65 #2
Perhaps he understood that Vanessa's newest scheme was dangerous precisely because it had left the realm of statements and exhibits and entered the fragile space where Dorothy and Sebastian had not yet learned how to stand without bruising each other.
He nodded once. "I will locate him."
Sebastian returned to the venue twenty-three minutes later.
Dorothy knew the exact number because she spent every one of them trying not to look at the clock and failing.
Hale had contacted Marianne Cho, who had not known Sebastian's phone was missing.
Security had traced his last scanned access point to a private consultation room on the mezzanine level used by speakers and legal teams.
A staff member reported seeing Vanessa Werner near the service corridor, wearing a gray coat and sunglasses.
No one had authorized her entry. That fact, in Dorothy's life, had begun to lose its power to surprise.
When Sebastian finally appeared at the end of the side hall, he was moving fast.
Marianne followed him, her face tight with anger.
One of Hood's security men came behind them, speaking into a radio.
Sebastian's expression was controlled, but his hair was slightly disordered at the front as if he had pushed a hand through it more than once, and his mouth was set in a line Dorothy had learned to read as fury held back for later.
He saw her.
Everything else in the corridor seemed to fall away.
"Dorothy."
Her name came out too quickly to be polished.
That should have relieved her.
It did.
It also hurt, because relief did not erase the last twenty-three minutes.
He stopped in front of her, close enough that she could see the tension around his eyes, far enough not to assume he had the right to touch. Even now. Even after Vanessa. Even with worry written through him.
"I did not know she had my phone," he said.
Dorothy's throat tightened at the immediate answer.
"She answered when I called."
"I know." His face darkened. "Marianne found the call log when we recovered it."
"Recovered it from where?"
"A side table in the consultation room."
Dorothy looked at him.
Sebastian's jaw tightened. "She took it when she approached me."
"Approached you where?"
"In the mezzanine corridor." His voice stayed controlled, but anger pressed beneath it. "She intercepted me after the first panel. She claimed she wanted to surrender the source of the forged contract before things escalated further. I should have ignored her."
"Yes," Dorothy said.
The single word came sharper than intended.
Sebastian accepted it.
"I know."
She hated the echo. Hated that everyone in this story kept knowing things after the damage had found its way in.
He continued, "I agreed to hear her only in a public-adjacent room with Marianne nearby and security outside. Vanessa insisted she had evidence that Adrian Vale forged the document to protect himself and frame her. She was lying. Or stalling. Possibly both."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
The question left before she could soften it.
Sebastian's face changed.
"Because I thought involving you in another Vanessa performance would give her exactly what she wanted."
"And instead she answered your phone."
"Yes."
The admission sat there, plain and insufficient.
Dorothy looked away.
The corridor's cream walls seemed too bright. People passed at the far end, pretending not to look. Hale stood back with Marianne, giving them a pocket of privacy within a building designed to deny such things.
Sebastian lowered his voice. "She ambushed me. I did not go to her residence. I did not meet her privately by choice. I did not give her my phone. She must have taken it when she dropped her folder and I reached to pick up the pages."
Dorothy believed him.
She did.
The belief came before pride, before fear, before jealousy could arrange an argument. Sebastian's explanation fit the man she knew, the situation, Vanessa's desperation, the call itself. Dorothy believed him.
And still the jealousy remained, humiliated now by its own survival.
Because Vanessa had been near him. Vanessa had spoken through his phone. Vanessa had touched the fragile distance between them and made it feel contaminated.
Dorothy crossed her arms, then uncrossed them because the gesture felt too defensive. "What did she want from you?"
"To provoke exactly this."
"That is not an answer."
Sebastian's eyes held hers. "She wanted to imply that I had used you, that I would abandon you when the scandal became inconvenient, and that I understood her better than I understood you because both of us know what it is to be outside your grief for Trevor."
The words landed with brutal precision.
Dorothy went still.
Sebastian saw the impact and regretted it at once, but he did not take it back. That, too, was part of the painful honesty between them now.
"She said that?" Dorothy asked.
"Not in one clean sentence. Vanessa rarely offers that courtesy. But yes. That was the shape of it."
Dorothy's stomach tightened.
Vanessa had aimed well again.
Not because the accusation was true, but because it touched real bruises. Sebastian was outside the grief Trevor had left behind. He did know what it felt like to stand near Dorothy while another man's late tenderness shook her. Vanessa had found his wound and tried to speak into it.
Dorothy looked at him closely. "Did it work?"
Sebastian's expression hardened. "No."
"Not at all?"
A muscle in his jaw moved.
Dorothy's chest tightened.
"Not enough to change what I know," he said.
"That is not the same thing."
"No," he admitted. "It is not."
The honesty cut, but she had asked for it.
She looked down at her phone, then back at him. "When Vanessa answered, she wanted me to believe you were with her."
"Yes."
"I knew that."
"I know."
"And still I felt it."
Sebastian's gaze softened in spite of everything. "Dorothy."
"I hated it," she said, the words coming faster now because stopping would make them harder.
"I hated her voice on your phone. I hated not knowing where you were. I hated imagining her near you. I hated that she made me feel like I was back in the Raymond house listening to another woman call for a man who might leave."
Sebastian's face changed.
The anger in him cooled beneath something more vulnerable.
"But you are not Trevor," she continued. "And I am not your wife. And Vanessa is not your old love. And I know all of that, but for a moment it did not matter because jealousy arrived before reason and I hated myself for giving her exactly what she wanted."
Sebastian stepped closer, then stopped.
She almost wished he had not stopped.
The almost was another truth.
"Jealousy is not a crime," he said quietly.
"That is what I told myself."
"Then believe yourself."
Her eyes burned. "It feels ugly."
"It can be."
"That is not comforting."
"I was aiming for honest."
A laugh almost escaped her. It broke before becoming sound.
Sebastian's mouth softened faintly, then grew serious again. "What did you do with it?"
Dorothy looked at him.
"The jealousy," he clarified. "What did you do with it?"
She thought of Vanessa's voice, the trap, the implication, the old heat rising. She thought of the way she had refused to let Vanessa turn feeling into equivalence.
"I told her jealousy does not justify harm."
Sebastian's expression shifted.
For a moment, something like pride touched his face.
Then pain followed it, because he understood what it had cost her to say that.
"That sounds like you," he said.
The words reached her more deeply than praise would have.
Dorothy swallowed. "Does it?"
"Yes."
The corridor went quiet between them.
Not empty.
Quiet.
Dorothy realized, standing there beneath the forum lights with reporters still waiting beyond the hall and Vanessa somewhere beyond security's reach, that the ache in her chest had changed.
It was no longer only fear of losing Sebastian.
It was the sharper fear that she might damage him by failing to name what he had become to her.
He had pulled back because she had not chosen clearly.
Vanessa had tried to use that distance. Trevor had told her not to lose someone good because of him.
And now Sebastian stood in front of her, explaining an ambush he should never have had to defend himself against, while Dorothy felt jealousy she had no right to turn into accusation and no wish to deny.
The ground beneath them was still unstable.
But at least they were both standing on it honestly.
Sebastian looked down at her phone. "You called me."