Chapter Forty-Four—Ethan
I’m awake before five.
The suite is dark except for the thin line of light under the curtains.
I sit at the table with my laptop open and the screen untouched.
Through the bedroom door I can hear Andrew’s breathing.
Liam is wherever Liam ends up—probably sideways across the mattress, one arm off the edge.
Riley is between them, curled under the blanket she pulled from the closet two nights ago because the hotel one is too thin.
I’ve been looking at the door for twenty minutes.
I’m not cutting Connor out.
I’ve run every version of this twice over and I keep landing in the same place. Harrington’s offer is clean. Controlled. Exactly what I spent years positioning for.
And it would cost Riley her brother.
I close the laptop.
I wake the others just after six. Andrew is up first, sitting on the edge of the bed before I’ve finished saying his name.
Liam takes thirty more seconds and arrives at the couch with his eyes half-open and his expression already alert—he reads the room before I’ve said a word.
Riley stirs, and I start to say she can keep sleeping, but she sits up and shakes her head.
“I want to hear this,” she says.
I tell them all of it. The offer. The structure. What we gain. What Connor loses. I don’t soften any of it.
Liam stands up halfway through. “So Harrington cleans up the deal and all we have to do is make Connor disappear.”
“That’s the offer.”
“That’s not a deal. That’s a setup.” His voice is sharp now, all the ease gone. “Connor helped build this thing. He doesn’t get erased because he had a bad week.”
“I know.”
Liam stops. Looks at me. “Wait. You already decided.”
“Yes.”
“Then why are we—”
“Because you deserved to hear all of it,” I say. “And so did she.”
He looks at Riley. Then back at me. His shoulders drop. “Alright. Good. Yes.” He rubs his face. “Sorry. I was ready to fight you on it.”
“You wouldn’t be you if you weren’t,” I say.
Andrew, from the window: “We’re with you.”
I call Connor’s room and ask him to come up to the suite. He arrives twenty minutes later—hands in his pockets, face guarded, posture braced for another fight.
“Harrington offered to move forward without you,” I tell him. No preamble. “I turned it down.”
Connor goes very still. “You did what?”
“The original structure stands. You stay in.”
He looks at me. Something passes between him and Andrew—a look I’m not part of and don’t need to be.
“I’m not thanking you for this,” Connor says. His voice has gone rough. “But I’m not walking away from it either.”
“I’m not asking for thanks.”
He exhales through his nose. “Let’s call Harrington.”
We do it together. Speaker on the table, all four of us around it. I tell Harrington the structure stands, Connor stays, and we’re prepared to discuss governance adjustments.
Harrington goes quiet.
Long enough that Liam shifts beside me and I watch Riley hold very still.
“Respect the choice,” Harrington says finally. “But it complicates things. Tighter governance. Slower timeline. Slightly reduced equity on your end—and a board seat on our side. You understand what you’re accepting.”
“I do.”
Another pause. “Then we have a deal.”
When the call ends, the room stays still for a moment. Then Liam claps me on the shoulder, hard—says something that gets swallowed by the exhale he lets out. Andrew sits back and nods. Connor looks at his shoes.
“This was the right call,” Connor says.
Nobody answers. We don’t need to.
He picks up his jacket from the back of the chair. He’s almost at the door when he stops.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he says. He’s looking at the wall, not me. “Keep me in.”
“I know.”
“So why did you?”
I think about how to answer that honestly. “Because Riley would have known,” I say. “And I wasn’t willing to be the reason she had to choose.”
His hand stays on the doorframe.
“That’s not how I expected you to be,” he says.
“I know.”
He nods once, almost to himself, and lets himself out.
Riley crosses the room and puts her arms around me and doesn’t say anything. I hold on.
What I gave up was real.
What I kept was too.