24. Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
~DECLAN~
I don’t have a goddamn clue what I’m doing.
It’s been six hours since Darcy walked back into the hotel and I stood on a Miami beach trying to find answers in the sound of the ocean, and I'm standing on the private tarmac at Opa-locka Executive Airport watching the ground crew load my bag onto the Shaw Group jet.
The Miami morning is already thick with heat.
Ninety degrees before eight AM, the south Floridian humidity making my shirt stick to my skin, the sun low and blinding as it bounces off the tarmac.
The private jet is ready.
The Tulum deal is closed.
The gala is done.
And Darcy has been silent since she walked back into the hotel at midnight.
Victoria tracked her phone — still in the city, which I already knew because I had my driver Antonio watching the hotel entrance until four AM.
And, if all that weren’t enough, Quinn confirmed she'd had a conversation with Jessica late last night.
"What about?" I'd barked over the phone when he had the balls to call.
"Women business," Quinn said, like a man who has been married six weeks and has already learned which questions to stop asking. "I don't know and I don't intend to find out."
"Quinn—"
"Declan. Women business. I'm staying out of it and so are you."
Which is how I know it's bad.
Quinn avoiding information is a very bad sign.
I pull out my phone, calling my executive assistant Victoria, and she picks up on the second ring.
"You're calling me on my paid time off," she says.
"Good morning to you too."
"It is my PTO."
"I'm aware of what PTO is."
"Are you? Because you've called me four times this week."
"Twice."
"Four times. I have the call log."
"Two of those were accidental."
"You don't accidentally call people, Declan. You're the most deliberate human being I've ever met."
Unfortunately true.
"I need a status update," I say.
"On what? I'm on PTO. My status is horizontal."
"On the annulment."
A pause.
"The annulment," she repeats.
"Yes."
"The annulment that has been processing quietly for the past two months while you've been—" She stops. "While circumstances have been evolving."
"That one. Yes."
"Nine days," she says. "Nine days and it processes automatically if there's no contest filed."
"And if there's a contest?"
"Then it doesn't process. Then it becomes a divorce proceeding instead of an annulment, which is significantly more complicated and significantly more public."
"Right."
"Declan."
"What?"
"Why are you asking me about contesting the annulment at seven AM from what sounds like an airport?"
"I'm just confirming the timeline."
"You've confirmed the timeline six times. You have it memorized. You could recite the annulment statute in your sleep." Her voice shifts, that particular Victoria shift from professional to 'I know you’re up to something'. "You want to contest it."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't not say it."
"That's a double negative."
"It's a perfectly valid grammatical construction and you know exactly what I mean."
The ground crew finishes loading the bags, and the pilot gives me a nod from the top of the steps.
I hold up one finger.
"She's pregnant," I say.
Silence ensues — a special brand of Victoria silence that I’ve learned long ago not to question.
"Okay," Victoria says finally, very quietly.
"That's it? Okay?"
"I'm thinking."
"Think faster."
"I'm thinking," she says again, "about the last time you asked me something you didn't already know the answer to." A pause. "I can't find one."
I don't say anything to that.
"Eleven years," she says. "You've never once called me and not known what you wanted. You call me when you've already decided and need someone to execute." Another pause. "So what's actually happening right now?"
The bay is going gold in the early heat as a pelican crosses the water.
I watch it.
"I don't know," I sigh, feeling the breath down to my toes, "what's real."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean—" I hesitate, trying to locate the thing I've been circling since midnight.
"Her father. My father. the twenty-four years between them.
And she was right there the whole time and she didn't tell me.
" The words come out flat, factual—almost as if I keep them that way they'll hurt less. "I don't know if any of it was—"
"Don't," Victoria says.
"Don't what."
"Don't finish that sentence. You know it wasn't."
"Do I."
"Yes." Her voice is very even. "You do."
Turning from the plane, I face the water, thinking about Darcy at a resort bar, furious and flushed, telling me exactly what she thought of me, using my fists to solve problems with approximately zero regard for who I was.
"Your father trusted his best friend," Victoria says carefully. "And that man spent fifteen years inside the trust before he used it."
"I know the story."
"I'm not telling you a story. I'm asking you something." Victoria exhales. "What did you do, after?"
"After what."
"After your father died. After the company nearly went under. After you figured out what a friendship costs when you trust the wrong person." She waits. "What did you do?”
I know what she's getting at.
"I handled it," I say.
"You disappeared," she corrects. "Into the back end of that company. Let Wyeth be the face. Let Quinn handle the relationships. You became—" She hesitates. "—infrastructure."
"Someone had to."
"I know. Someone had to. And you were right to do it." A beat passes. "For a while."
"But now you don't know how to trust someone who got that close," she continues. "Because the last person who got that close to your family…"
Victoria lets the end of her sentence trail off, but we both know where it was going.
And that’s when it hits me.
Last night.
With Darcy.
When I told her I needed time.
The memory of it arrives without warning.
Her beautiful face on the beach. The way she said okay like she'd been expecting it.
Like she'd already made room for being left.
And that’s the kicker, isn’t it?
Because when you’re born to the sorts of men we were born to — narcissists who suck the air out of every room — you wind up doing it your whole life…
Making yourself smaller.
Making it easy for people to go.
I think about a young woman who legally changed her name and moved to a couch in Atlanta and built something from nothing because she'd rather start over entirely than become what she'd came from.
I think about me watching her walk back toward the hotel.
Not chasing.
Not bargaining.
Just walking in the sand with her shoes in her hand like she already knew how this ended.
Like she thought she deserved it.
I know that feeling more than most.
In fact, I've spent forty-seven fucking years cultivating that exact skill — the art of making myself so indispensable, so relentlessly useful that no one ever gets close enough to notice that underneath all of it, I'm still the twenty-three-year-old who watched his father's poor choices in people make him lose everything.
And smiled dutifully at the funeral.
I never forgave anyone who got too close after that.
Including myself.
The pilot is watching me from the top of the steps, and I look at my phone.
Nine days.
"Don't do anything yet," Victoria says. "Get on the plane. Go home. Sleep. You've been awake for—how long?"
"Twenty-six hours."
"Go home and sleep and don't make any decisions about your marriage or the rest of your life from an airport tarmac in Miami in July."
"That's your professional advice?"
"That's my human advice. My professional advice is that you're paying your lawyer an enormous retainer and you should probably call him."
"And if I can't sleep?"
"Then stare at the ceiling. But do it in New York." A beat. "Sir."
I almost smile.
Almost.
"Thank you for your input, Victoria."
"You're welcome. This conversation is going on your account as a billable hour."
"It's your PTO."
"Then it's two billable hours."
She hangs up, and I stand on the tarmac for another moment, the Miami sun heavy on my shoulders.
Nine days.
Nine days to decide what to do about my marriage, my life.
With a swear to the heavens and my heart in my throat, I climb the stairs to get on the plane, knowing I don't have an answer.
At least not yet.
But I’m getting closer.