CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Two days after Christmas
The elevator feels even faster on the way down. I’m grateful, but it also makes me feel like my heart and lungs were left suspended in the air at the thirty-first level. I can’t breathe when we spill out onto the street in front of the Shard.
My composure is snow in the rain, cold and fragile and melting rapidly away.
I’m desperate to put distance between Jake and me, but hustling in high heels on a busy London street in the dark is a guaranteed rolled ankle.
I make a break to the left because it seems less crowded than my other options.
Behind me, Jake says, “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” I shout over my shoulder. “Away.”
“Evie, you have to let me explain,” Jake calls after me. “This is exactly what I brought you here to talk about tonight.”
I skid to a stop. Other pedestrians flow past me like I’m a stone in a stream. “You planned this?”
“Christ, no. I meant … to tell you everything. Tonight was the first time I’ve seen my father in person for more than a year.”
“Why here, Jake?”
“It wasn’t—” Jake’s gaze slides away and he exhales, hard. “It wasn’t the only thing I planned to tell you tonight.”
I have things I want to tell you tonight. They, ah, have to be in a certain order.
God, I want to scream at the sky.
“I wanted to make sure it was clear how important this was to me,” he says. “How important you are.”
“Your dad called you Jameson. Is Jake even your real name?”
“I’m named after him. Jameson Kiernan. Everyone called me JK when I was little. Then that turned into Jakey. Eventually became Jake.”
“What’s the name of your firm, Jake?” I already know the answer, but I want to hear him say it.
“Frost, Acton, and Isaacs.”
My heart collapses into my belly. I might throw up. Frost, Acton, and Isaacs is one of the most notoriously ruthless firms undermining environmental progress in the last thirty years.
“Choices made in parallel, Jake? Your firm actively promotes using corporate courts against governments trying to take climate action. For profit. It’s literally not possible for our professional lives to be more different.”
“It’s not my firm,” Jake says. “Why is it easier for you to believe that’s the real me, rather than the man you’ve known this month?”
“I have no idea who you are. How you could … participate in what that firm does. Was the nonprofit a lie?”
“No.”
“Then what, Jake? Make it make sense.”
His jaw flexes like he’s trying to chew his words into something more palatable. “He played you, like he plays everyone and everything else. There’s no winning with him, Evie.”
“How do you know?” I fire back. “Have you even tried?”
Jake clenches and unclenches his hands. “I’ve spent the last three years trying to get out.”
“You try until you succeed. That’s how it works.”
“Ah. Is that how it works? Is that why you’re running like a frightened mouse?”
“This isn’t my fight.”
“So your spine is situational, is it?”
“Yes.” I raise my chin, defiant now. “I’m not equipped to go head-to-head with a man like your father.”
“Neither was I, Evie.” It’s the first time Jake has ever raised his voice when he’s spoken to me.
There’s more than frustration in it. It’s pain.
He closes his eyes, resetting. Steadier, he says, “From the time I was old enough to understand it, my father always made it clear what my place was. Eldest son. The legacy. I was assigned it, Evie. And after Mum divorced him, I accepted it, because it meant I could take care of her and my siblings. School, debt, all the problems they never realized they never had. Including him. My siblings have never had to deal with him the way I have. Because I have.”
I back towards a wall, out of the way of the people around us.
Jake follows. He catches me by the arm when my heel gets stuck in a crack in the sidewalk, and I stumble.
He pulls me gently to him, and I let him take me.
Like the night I fell on the ice at Somerset House, he angles his body to shield me from the flow of pedestrians.
“I told you the truth about Juno.” Jake mirrors my steps, keeping me close. “She isn’t my fiancée. We were never together.”
“I believe you.”
“And about my father?” When I nod, he says, “So you’re not angry?”
“I’m not angry, Jake. I’m sad.” I curve my hands around his lapels. “But not for the reasons you think.”
“Tell me, then.”
“This is all too big for me. The scale of your life—” A tear slips loose, glittering for a moment on the sequins of my sleeve before soaking in. “Juno is like … a symbol. People like her belong in your world. Not me.”
Night wind comes in from the north, scattering the waves of his hair.
God, this would be so much easier if he were a little less beautiful.
I hook both my hands around the back of his neck to pull him down for a kiss.
His mouth trembles against mine. “I fell in love with you, Jake. I tried not to. But you had to make it so damned impossible.”
He inhales, sharp and ragged. “I love you too, Evie. Thank god—”
I drop my grip on his coat. “No.” I pull away. “Let me go.”
Confusion clouds his face. “I thought you weren’t angry.” He stiffens, but he lets me go.
“I’m not. I wish I was. It would make this easier.”
“Wait.” He looks at me like I’m holding a stick of dynamite in one hand and a lit match in the other. “Make what easier?”
“I’ve just been borrowing this life. Borrowing London.” I take a step back. I’m afraid if he touches me again, I’ll scatter like a windblown dandelion. “Borrowing you.”
There’s a black cab nearby on the street now. Empty.
I truly do understand why he didn’t tell me about this sooner.
If anything, though, it makes it that much worse.
All it does is prove I was wrong to stop protecting myself.
God, I’m right back to who I was when I arrived here, aren’t I?
Absorbing the fallout of someone else’s mistakes, questioning the validity of my anger, my hurt.
I wish I could summon the sort of sharp, righteous anger that would slice a clean break between us.
But instead, the ache in my heart is magnified by my concern for his, tethering me tight to the very source of my pain.
“I have to go.” I turn and weave through other pedestrians before I lose my nerve.
“Your bag,” he calls after me. “It’s still at my place.”
I don’t turn around. My hand closes on the cab’s door handle.
“All your dresses—”
Swinging the door open, I turn and give him a sad smile. “There’s nowhere in my real life I could wear those dresses, Jake.”
“Where to, please?” the driver says.
“Damnit, this is real life.”
“It was.” My throat is clogged with tears now. “But I’m leaving it in London.”
The driver says, loudly, “You getting in then, love?”
“Please don’t get in that cab, Evie.” Jake’s voice breaks as he shouts after me. “I’m not asking. I’m begging.”
The muscles in my calves clench, my toes curl in the stilettos.
My body balks at what my mind is commanding it to do.
I’ve become two Evies again. One urges flight, the other urges fight.
I’ve been here before, split down the middle by a man I love.
Flight is supposed to be the easier option, but it’s not. Not in moments like this.
Still, I fly.
* * *
I’ve never been to Earl’s this late, so I shouldn’t be surprised to see someone behind the counter I don’t recognize. I’m more than surprised. I’m completely shattered. There are even two people sitting at Jake’s table—a young couple with the audacity to look deeply in love.
The unfamiliar faces bring into sharp focus just how alone I actually am here in London.
The feeling of home that I’ve had has been an illusion.
Once I get on the plane home tomorrow, London, Covent Garden, Cherry, Quinn …
and Jake, will all move on like I was never here in the first place.
Quinn and Cherry will make friends with a new traveler, someone else will sleep in my bed at Paperwhite, and Jake Frost will eventually meet someone new and better suited for him than I ever was. Someone who was always meant to stay.
The barista frowns at me. “You all right?” he says.
God, I must look completely unhinged. My smoky eye has inevitably run down my cheeks, and I can feel the ratty nest of my collapsing chignon bobbing against the back of my neck every time I move. “Ah … sorry, I was just looking for Cherry and Quinn.”
I sit at one of the tables along the wall to text them. I use the group chat that Maddie isn’t in with us. I don’t want to worry her.
Cherry shows up first. She whistles low as she approaches. “Now that’s a fit, love.” She slides into the chair across from me and says to the person behind the bar, “It’s fine, Julian. I’ll close up.”
“Right, boss,” says the strange-to-me barista.
I watch him go, then turn back to Cherry. “You’re the boss?”
“I am. Why do you think I’m here all the bloody time?” Cherry laughs. “Youngest business owner in Covent Garden,” she says proudly. With a soft, cheeky grin, she adds, “At least for now. I seem to be getting older every year. It’s so unfair.”
Quinn arrives shortly after Cherry does.
I’ve never seen either of them out of their plain tees and Grey Earl’s aprons.
Quinn wears a puffer over a hoodie with a screenprint that’s age-softened to a blur of color.
Their jeans are cuffed just high enough to show off chunky wool socks and leather lace-up boots.
Cherry’s in a charcoal wool peacoat over a clay-colored turtleneck tucked into wide-legged jeans.
Again, I’m overwhelmed by the sense that I’m just a visitor here.
I’d give anything to have just a few more days to spend with them outside this coffee shop.
Quinn drags over a chair from an adjacent table and sits on it backwards. “Y’all right?” they say.
“I’m so sorry. But I need a favor.”