4. Sloane #2
"Xavier," I breathed, the name scraping my throat.
"It's good to see you," he said, his tone mild. His face stayed open and polite, the frictionless expression you offer a stranger you hold zero unresolved feelings for.
"You too." I forced my spine straight. "How have you been?"
"Well. And you?"
"Good." I pinned my hands flat against my sides. "Things have been great. And your clinic?"
"Thriving. More of the same."
He pulled out Olivia's abandoned chair and sat. I sank back into my own seat, realizing with a spike of panic that we were sharing the same six feet of air for the first time in eight years.
The pull of him beside me was immediate, gravitational. I strangled my phone in my lap and stared at the linen tablecloth.
"We don't have to hate each other, Sloane," he said.
My shoulders locked.
I'd braced for glacial cold. I'd braced for surgical cruelty that tells you how much damage you caused without lifting its volume.
I'd braced to be invisible to him, or to wither under a glare that carried every vicious insult he was too refined to scream out loud.
I'd spent years convincing myself that if our paths ever crossed again, the hatred would be there, and it would be deserved.
At least his hatred would mean I'd mattered enough to leave a scar.
What I'd failed to brace for was mild indifference.
"Relationships end," he continued, his tone reasonable. "It's a normal part of life. There's no reason to carry this awkward tension between us."
The vile letter I'd mailed him, the horrific words I'd chosen, the targeted cruelty I'd weaponized to make sure he never came looking for me: every piece of that wreckage was enough to justify a lifetime of tension. And yet he sat beside me, easy as anything, waving it off as ancient history.
"I want you to know something," he added, conversational. "What you wrote in that note? You were right. I didn't deserve a woman like you. Not back then." His dark eyes swept the banquet hall. "Your honesty pushed me to make something of my life. So in a strange way, I should be thanking you."
I searched his profile with no idea what my own face was giving away.
I'd written those venomous words because I needed him to swallow the lie.
I needed him to believe, down to his marrow, that I was a gold-digging monster who valued a fat bank account over love.
I needed him to think I saw his residency as a pathetic failure, that I walked away because he couldn't afford me.
I wrote it to be believed. I mailed it, and I spent every waking day since agonizing over how badly it must have wrecked him to read it.
That damage was the whole point. It was the brutal mechanism I used to protect his future from my father.
His hand slid across the table and settled over mine. My fingers had been picking at my cuticles without me noticing, a nervous tic I fell back on whenever I had nowhere safe to put the anxiety. His warm palm covered my frantic fingers and stilled them.
His hand was so warm. It always had been the steady hand of a surgeon.
"There's nothing stopping us from being friendly," he said. "We don't have to waste energy hating each other."
He flashed a genuine smile, dark eyes holding mine. "You being this quiet isn't like you. I've never known you without a sharp comeback."
"I'm just… surprised." My voice came out small, stripped of its usual armor. "I really thought you'd still hate me."
He paused, one broad shoulder lifting in an easy shrug.
"Hating you after all this time would mean I'd been thinking about you," he said. "And honestly? I've barely thought about you at all. When I saw you across the room earlier, I was struggling to remember what you looked like."
I stared at him, the air emptying out of me. "So I was never relevant to your life?"
He hesitated. His jaw shifted once, his eyes dropping to the tablecloth before flicking back up to mine.
"You were relevant once," he said. "But the moment I opened your package, you stopped being."
He pushed back his chair and stood.
"I should go find my sister." He buttoned his jacket. "It was good to see you again, Sloane."
I sat paralyzed, watching him walk away.
He worked the crowded room with easy charm, stopping to greet familiar faces, resting a loving hand on Violet's shoulder, his deep voice carrying a warm laugh I was too far away to hear. The sea of guests parted for him and closed the second he passed. He never looked back.
I didn't move.
I'd spent eight years carrying what I'd done to save him. I'd built the whole foundation of my adult independence with the guilt of that sacrifice buried right underneath it.
I'd thought about him when my life was chaos, and I'd thought about him when my life was quiet.
He had been the gravitational axis I'd organized my entire universe around, even when that meant forcing myself to stay away from him.
And he had barely thought of me at all.
I'd spent eight years mourning a man who had moved on without effort, a man who took the broken pieces I handed him, built a spectacular empire, and then thanked me for leaving.
I'd been such a fool.