5. Knox
Knox
The country club’s private dining room smells like fresh flowers and money, two things I’ve spent my whole life surrounded by and never once found comforting.
Ella’s stepmother, Diane, booked the space today for a “planning luncheon” which really means twelve women, ten different vendor portfolios spread across two tables pushed together, and enough champagne to get a football team wasted.
And this isn’t even for the actual wedding.
No. This is only for the upcoming engagement party.
Ella’s sitting at one of the tables, sipping champagne and absorbing all the attention. She looks happy. Genuinely happy, because of my proposal. Carrying the weight of that is something I’m struggling with. It’s fucking with my head.
As soon as I could give myself some space, I did.
A glass of whiskey in hand, settling near the window.
I can get through today. I’ve gotten good at the whole existing in a room without actually being present.
Nodding at the right intervals. Producing the appropriate expression when someone looks my way.
Diane has already introduced me to three women whose names I’d forgotten immediately, and each of them gripped my hand or kissed my cheek and said some version of what a wonderful match Ella and I make. I smiled and agreed and felt nothing but lingering dread.
My mother is here too, of course. Victoria Aldrich doesn’t miss events, even when she’s barely coherent.
She’s sitting next to Diane, their heads bent together over a portfolio of centerpiece arrangements, chatting back and forth like they’ve known each other for years.
She looks decent today. Better than she has lately.
I’ve been monitoring her even more since the accident.
How I did those first days after her overdose.
“Knox.” I blink and Ella’s next to me, sliding her hand into the crook of my arm. “You doing alright? You’re kind of out of it.”
“What?”
“You look like you’re lost in la-la land.” She keeps her voice light, her smile in place for all to see. “Try to look like you want to be here.”
I notice Diane watching us and force a smile. “I want to be here.”
“Right.” She squeezes my arm and rolls her eyes slightly. Not enough that anyone else would notice. Then she drifts back to the table, rejoining the conversation about peonies and roses.
I turn back to the window.
Outside, the golf course spans what seems like miles. Flat and green and mostly empty except for a groundskeeper dragging something across the fairway. It’s a Tuesday afternoon in July. Most Ashford families are at their summer homes in the Cape or The Hamptons or some up in Lake Mercer’s Point.
I think about Sawyer’s face when I saw her last week. How she looked at me with so much hatred at first but then it morphed into something so much worse. Indifference. She was exhausted, and why shouldn’t she be?
I drove home and sat in my car in the parking garage for twenty minutes before I could make myself go inside. I still watched her on the app, I’ll never stop doing that, but I gave her space. No texts. No calls. No dropping by her apartment or job to lay eyes on her.
It’s killing me. Actually killing me.
“The centerpieces at my stepdaughter Hailey’s wedding,” my mother says from the table, and mention of that day snags the organ in my chest and yanks. “The tall ones with the hanging greenery. Do you remember those, Knox? They were stunning. Whoever did those arrangements—”
“I don’t remember,” I say.
She shoots me an irritated look. “You were there.”
“I know I was there. So were you.”
I doubt she was sober in any way shape or form.
She’s quiet for a beat, before turning back to Diane to say something about the florist’s name, leaving our exchange alone.
My gaze floats back to the window, and the groundskeeper is gone, it’s so empty out there. Nothing to distract me from thinking about Hailey’s wedding.
Having drinks at the hotel bar was Owen’s idea, but once he brought it up to Chris, Hailey’s new husband, the idea spread like wildfire.
I had to go—or at least that’s what I told myself.
In reality, I could have stayed for a quick drink and went up to my room.
I had no one to blame but myself for staying as long as I did and drinking as much on top of that.
I’d been watching her all night. I knew I was doing it. I couldn’t locate the mechanism in my brain that would make me stop…some wire that should have warned me. Told me this is a bad idea.
Whatever connection that could have made me stop was severed by the third time she laughed at something Owen said and I felt it in every nerve ending.
She was wearing this fucking dress that had no business being that tight around her tits. It was flimsy as hell too and I knew she was chilly as the night went on.
I was supposed to hate her, and I did, but that didn’t stop her from being distracting. She kept catching my eyes across the room and looking away first, which told me everything I needed to know about her feelings toward me. Not that I knew what to do with the information.
I was angry. I’d been angry for months, and it wasn’t going anywhere.
David Thorne had stolen from my family, from this town, from people who trusted him, and was now sitting in a holding cell waiting for a trial he was going to lose, and the damage he’d done was something I was living with every single day.
Every spreadsheet, every creditor call, every morning I evaded employees’ emails asking if they’d be the next one to get laid off.
These were real people. Hardworking people. And they lost everything because of one man’s choices.
Then I remembered that it was easier for the anger to find a target.
And I knew Sawyer had nothing to do with it. I’d known it from the beginning. She was guilty of being their daughter. That was all.
But that meant she was the one standing in front of me, close enough to direct the rage at when everything and everyone else was too diffuse and too large and too impossible to touch.
One look at her and I’d see her mother’s face, contorted in ecstasy as she fucked my cheating prick of a father. Or I’d see David Thorne’s guilty expression as the cops took him away in handcuffs.
It was easier to be angry at Sawyer than at anything else.
I told myself that was why I followed her to the bar. Some combination of months of misdirected anger and three glasses of whiskey and the way she’d been looking at me all night like she wanted to fight me or fuck me. Both, maybe. I told myself that’s all it was.
Then I had her pressed against a wall in the dark and her dress bunched in my hands and her voice moaning my name, and I understood that I had been lying to myself for so much longer than those past few months.
It would have been easier if it felt wrong.
If my fingers in her cunt, and my hard cock pressed against her ass, and how wet she was for me didn’t feel like fucking kismet.
Instead it felt like the first true thing I’d done in years, and that was the most terrifying part.
That underneath all the misdirection, this was where it landed.
Her.
I had to make it easier. So I made sure she’d hate me for it.
“You don’t deserve to come.”
I heard myself say the words and watched the humiliation sink in, morphing from want to fury. And when I stepped away, it was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
She shoved past me. I gave her thirty seconds, then walked out.
Owen was in the hallway. Of course he was.
I saw them before he registered me walking out.
Watched him with her, his expression shifting to one of concern as he took in her messed up hair, and her wrinkled dress, and her red-rimmed eyes.
My fists clenched as he touched her and it took everything in me not to shove him aside and sling Sawyer over my shoulder to finish what we started upstairs.
I couldn’t do that, so I kept my gaze trained on the floor and walked away. Ignoring Owen and Sawyer talking behind me.
That night, I got no sleep and I didn’t even care. I deserved it.
There was a family brunch the next morning. As much as I didn’t want to go, I needed food and coffee and it was the quickest and easiest way available.
I showed up twenty minutes late deliberately, and found them already seated around a large round table—my parents, Owen, Hailey and Chris, a few others. I nodded my chin when Chris greeted me and sat down.
Sawyer wasn’t there. She’d gone home last night. I knew that before I even walked in but knowing that and seeing her absence were two different things.
A server filled my empty mug with coffee and I wrapped my hands around it.
Owen was talking when I arrived, going on about some coworker of Chris’s acting like an ass last night. He had all eyes on him, each of them hanging on his every word. Except me. I couldn’t care less about some drunk asshole, not unless he tried to hurt a woman.
I ordered the pancakes and bacon and chimed in when someone spoke to me directly. Otherwise, I was happy to sit back and drink my coffee unbothered. I was tired and my mind wouldn’t stop reeling from my hookup with Sawyer.
Our meals came and the only sounds for a short time were forks clanging and toast being crunched into.
A natural lull opened up and Owen set his fork down and sat back in his chair. His expression was like a little kid waiting to tell their parents that they got an A in school.
“I have some news.” He said it to the table, but his eyes found mine. “Sawyer and I are making it official.”
The table went quiet for a beat.
My mother’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. She set it down carefully, focusing hard on her plate before looking up, newly composed. “Sawyer Thorne,” she said.
“Yeah.” Owen’s expression didn’t waver. I was sure he expected mixed reactions.
My father made a rumble sound low in his throat, not words but we all knew what he meant. He reached for his orange juice. “This is Hailey’s brunch. How could you bring up that girl at your sister’s brunch, Owen?”
“Dad.” Hailey’s voice was calm but had an undertone of warning. She looked at Owen from across the table and smiled. “I think that’s great, little bro.”
Owen shot her a grateful look.
My father set his glass down. “You’re playing with fire, son. She’s his daughter.”
“I know whose daughter she is, Dad.”
“Then you know—”
“I know exactly what I’m doing.” Owen’s words had a finality to them. He looked at my father for a long moment, then picked up his fork and resumed eating.
There was silence again. Only Owen could get my father to shut his mouth about something that pissed him off. I despised that about him.
Was this all my fault? I pushed Sawyer away last night and now Owen makes this announcement today. She moaned my name mere hours ago and now, what? She’s his girlfriend?
I stared into my coffee, watching the way the morning light hit the surface of it, and when I glanced up, Owen was looking right at me again.
Jesus Christ. I knew what he wanted and I had to dig deep to find something to say that wouldn’t start a screaming match at my sister’s brunch.
“She’s good for you,” I said. It killed me, but there. I commented.
Something in his face settled. “Yeah. She is.”
Hailey looked at me with sympathetic eyes before reaching over and squeezing Owen’s arm. I didn’t know how she could read us both so well, but somehow I knew she knew.
I watched steam curl off the surface of my coffee while the table moved on around me.
My mother finished her meal and said nothing further.
My father cut into his omelet with the fervor of someone who’s swallowing down the rest of what he wanted to say.
Hailey kept the conversation moving, filling silences before they could calcify into something worse.
I ate my pancakes, barely tasting them before they slid down my throat.
Did Sawyer go straight into Owen’s open arms after I walked away?
Was this on me? I already knew the answer.
I’d handed him the opening and he’d filled it without hesitation because that’s what Owen did.
He didn’t overthink. He didn’t talk himself out of things.
He just did whatever the hell he wanted.
And I just...didn’t. I never did.
I pushed the last of my bacon around my plate.
Owen was still talking, back to his normal tone now that he’d gotten over the hard part, and everyone just moved on like the last five minutes were no big deal.
Maybe they weren’t. Maybe I was the only one sitting here feeling like I’d taken a punch to the gut.
I had no one to be pissed at but myself but I was pissed anyway, which felt on brand for me.
The thing about making bad decisions is you don’t always know they’re bad when you’re making them.
Last night felt like the opposite of a bad decision.
Last night felt like finally doing one real thing after months of stewing in my misdirected anger.
I figured there was always tomorrow to set things right.
Always time to change my mind, to make it up to her if that’s what I decided.
Good fucking plan.
I drained my coffee and set the mug down with more force than I meant to.
“You need a refill?” The server appeared at my side.
“No.” I pushed back from the table. “I’m done.”
“Knox! Come on over here!”
My mother’s voice pulls me back. I drain the rest of my glass and leave it on an empty table.
For the next hour, I smile and nod. Every time I want to say fuck it to the whole damn thing, Ella’s face morphs into her father’s and I remember why I’m here.
Not that Moretti didn’t just remind me when we met with him the other day to discuss a new contract for the business.
Ella knows I’m trying, but she’s too smart not to notice the difference between this and actually wanting it. She’s letting me off the hook anyway. I don’t know what that says about her or what it says about me that I keep letting her.
Someone brings me another drink and I stare at the amber liquid, my mind still on that wedding brunch. On how easily I gave in. On my brother.
It’s ironic, really. Owen would have loved this shit. The flowers, the champagne, the whole spectacle. He would have had every woman at this table laughing and cooing over him in minutes. He had that thing about him, like an ease that made people feel warm and fuzzy.
I’ve never had that.
I’m sure they all wish I was more like him. Sometimes I do too.