Chapter 17 Phoenix
PHOENIX
She came back to bed last night, but she didn't come back to me.
I felt it the moment she slipped under the covers—the careful distance she kept between us, the way she held herself rigid when I reached for her. She let me pull her close, but her body was a wall. Stiff. Guarded. Somewhere else entirely.
I pretended to be asleep. Watched her through half-closed eyes as dawn crept across the ceiling. She didn't sleep at all. Just lay there, staring at nothing, her mind clearly racing somewhere I couldn't follow.
Something happened. Something changed between the time she fell asleep in my arms and the time she came back from wherever she went in the middle of the night.
Her phone. I remember now—she took her phone when she left. Slipped out so quietly she thought I wouldn't notice.
Did she call someone?
The thought sends ice through my veins.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, pulling me out of the spiral.
It’s Marcus. Investor dinner is in 5 days. Thursday.
I stare at the message, my jaw tightening.
Need confirmation she's coming.
Another buzz.
And do you have any photos of you two together? That would really add a lot to building trust.
My thumb hovers over the screen. Photos. He wants photos of us like we're some marketing campaign, some carefully curated image to sell to investors. Like she's a prop in my pitch deck.
She's not a prop, I want to text back. She's everything.
Instead, I type: I'll handle it.
I toss the phone aside and press the heels of my hands against my eyes until I see stars. I pull on clothes and head across the lawn to the guest house. The morning is bright and warm, the ocean glittering in the distance, and none of it feels real.
I knock on her door. "Jade?"
Nothing.
I knock again, harder. "Jade, can we talk?"
Silence.
My hand goes to my pocket before I can think better of it. The key is there—I've always had a key, it's my property after all.
She's not here, I tell myself. You're just checking.
I unlock the door and step inside.
The guest house is empty. Her sandals are gone. Her bag is gone. But her laptop sits open on the desk, screen still glowing.
I shouldn't look.
But I'm already moving toward it, already bending down to see what's on the screen.
The browser is open. A magazine article, glossy and dated. The headline reads: "Paradise Found: The Crawford Love Story."
The browser is open to Google. Search history visible in the suggestions.
Nicholas Crawford Olive Crawford how they met
Nicholas Crawford paid Olive's debts
Crawford family Maui
My stomach drops straight through the floor.
She knows.
She's been researching my parents. Reading about how they met—the check, the island, the fairy tale that everyone on the outside thinks is so romantic. She's seeing the pattern. Connecting the dots.
Anonymous money. Paradise destination. Man who takes care of everything.
She's realizing that she's living Olive's story.
Panic claws at my throat. She's going to leave. She's going to pack her bags and get on a plane and I'll never see her again. She'll go back to her mother and Sydney will hold her and tell her I warned you, I told you, they're all the same—
No.
I force myself to breathe. To think.
She knows about my parents. She knows their story mirrors ours. But she doesn't know everything.
She doesn't know about the blog. About how I've been reading her words for twelve years, tracking her life through carefully curated posts, falling in love with someone who didn't know I existed.
She doesn't know about the business deal. About Marcus and the investors and how bringing her here wasn't just about wanting her—it was about needing her to play a role.
She just knows the surface stuff. The stuff that looks bad but can be explained.
I can work with this.
I can tell her that yes, my father sent Olive a check, but that doesn't mean I'm doing the same thing for the same reasons. I can tell her it's coincidence, not strategy. I can tell her I love her, and that love isn't about control, isn't about ownership, isn't about repeating toxic patterns.
I can make her believe it.
Can't I?
I close the laptop carefully, leaving it exactly as I found it. My hands are shaking.
I need to find her. Before she spirals too far into Sydney's paranoid worldview. Before she convinces herself that everything between us has been manipulation from the start.
I need to find her and tell her... what?
The truth?
Part of it, anyway. The parts that don't destroy everything.
I step out of the guest house and scan the property. The beach. The pool. The gardens. She could be anywhere, walking off her thoughts, building walls against me higher with every step.
I'm going to find her.
And I'm going to fix this.
Whatever it takes.