15. Sloane #2
"You don't know my father," I countered.
"I know enough."
"You know the public version of him," I said.
"You have no idea who he is behind closed doors.
You don't know what he said to me in that office while the door was locked.
I was twenty-one, I was alone, and I believed every syllable because I'd seen what he did to other people.
He'd never been wrong about what he was capable of.
I would rather have had you whole and building your life and hating me than watch him strip everything from you because of me.
That was the calculation." I held his gaze, terrified.
"That was the only math that made sense. "
His jaw muscles flexed.
"I would have let him burn it all down," he said.
The words landed like a lead weight.
"I would have lost every last piece of it to keep you," he repeated, his voice dangerously quiet.
"If that had been the reality, if you'd just come to me and told me what he said, I would have chosen you.
I loved you so much, Sloane. My whole life, my whole soul, was yours.
I would have walked away from the career, the clinic, all of it, and started over with nothing, as long as I had you. "
He dragged in a rough breath, the steadiness in his voice splintering. "You had no right to make that decision for me. You don't get to decide what I'm willing to lose. Stop making decisions for me. Stop pretending you know what I was supposed to feel."
We were both heaving for breath. The hallway stretched empty and silent around us, and we stood two feet apart with eight years of misunderstanding crushing down on us.
"I don't want to keep doing this," he said, his voice raw. "I don't want to keep walking in circles. I don't even want to know your father exists. What we had is done. It's been done a long time. I'm not going back."
"What if I still love you?" I challenged, my voice breaking. "What if I want us back? What if I want to return to who we were?"
He studied my face a long time, shoulders slumped, hands hanging limp at his sides, and he made no move to come closer.
"What happens the next time things get hard?
" he asked. "What happens when your father, or some other obstacle, steps in again?
Am I just the first thing you decide to throw away?
Because that's exactly what you did before.
" His voice turned raw. "The reason I don't want to fix this isn't because I stopped loving you.
It's because I know I'm the first thing you'll discard when life gets complicated.
You proved it once. Why wouldn't you do it again? To you, I was disposable."
He exhaled, and the anger seemed to drain out of him, leaving something quieter and more worn behind.
"How does it feel," I asked, "knowing you're moving forward with the ring you proposed to me with?"
He turned away from me, his back rigid. He didn't speak for a long time.
"I didn't want to give it to anyone else," he finally admitted.
"I came to this wedding with the ring because I was certain I wanted to give it back to you.
I wanted to close the chapter. I wanted to put the box in your hands and finally be finished.
I came here resolute, wanting nothing to do with you, wanting to be friends at most, wanting to finally move on.
" His shoulders dropped, his back still turned to me.
"But then I saw you, and I couldn't do it. I couldn't hand it back. So now I have two terrible choices. Give it to you, or propose to Eliza with it. And I've chosen Eliza." He turned back to look at me, his eyes shuttered. "I want nothing to do with this anymore. I want nothing to do with us."
The words rippled through me, stinging like acid.
I stared at his face, the jaw I'd traced a hundred times, the eyes I'd known before I understood what love meant.
Every passing year pressed down on me, the burden of what we'd once been and what I'd destroyed.
I felt the terror of that twenty-one-year-old in the locked office, still trying to justify the decision.
"I'm sorry," I rasped. "For all of it. Everything. I'm so sorry."
He looked at me with an expression I couldn't place.
"We need to end this," he said, level. "Whatever this is between us, it has to end."
"Yes," I whispered. "It does."
He turned and walked away.
I stood in the silence of the corridor until the echo of his footsteps faded. I stumbled back through the maze of hallways, through the dim light, until I found the door to my own room.
I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.
I'd never wanted any of this. I'd never wanted to hurt him, and I'd dismantled his life anyway, and now he didn't believe the one truth that might have saved us. I'd watched him walk away twice, once years ago and once just now. This second time was harder, because now I knew what I was losing.
He didn't believe me. He didn't believe a word.
I pressed my palms into my eyes and finally let myself sob, alone, with no one left to witness the wreckage.