Chapter 17
Caroline Atkins?
“Listen, I know he’s in there!” I snap, palms flat on the sleek marble counter of this bougie, antiseptic hospital that smells like lavender, money, and emotional repression.
“I’m not some crazy woman, alright? I know him. I’ve lived with him for the past two months. I’ve washed his goddamn underwear, for Christ’s sake. Just—just tell him Carol’s here.”
The receptionist—a bottle blonde with a badge that says Devon in cursive script, like she works at a spa and not a fortress of the rich and disconnected—gives me a look like she’s debating whether to press a button or flip open her pepper spray.
“Ma’am,” she says, voice coated in condescension and the faint smell of Chanel No. 5, “Mr. Vanderbilt isn’t accepting outside visitors right now.”
“Oh, outside—okay, outside? I’ve seen that man sleep drooling on a second-hand pillow, Devon. I’ve made him broccoli pasta because he didn’t know how a microwave worked. I’m not the damn outside.”
She blinks. One of those slow, bored blinks that makes me want to launch a chair through a window.
“I’m gonna have to ask you to step back,” she says, already gesturing toward a security guard who looks like he eats drywall for protein.
My chest’s tight. My stomach’s in knots. I’m not here to throw a tantrum in front of a spa lobby’s worth of white couches and glass vases. I’m here because he didn’t call. Because I haven’t heard from Alex since the news broke. Since that segment ran.
Since I saw him in a goddamn suit and not in the jeans I bought him from a Salvation Army on 2nd Avenue.
He’s in there.
He’s in there and they’ve got him locked up like a fucking museum piece.
And I’m just some poor nurse from the wrong side of Queens with day-old mascara and no security clearance.
But I don’t give a shit.
Because I love him.
And I’m not leaving until I know he’s okay.
I take a breath through my nose, square my shoulders, and plaster on the kind of smile I usually reserve for patients trying to shit the bed again.
“Look, Devon,” I say with the restraint of a woman who hasn’t slept and might punch a glass vase if provoked, “I think we started off on the wrong foot. I’m Caroline Atkins. Just tell him—or whoever’s babysitting him—that I’m here. I’m sure someone will clear me.”
She exhales like I’ve ruined her day of passive-aggressively stapling papers and sipping iced coffee through a metal straw, but she picks up the phone anyway.
Victory.
“Someone will come down and talk to you,” she says after a brief, clipped conversation. “You can wait over there.”
I nod, tension leaking out of my shoulders, and head to one of the plush ivory chairs that probably cost more than my fucking car.
I look like hell. Still in scrubs, coat over them, hair in a sad excuse for a bun, leather bag slouched like a tired dog at my feet.
Everyone around me looks like they belong on a yacht, and I look like I sprinted out of a twelve-hour ER shift, because I did.
Twenty minutes later, a very crisp, very old man with pristine posture and probably stock in three oil companies steps through the glass doors like he owns the building. And maybe he fucking does.
“Miss Atkins?” he says, voice as smooth and cold as a winter funeral.
I leap up. “Yeah. That’s me.” My voice is hopeful, too hopeful. “How is he? Is he okay?”
“Don’t fret, Miss. Mr. Vanderbilt is in perfect health.” He smiles like I should clap. “May I ask how you came to know him?”
“I was—uh—his nurse. After the accident. I, uh, took him in. At home,” I say, like a goddamn idiot. “To help him recover.”
“Oh, how kind of you.” He says it like pity, not gratitude. Like I’m a golden retriever that dragged a pigeon into the house. “I assure you he’s now with his family, and resting after… all these events.”
“Right…” My stomach tightens. “And you are?”
“Pardon me.” He offers a hand like I should kiss his fucking ring. “Reginald Wexner. I’ve been with the Vanderbilt Conglomerate for over twenty years.”
I nod slowly. Cool. That’s great, Reginald. That tells me absolutely jack shit about who you are to Alex.
“Can I see him?” I ask, hopeful.
“I’m afraid not, Miss Atkins. He’s resting. And naturally, there are… many people eager to see him,” he says with a polite, cutting smile. “His girlfriend, for one.”
My stomach does a full Olympic dive, twists mid-air, and belly-flops straight into hell.
“Girlfriend?” I repeat, blinking, like maybe that word doesn’t mean what I think it does.
Reginald gives me a tight, professional smile—like he’s just informed me of a cancelled brunch reservation instead of shattering my entire fucking reality.
“Oh yes, of course,” he says, smug and grandfatherly in that ‘I-wear-cashmere-socks’ sort of way.
“Miss Genevieve was absolutely beside herself. Looking for him all over Manhattan. Quite a reunion, really.”
Miss Genevieve. Jesus Christ, she probably sips martinis with her pinky out and owns seven matching poodles named after European cities.
I force my jaw to stay shut so I don’t bite this man’s Botoxed fucking head off.
Reginald, meanwhile, just keeps talking, like he’s narrating a charity gala. “She was very emotional when she saw him. Of course, there’s a lot of catching up to do, now that he’s returned. Business meetings, family debriefings… and of course, personal matters. You understand.”
No. No, I fucking don’t understand.
Because the man I knew—the man who couldn’t do laundry and accidentally lit toast on fire—he didn’t talk about a Genevieve.
He talked about me. Or maybe he didn’t say the words, but he made it damn clear with every look, every touch, every fucking time he kissed me like I was the only thing grounding him to earth.
And now what? I’m just some charity case he accidentally fell into while slumming it?
“Right,” I manage, the word a bullet I bite between my teeth. “Well, that’s good. That he’s okay. That he’s… home.”
Reginald smiles, and it’s so fucking condescending I could punch it off his perfectly moisturized, probably cucumber-exfoliated face.
“I’m sure Mr. Vanderbilt is very grateful for your assistance,” he says smoothly, like I nursed a dog back to health and not a man with no fucking memory, dignity, or clean underwear.
Then he has the gall—the unholy audacity—to pull out a fucking checkbook.
Like it’s 1987 and I’m some maid they’re trying to pay off before the gala.
My brain hiccups. “What—?”
“I’m sure this will recompensate you handsomely for all your troubles during this period,” he says, scribbling with the efficiency of someone who’s done this before. Probably hundreds of times. For all the girls who didn’t come from legacy names and gated estates.
He tears the check with a smug little flourish and holds it out to me like it’s a goddamn dog treat.
“Here. For your time.”
I blink.
He just offered to pay me for taking care of Alex. For loving him. For feeding him, patching him, letting him sleep in my bed. For hearing him cry in the shower and pretending not to so he could have that scrap of pride.
“For my time?” I echo, heart thudding like a war drum.
“Yes, Miss Atkins. We appreciate your… dedication during Mr. Vanderbilt’s temporary lapse.”
Lapse. Lapse.
Like Alex tripped over a crack in the pavement and forgot his last name for two fucking months.
“I— I didn’t do it for money,” I manage, voice rough, tight in my throat. “I just want to see him.”
Reginald, polished like a damn luxury casket, gives me that small, reptilian smile again. “Miss Atkins, I’m sure you don’t want to create a scene in front of his girlfriend.”
That one lands like a goddamn fist to the solar plexus. I actually flinch. The air goes thin.
He sees it. The flicker in my eyes. The sting.
And the smug bastard moves in for the kill.
He takes my hand—like I’m some blushing debutante at a fucking cotillion—and shoves the check into my palm.
“Take it as a token of gratitude,” he says, like he’s doing me a favor. “You’ve done a great service. Now… it’s time to get back to our lives.”
Our lives.
Because mine, clearly, was just a holding space. A layover until Alex Vanderbilt decided to come back to the land of silver spoons and trust funds.
And I just stood there.
With a goddamn check in my hand.
With his voice in my head calling me baby.
With the memory of his arms around me in my shitty twin-sized bed.
With the ghost of everything we built between two bowls of broccoli pasta and one broken arm.
I close my fingers around the check. Not to keep it.
To crush it.
“Tell him,” I say, and my voice doesn’t even shake. “Tell him I came. Tell him I waited. And tell him I hope his real life is worth it.”
Then I shove the check into Reginald’s pristine blazer pocket and walk the fuck away.
Because if Alex Vanderbilt wants to forget the life we made together?
Then he can start by forgetting me.
The subway back to Queens was brutal. Not in the usual rat-on-your-foot, mariachi-in-your-face, someone’s-crying-in-the-corner kind of New York way.
No, this was the soul-sucking, silence-heavy, every-station-is-an-eternity kind of brutal.
And I don’t let myself feel it. Not now.
Not yet. Feelings are for later. For maybe after I bleach every inch of my bathroom and scream into a pillow until my throat gives out.
When I get home, the apartment is cold. Like graveyard cold. Colder than it has any fucking right to be for a place that’s been lived in, loved in, fucked in.
I kick my boots off and stand in the center of it—this tiny, overworked shoebox of a home—and all I can see is him.
Thrifted clothes in the hamper, smelling like cheap detergent and the man I stupidly gave a bed to.
His shampoo’s still in the shower, black bottle, obnoxious label screaming ACTIVATED CHARCOAL. We had a whole damn aisle argument over it—me, begging him to get something normal like mint or cedarwood, him refusing because “this one says detox and I’m a man with a mysterious past, Carol.”
I almost bought him a fucking loofah.
There’s his shoes under the radiator. His coffee mug by the sink. His stupid half-read crime novel on the loveseat, pages folded like a goddamn monster.
There’s him.
Everywhere.
And now there’s me, middle of the apartment, surrounded by the leftovers of a fairytale gone completely fucking sideways, holding back the dam like a one-woman emergency response team with nothing but duct tape and denial.
But it doesn’t hold.
Nope. It ruptures the moment I crawl into bed and get a whiff of him on the pillowcase. That mix of shampoo, detergent, and him. Warm skin, safety, dick, and goddamn home.
It’s not crying. It’s not even sobbing.
It’s ugly. It’s hiccupping, snotty, gut-deep fucking grief. Hyperventilating so hard I think I might pass out. Clutching the blanket like it can hold me together while every single stitch of what we had unravels.
Because plot twist—turns out my mystery homeless amnesiac boyfriend with the perfect jaw and the god-tier dick?
Yeah. He’s a fucking billionaire.
With a fucking girlfriend.
Of course he has a girlfriend. Look at him. There’s no way the universe lets a man like that go unclaimed. I just didn’t think the claim would come with pearls, a trust fund, and a last name that sounds like it gets engraved on libraries and winged statues.
And I knew. Deep down, I knew. From the second he said “I think my name is Alex” I knew something like this might come for us. I just didn’t think it’d be this fast. This sharp. This fucking final.
Turns out, I was just a pit stop on the road back to his real life. The nurse with a big mouth, a small apartment, and a heart dumb enough to fall for the world’s hottest stray.
Fuck me for hoping.
Fuck me for spiraling.
Because what do I do after sobbing myself into dehydration? I dive headfirst into the internet like a woman possessed. Like I’m not holding my heart in my hands while typing his goddamn real name.
Alexander Vanderbilt.
And Genevieve De Vere.
The fucking power couple of old money wet dreams.
Every article is a knife. Every headline like “Vanderbilt De Vere: The Modern Gatsby and Daisy” slices me open with a new angle. They’re all so polished. So posed. So perfect it makes my teeth hurt.
Here they are at the Met Gala, tux and a backless dress, matching smugness and a quarter-million dollars worth of accessories between them.
Her eyes dead behind the lashes, his arm glued to her waist like a goddamn PR stunt.
Which, plot twist, it probably was. And still—they look good.
Painfully good. Like the kind of good that makes people believe in arranged marriages and generational wealth.
I scroll faster, because I’m a fucking masochist. There they are at a gala for orphaned whales or some shit. Then a ski resort. Then front row at Milan Fashion Week looking like they own the goddamn planet and everyone in it.
I find one picture—one fucking picture—that punches me square in the face. She’s laughing, hair all done, hand on his chest, he’s looking down at her like she’s the sun and the moon and maybe a ten-year trust fund all in one. And for a second, just one miserable second, I wonder:
Did he look at me like that?
Because now all I can see is the difference. The gap. The cosmic chasm between a man born into marble floors and someone who owns exactly one IKEA loveseat and a bottle of store-brand Advil.
And me? I’m in a baggy sweatshirt that smells like antiseptic and regret, in a fifth-floor walk-up in Queens, trying to figure out how long it takes for heartbreak to stop feeling like a sledgehammer to the ribs.
Fuck him.
And fuck me, for thinking I had a chance.
Because Crash and Carol?
Yeah. That worked. That fit. That was movie-night leftovers and burn-your-mouth kisses and folding each other’s underwear like it meant something.
That was real.
But Alexander fucking Vanderbilt and Carol from Queens? What a fucking joke.
What’s the romcom angle there, huh?
Cinderella, but she’s got student loans and a night shift, and Prince Charming’s got a penthouse and a publicist? Fuck off. That’s not romance, that’s a punchline.
Heir to a legacy.
I’m heir to a laundry basket of scrubs that smell like antiseptic and half the borough’s blood types.
He wears Rolex.
I wear compression socks and a ponytail I haven’t redone since Wednesday.
He’s got a goddamn chauffeur.
I once got in a screaming match with an MTA conductor because the L train skipped my stop.
So yeah.
Crash—who couldn’t remember how to work the dishwasher and had the audacity to look good in my thrift-store sweatpants—he made sense.
He was mine.
But Alex Vanderbilt? That man belongs in a penthouse suite, not in my fifth-floor walk-up dodging cockroaches with a bum arm and a heart too fucking big.
And me?
I was stupid enough to think I could keep both.
That I could have the man and the mystery.
Turns out the moment you give a man his name back, the rest of him remembers how far out of your league he actually is.