Chapter 17
ROURKE
Beatrice sets the acceptance card on my desk without a word. Cream paper. Black ink. One clean line in Mallory’s careful hand.
Mrs. Mallory Carmichael accepts with pleasure.
The office noise thins until there’s only the scratch of my thumb against the edge of the card.
“She’s coming?” I ask.
Beatrice looks at me over the top of her glasses. “That’s what accepting an invitation generally means.”
I read it again, as if the ink might rearrange itself.
Mallory. Here.
Back inside a Carmichael property, surrounded by the polished rooms that taught her how to disappear.
“She promised Emmaline months ago,” Beatrice says. “Mallory keeps promises. Even the painful ones.”
Yes, she does.
Mallory kept dinners warm. Kept rooms running. Kept my life beautiful while I kept taking it as proof that she was fine. She kept loving me long after love should have required more than my absence and a credit card.
I stand because sitting feels impossible.
The windows behind my desk look down over the city, all glass and money. I know every major project in this company by forecast, margin, and risk exposure. I can see five years of expansion if someone gives me ninety seconds and a map.
I couldn’t see my wife starving at my own table.
“Don’t,” Beatrice says from behind me.
I turn. “Don’t what?”
“Whatever grand, idiotic thing just occurred to you.”
My mouth closes.
Because it did. Fast. Instinctive.
A speech. Flowers everywhere, not hotel flowers, not sterile white roses, but zinnias, cornflowers, and daisies, like she'd have at the market. A room stopping while I say her name into a microphone. Every guest forced to understand that Mallory was never an accessory to the Carmichael life.
The fantasy collapses before Beatrice can open her notebook and make a notation.
Mallory standing still while a room looks at her. Mallory having to answer my apology with people watching. Mallory turned, again, into part of the Carmichael image.
“No speech,” I say. "No dramatics."
Beatrice’s expression eases by the smallest degree.
“And if she avoids you?”
“Then I let her.” My voice holds. Barely.
Beatrice studies me for long enough that I feel twelve years old and underprepared. “I do keep a spray bottle in the bottom drawer of my desk.”
“Do I want to know why you have that?”
“Don’t worry about it. Just don’t mess up.”
I pick up the folder waiting beside my keyboard.
It’s heavier than it looks.
Preliminary trust structure. Management options. Names of independent trustees. A list of executives who can take pieces of the empire I once convinced myself only I could hold together.
“I asked Walden to start drafting,” I say.
Beatrice’s eyes drop to the folder.
“I’m stepping back from active control.”
For once, she says nothing.
“Not tomorrow. Not carelessly. But the process is real. Expansion plans that require me inside every room are suspended. The board will scream. My father’s friends will call it instability.
They can call it whatever they want.” My fingers press into the folder until the edges bite.
“The money can stay protected without me personally feeding the machine every hour of my life.
I never wanted to be my father, but I've done an excellent job of trying to do just that. "
Beatrice removes her glasses slowly. “Does Mallory know?”
“No.”
“Are you planning to tell her at the wedding?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because it would sound like a price tag.” My throat tightens. “Like I’m offering sacrifice in exchange for forgiveness. She's taught me what's important. It's been a hell of a lesson.”
“If she never comes back?” she asks.
I look at Mallory’s handwriting.
"I'll never be the same, but at least she will have taught me who I'm supposed to be." I turn away from Beatrice because I can't risk seeing anything like pity on her face. "I just wish it didn't come with the price tag of losing the woman I love more than anything."
The Carmichael ballroom is too bright, too joyful for the way my insides are at war with each other.
There's no doubt the room is beautiful. Warm lights, low arrangements, color in the flowers because Mallory helped her choose them months ago, before everything broke. Beatrice’s granddaughter wanted pinks, yellows, and little wild-looking things the hotel florist initially tried to replace with white roses until Beatrice used the tone that makes department heads reconsider their attachment to living.
Mallory’s fingerprints are everywhere.
That nearly stops me at the entrance.
I arrive early and make myself useful only where asked.
Beatrice appears beside me in beige silk, her hair pinned with surgical precision.
"Are you ready for whatever happens today?" she asks.
"You make it sound as if I'm about to step onto a battlefield, Beatrice."
"Lives can be destroyed just as easily in silk as they can in fatigues. You of all people should know that."
"Are you training to be a motivational speaker?"
"Would you listen?"
I try not to smile. I fail.
Then Beatrice says, “She’s here.”
The room loses sound.
I look toward the entrance.
Mallory steps inside.
For a second, I forget how to breathe.
This isn’t the woman from the corridor with the headset denting her hair. This isn't the broken woman in the penthouse showing me a photograph that will likely haunt me for the rest of my life. This isn't even the woman at the market, gathering flowers in a bouquet.
She’s all of them. And so much more.
Her dress is soft blue, cut simply, falling over her body in a way that makes every diamond in the room look overworked. Her hair is pinned low, a few pieces loose near her face.
My hands ache with the need to touch her. I curse the day that I made myself into a man who couldn't walk over to this woman and feel the warmth of her skin beneath my palm.
The beach comes back. Mallory laughing and making a joke about how I was dressed on the beach. Mallory calling me ordinary before she knew ordinary was the only thing I’d never been allowed to want.
Then Juniper Bend.
Brown paper around stems. Her fingers counting change into my palm. The diner’s terrible coffee. Her laugh slipping out before she could stop it.
I love her so intensely that I feel like the world is ripping apart at the seams around me.
Go to your wife.
I take one step.
Then another.
Mallory turns her head, and her eyes find mine through the moving crowd.
There’s no smile. There’s no forgiveness. There’s only the woman I lost standing beneath flowers she once helped choose, and me crossing the room with empty hands because empty hands are the only honest thing I have left to offer.
The greatest danger of the evening is that she may refuse to speak to me.
I believe that all the way across the floor.