CHAPTER 52
Sebastian
I hadn’t set foot in the field since the night I proposed.
Nine years, and I’d told myself it was distance, scheduling, the thousand small tyrannies of running an empire.
It was cowardice. A man doesn’t return to the scene of the best thing he ever did and then destroyed.
He builds a company tall enough to see over it and calls that living.
But she came when I asked. That was the thing I couldn’t reason my way past: that after everything, when I said Grasse, when I said the field, Adeline Hart got in the car.
We came up through the rows in the last of the light, and then the light went, and the jasmine did what jasmine does at nightfall.
It opened. The whole hillside exhaled at once, green and white and impossibly sweet, that accord I had smelled in a bottle worth four hundred million dollars and never once deserved.
Somewhere behind us Theo was asleep against Delphine’s shoulder in the car, his copper head tipped back, and I was aware of him the way you’re aware of your own pulse: the small grey-eyed proof that I had been given a family and thrown it into the dark.
Ada stood a few feet off, arms folded against the cool, her face turned up to the first stars. The girl I’d knelt for had been twenty-one and drunk on this smell. This woman was thirty, and she smelled the field like a professional now, reading it, unafraid of it. That was mine to answer for too.
“You proposed here,” she said. Not a question. “Right about here.”
“Two rows down.” My voice came out rough. “I’ve thought about the exact spot more than I’ve thought about anything I’ve built since.”
She didn’t turn. “Sebastian.”
“Let me say it wrong,” I said. “I’ll only get it right if I’m allowed to start by getting it wrong.”
That turned her. Green eyes, the freckles I’d once counted, the wariness I had put there and could not take back with any amount of money, which was the whole and terrible lesson of the last four years.
“I knelt here once,” I said, “and told you that you were the only thing in the world I couldn’t buy.
And then I spent our marriage trying to buy it anyway.
A lab instead of my attention. A name instead of my loyalty.
I gave you things, Ada, because things were cheap for me and the other was not.
” I made myself hold her eyes. “I am not the man who knelt in this field. That man believed his mother, and Chloe, and his own pride, over the one true thing he had. I buried him. I would dig him up and kill him again if I could.”
The wind moved through the rows. Petals came loose and went pale across the dark.
“So I won’t ask you to be that girl again,” I said.
“She said yes before I finished the sentence, and she was wrong to, and I have never forgiven myself for being worth so little of what she gave. I don’t want your yes to cost you nothing.
I want it to cost you everything, and for you to spend it anyway, with your eyes open, knowing exactly what I am. ”
“And what are you?” Her voice was very quiet. “Now.”
I understood, standing there, what I had come to offer.
I had rehearsed leverage on the drive: the custody I’d never contest, the credit restored, éternel signed back to her name, Vale Group opened like a vault.
I’d built a case the way I build every case.
And the field had taken it all out of my hands, because none of it was mine to give.
The credit was already hers. The child was already hers.
The name that had ruined us I would not insult her by offering.
I had come with nothing.
“I have no company to put behind me tonight,” I said.
“No board. No leverage. I burned every card I had the day I let a room believe another woman made your soul. I have no name to give you that you’d want.
Chloe’s exposed, the Vale name means less every hour, and I’ve never in my life been gladder to have less to bargain with.
” My throat closed and I let it. “I’m not offering you Sebastian Vale of Vale Group.
There’s nothing left of him worth having.
I’m offering you the man who’s still stupidly, permanently in love with you, four years too late and finally, finally, arriving with empty hands.
That’s all I’ve got. Myself. It’s the first thing I’ve ever brought you that was actually mine. ”
And then I did the only thing the field had ever taught me.
I got down on one knee in the night-blooming jasmine, exactly where I’d knelt at twenty-eight and thrown my life away, and the scent broke open around me, green and white, our whole history rising off the crushed leaves.
I didn’t reach for a ring. I’d left it in the car.
This time I brought nothing but the offer.
“Marry me, Adeline,” I said. “Not to be my wife. To let me spend the rest of my life actually deserving you. Say no and I’ll drive you home and love you from across the world without a single condition. But I had to kneel here again, where I broke it, and ask.”
In the entire history of us, Ada opened her mouth to answer me, and nothing came out.