Chapter 30 #2
“You had numerous chances for that, Alec. You chose to let me go on believing the lie. You didn’t trust me.”
“Yes, I did.”
I shake my head. “No. You couldn’t have, or you would’ve known that your net worth wouldn’t change a thing about what I feel for you.”
He glances down. “I know that now. I’m an idiot, Ella. I was afraid of losing you.”
“Then why did it take two days for you to come and tell me?”
“Ella, I was in the hospital until this morning.”
The hospital? I swallow hard, hearing the anguish in his voice. I see it in the way his hands clench atop the table. When he looks at me again, his eyes are raw with emotion.
“When you walked away from me and got into that car, it felt like my entire world was crumbling. I know you didn’t want to hear me say that I love you—not after I hurt you like I did—but it’s the truth, Ella. I love you.”
He says it fiercely, a look of intense determination in his eyes.
“After you pulled away from the curb, I went back into my brownstone to get my keys. I was going to find you and bring you back with me. The only thing that mattered to me was making it right with you and doing whatever I had to for you to forgive me.”
He pulls in a sharp breath. “I got as far as the front door.” He stops. Looks down at his hands resting on the table between us. “My chest seized up. My heart. It just… locked up. Pain like I’ve never felt before.”
My hand goes to my mouth. “Oh, Alec.”
He stares at me. “I couldn’t move, could barely breathe. I was on the floor calling 911 before I knew I’d fallen.”
I can see it all as he talks. I don’t want to see it, but my brain builds it anyway: Alec on the hardwood of his hallway, his phone in his hand, his heart failing him in the same house where I left him only minutes earlier.
And I’d had no idea.
My hand is across the table, on his wrist, my fingers pressing into his pulse because I need to feel it. The beat is right there, steady under his skin, and the relief of it makes my eyes sting so fast I don’t have time to brace.
“Alec, your heart—”
“It’s fine,” he says, turning his wrist under my grip. His fingers close around mine, his thumb settling into my palm. “I spent the past two days in the cardiac unit, just to find out it wasn’t a heart attack. It was my body reacting to the pain of losing you.”
His body’s reaction to losing me. Not a heart attack. A heartbreak. The man whose actual heart condition brought us together, whose chest I used to fall asleep against, whose pulse I feel throbbing so heavily now under my fingertips as I hold on to him like I don’t dare let go.
My grip tightens on his hand. I can’t speak. My throat has closed around everything I want to say and the tears sliding down my cheeks are saying it for me.
“I called you,” he says, his voice thick. “From the hospital bed that first night. I don’t even know if the call connected or how long it rang. I was on a lot of medication and I could barely hold the phone. When I tried again the next day, your number was blocked.”
The tears come harder now. Fast and hot down both cheeks, because I am hearing the other side of a silence I’ve been living inside.
The blank phone screen. The “maybe he doesn’t care” story I told myself over and over while wiping down counters and smiling at customers.
All the while he was in a hospital bed trying to reach me and hitting a wall I built with my stubborn pride.
“I’m sorry.” My apology comes out wet and shaky. “I didn’t know. I thought you just... I thought we were done.”
“I don’t want us to be done.” He says it simply. The way he says other things that are not up for negotiation. “I’ll never be done trying to make you forgive me.”
His free hand comes up and his fingers brush the wetness off my cheek. The touch is feather-light and so tender that a small sound escapes my throat. Not a word. Just the sound of my last shred of resistance officially leaving the building.
I walked away from this. From everything we shared. From him.
But he’s here now, and all of my fears, all of my insecurities, melt away as I look into his eyes.
He brings my hand up to his lips. He kisses my fingers, then holds our joined hands over his heart. “You are everything to me, Ella. I love you.”
Three words. The same ones he said in Brooklyn. Except this time, I don’t want to run from them.
I’m not afraid of welcoming him back into my heart.
The truth is, he’ll always occupy that part of me.
What I’m afraid of is the part that comes afterward.
The part where he goes back home to his fourteen-billion-dollar life, and I stay here pouring coffee, and the distance does what distance always does.
“How is this ever going to work, Alec? Your life is in New York. Mine is here.”
He nods. “I thought of that too. And I wasn’t going to come here without a solution.”
A wry glint sparks in his eyes, and it wakes up his dimples as he lets go of my hand to pick up something that’s lying on the booth seat beside him. It’s one of those large, fold-up maps like they sell at the gas station down the street.
I watch, confused and admittedly fascinated, as he spreads the map of the entire United States out on the table between us.
“I don’t need New York. I can run HoloTech from anywhere with a laptop and a signal.” He says it the way he says facts. As though it’s already been decided. “I don’t care where I am, Ella. I only care that you’re there with me.”
Then he sets something beside it. A pad of sticky notes. Bright yellow.
“Now, I’ve heard the proper way to do this is with a red pin and your eyes closed, but I had to improvise.”
He remembers. One of my many rambling stories, random bits of my life that I relayed mainly as a way to fill awkward silences, yet he remembers. I laugh, caught somewhere between total elation and disbelief as he peels off one of the sticky notes and hands it to me.
“Wherever you choose,” he says. “I’ll go. Here too, if that’s what you want.”
I look at the map. At an entire country laid out before me and Alec’s solemn declaration that he’ll follow me anywhere.
I look down at the yellow paper in my hand.
I don’t close my eyes when I make my choice.
I look at him. And I know. The way I knew Sedona was home before I’d ever set foot in it. Leaning across the table, I press the sticky note to his chest. Right over his heart.
“This is where I want to be.”
He exhales, and his hand comes up to hold mine. “You’re already there. Forever.”
“I love you,” I say. My voice breaks around the words, and I let it. “I love you, Alec. I should have said it before I got in that stupid car two nights ago. I should have said it in Barbados when I felt it for the first time and I was too scared.”
He slides out of the booth and walks over to me, taking my hand in his and pulling me up to him. “With you in my arms, I’ll always be home, wherever that is.”
His mouth touches mine and the first thing I feel is relief.
Pure, flooding, bone-deep relief, like the first full breath after being underwater too long.
Then heat. My fingers curl into his thick hair, gripping, pulling him closer as his fingers slip to the nape of my neck and even that light touch sends a wave of desire through me that I feel in the pit of my stomach and lower.
Dimly, I realize we are kissing in my workplace. In the middle of my shift, with a road map spread on the table beside us and a yellow sticky note pressed between my palm and his heart.
A clap starts up from somewhere behind me. Then another from a different area of the dining room. Soon, it’s the whole damn place, thundering with applause and hoots and cheers.
I open my eyes and spy Lisa high-fiving Hal on the other side of the room. A laugh bubbles out of me, despite the fact that Alec is still kissing me. He pulls back just enough to look at me, his breath warm on my lips. His hand leaves my hair and reaches into my apron pocket.
He finds the scarf and draws it out slowly, and when he loops it around my neck, I feel the weight of every mile between this moment and the last time he put it there. He traces the edge of the silk where it rests against my collarbone.
“This belongs to you,” he murmurs. “And so do I. Always, if you still want me.”
“Yes, Alec. I do. I’ve never stopped wanting you.” I nod and laugh through the tears still wet on my face and pull him back to me.
He kisses me again, softer this time, slower, like we have all the time in the world.
And we do.
We finally do.