was hoping I’d come out without it.
“Ella. Don’t go. Not like this.” His voice is low and rough. “Stay tonight. We can talk in the morning.”
I roll my suitcase toward the small foyer. “There’s nothing to talk about in the morning that’s different from right now.”
He frowns. “Yes, there is. Everything you saw today, the brownstone, Lucia’s, the neighborhood. This is me. I’m the same person who brought you here a few hours ago.”
I shake my head. “You’re the same person who sat across from me for ten days and chose, every single day, not to tell me who you were.” I stop walking. Turn to face him. “I found out who you are from strangers with cameras on a public sidewalk, Alec.”
He’s quiet. His hand goes to the back of his neck, the gesture of a man whose composure is failing. “It wasn’t like that.”
“No? I was standing there, holding your hand, and I was the only person on that street who didn’t know who Alec Beckett really was.
My face is in those photographs now. Attached to a nine-billion-dollar story I knew nothing about.
” My voice is level. Not loud. I don’t need it to be loud.
“I had no warning. No chance to decide for myself whether I wanted to be in those pictures. You took that choice from me the same way you took every other choice. By deciding I didn’t need the information. ”
“I didn’t know they’d be there.” His voice is strained. “I never meant for that to happen.”
“But it did happen. And I didn’t have any way to prepare for it, because you made sure I didn’t know enough to need to.”
He absorbs it. I can see the understanding land, the way his shoulders drop a fraction and his eyes go raw in a way that tells me he’s just now confronting the exact shape of what his silence cost. Not the abstract damage. The concrete one. Me. On a sidewalk. Blindsided.
“Everything I feel for you is real.” He looks at me and his defenses are gone.
Every one of them. The dry composure, the controlled delivery, the carefulness of a man who weighs his words before he speaks them.
None of that is here. What’s here is bare.
“Every word, Ella. Every night. You were never a joke to me. You aren’t now.
You are the only honest thing in my life and I was too afraid to be honest back. ”
I hear him. Through the hurt and the numb efficiency of packing my bag and erasing myself from his bathroom counter, I hear him.
His voice breaks on the word “honest” and I know he means it.
I know it the way I’ve always known things about Alec, with the gut-level certainty I bring to reading people, the same instinct I’ve spent ten days using to learn every crack in this man’s armor.
The man in front of me is the man I fell in love with, and he is in real, visible pain. Wrecked.
But so am I. Understanding why he lied and accepting the lie are not the same door.
I crossed a line in the car that I can’t uncross.
Not a line of anger. A line of clarity. I can see the whole picture now, and the picture is a woman who was given a partial version of the man she loved and asked to build a relationship on it.
I pick up the suitcase handle.
I’m three steps from the door when the room goes still.
“Ella… I love you.”
My body catches before my brain does. A hitch in my breath. A stutter in my stride. My hand locks around the suitcase handle. I stand in his hallway with the warm lamplight on the hardwood floor and the dark wood of the door in front of me, and those three words settling into the silence behind me.
He didn’t just say the words. He means them.
I can hear the difference between Alec performing and Alec breaking, and this is breaking.
He held these words back. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.
He’s been carrying them, waiting for the right moment, and the right moment is gone and he’s saying them now because I’m walking toward the door and it’s the only true thing he has left.
The knowledge is the worst thing he could have given me.
Because now I know what I’m losing. If he’d said this in Barbados, before the cameras and the billions and the ten days of chosen silence, it would have been everything.
It would have been the word I was already carrying in my own chest, waiting for him to say first.
Now it’s the thing that will follow me home.
I can’t turn to face him. If I do, I’ll crumble, and right now I need to be strong. Not for him. For me. Finally, for me, I have to be strong. Even if I have to do it with a broken heart.
“That only makes it worse.” My voice is quiet. Steady. “You know that, right?”
He doesn’t answer.
If he didn’t love me, this would just be a lie I fell for. I’d get over it. But if he means it, if he truly loves me, then he chose this. Every day. He loved me and he still decided, every morning, that I wasn’t worth the truth about who he was.
My phone is in my hand. The Uber app is open. My thumb moves across the screen before I’ve consciously decided where I’m going.
JFK. There’s nowhere else. My parents are in Hoboken, ten miles across the river.
My mom, my sisters. I could be on their doorstep in thirty minutes.
But I picture showing up crying with a suitcase in my hand, trying to explain that the vacation I left for ten days ago turned out to be a holiday fling with a man whose net worth makes financial headlines.
I can’t be that daughter tonight. I don’t want to explain all of this to anyone right now. I need to be home. My home. Sedona. The diner. Lisa. The life that makes sense.
“Ella, talk to me. Where are you going to go?”
“Home.”
He swears softly, raggedly. “At least let me drive you to the airport.” His voice is behind me. Close. “Ella.”
I don’t respond. The Uber notification hits my phone. Five minutes. The driver is five minutes away.
I open the front door and the evening air meets my face. All the details I’d found so charming when I arrived now conspire to make me cry. The stoop with its iron railing. The street. The herb pot by the door, the slightly unruly basil spilling over the rim.
I walk down the steps. The suitcase thumps behind me on each one.
Alec follows me out. I can feel him behind me. That current along my skin, that pull in the pit of my stomach. It’s still there, even though he doesn’t belong to me. My body hasn’t gotten the message yet.
The Uber pulls up sooner than estimated. Thank God.
I walk down to it without turning around.
If I see his face I will crack, and cracking means staying, and staying means becoming the woman I swore I’d never be again.
The woman who lets love be the reason she abandons her own judgment.
I spent three years doing that with Jake.
I will not spend one more minute doing it, no matter how different the man, no matter how real the love.
I open the door. Get in. Pull it shut.
“All set?” the driver asks.
I nod, and the car pulls away from the curb.
Only then, once I’m in motion and the decision is behind me, do I look back through the rear window.
Alec is there. Standing at the curb in the amber glow of the streetlight. The brownstone behind him. The stoop, the dark door, the iron railing. His hands at his sides. Watching me go.
The car turns the corner and I pivot away from the window and cry.