16. Sloane
SIXTEEN
SLOANE
I navigated back to my room with my hands shoved deep into my pockets, my face wet, the fragments of the conversation settling like broken glass around me.
I hadn't seen any of it coming. I hadn't expected to confess the truth about my father. I hadn't expected Xavier to stand there, his jaw locked like granite, and coldly tell me he'd have let his whole life burn before he let me make that call for him.
And I hadn't braced for the barrage that followed: My whole life was yours. You had no right. Stop making decisions for me.
I'd stood in that corridor, handed him the most agonizing secret of my life, and he'd refused to believe it. That was the realization crushing down on me as I walked.
The argument didn't gut me, and neither did the sight of him walking away. What gutted me was that there was nothing left I could do about it. I couldn't force him to believe me, I had zero evidence to prove it, and I was going to have to drag that helplessness around for the rest of my life.
I pressed my palms against my swollen eyes as I walked.
He'd stared at me right before he turned his back, his jaw set, his dark eyes offering no grace.
After all those years, after every toxic choice I'd made just to keep his life intact and shielded from my family, his face when I finally told him the truth was the face of a man who'd already settled on his verdict.
He believed I'd invented my father's threat as a dramatic excuse in a dark hallway, once the easier explanations ran dry.
And the bitter irony was that I understood why.
I'd never given him a single reason to trust me with anything.
I'd mailed a devastating package and a toxic note, then shown up years later and pushed back into his orbit with no right to be there.
I had no standing to demand his trust now.
I needed him to believe me, he didn't, and I was going to have to figure out how to survive that.
I reached the suite and let myself in.
Andrew had left the bedside lamp on and sat on the edge of the mattress with his shoes still on, his phone face-down beside him. He looked up the second the door clicked shut, his blue eyes zeroing in on my face.
"What happened?" he asked.
I ignored the question and crossed to the bathroom. I ran cold water over my hands, splashed my face, and patted it dry with a thick towel. My eyes were bloodshot and swollen, and there was no cosmetic fix for that. I walked back out and sank into the armchair across from the bed.
I'd been turning this over the whole walk back.
The Xavier situation was a separate category of pain I wasn't equipped to sort through right now, so I made myself focus on the Andrew situation instead.
I agonized over what it meant that I'd boarded a flight to Hawaii willing to use him as a prop in a performance he didn't even know he was part of.
He'd been honest with me from the beginning.
He laid out the arrangement, named what he was after, and I'd smiled and pretended to be a willing participant while spending every meal and every afternoon unable to keep myself away from another man.
Andrew deserved better than that. He hadn't done a single thing to deserve the crossfire I'd dragged him into.
And then there was Eliza. I hadn't spent nearly enough time thinking about Eliza. She'd boarded a flight with Xavier, and I'd spent the whole week watching them, logging their interactions, too consumed by my own wreck to see her as a person at all.
She was a woman in a committed relationship who'd flown to a tropical island, only to watch the man she came with drift toward someone else every available hour, and she'd refused to make a scene about it.
I'd been foolish and selfish, and this week wasn't something I'd ever be able to look back on with a clean conscience.
I couldn't keep using the people around me to prop up my own pride and calling it moving on.
"I need to talk to you," I said.
Andrew waited. He stayed seated with his hands resting flat on his thighs, his blue eyes fixed on me, his face open and unbraced.
In my head, I'd imagined this being easier if he bristled, pushed back, or acted like a jerk to make me feel justified in ending it.
He wasn't going to do any of that. I was going to have to sit in the full discomfort of what I was about to do with no excuse to hide behind.
I stared down at my hands.
"You asked me to think about it," I started, my voice barely above a whisper.
"About whether I could try. Whether we could build something real out of this arrangement.
" I took a jagged breath. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about it.
I know what I want now. And the honest truth is that until I stop wanting it, I'm never going to be capable of wanting something else.
Not for real." I lifted my eyes to meet his.
"Pretending otherwise isn't fair to you. "
He looked down at the carpet, taking it in, then lifted his gaze back to me.
"I understand," he murmured.
"I'm so sorry, Andrew."
"Please, don't be." He straightened a little.
"But I want to be transparent with you too.
" He picked up his phone, turning the dark screen over in his hands before setting it back down.
"This arrangement was never only about romance.
You know the math. There are enormous assets at stake here, your father's holdings, the merger, everything Henry built this pipeline toward.
I'm not asking you to change your mind. But I think you need to understand the size of what you're walking away from. "
"I know what it costs," I said firmly.
"It's a staggering amount of leverage. And we don't have to be in love for this to work, Sloane.
That was never the requirement. Plenty of arrangements like this run fine without it.
We could build something livable. You'd get a level of independence you don't have now, I'd get the leverage I came for, and neither of us would ever have to pretend to feel things we don't."
I stared at him. He wasn't wrong about a single word. He was practical, he was offering me a logical exit, and I wasn't built to survive it.
"It's true love that I want," I confessed.
"That's all it is. I don't care about the money.
I never have. The empire was never mine, and I was never going to treat those assets like they were.
" I shook my head. "You'd never blow up your whole corporate life for a feeling.
I understand that. I'm not judging your map.
But I would. I'd burn everything to the ground for it, and that's what I'm going to do.
I'm not going to stop wanting the love I want just because it's inconvenient. "
He sat quietly, absorbing the finality of it.
I'd already wrecked Xavier once. I'd devastated him when I was young and paralyzed by terror, and I'd spent eight years convincing myself it was the only survival option.
Then I'd flown to Hawaii and hurt him all over again.
I'd been reckless with his heart, reckless with Andrew's time, reckless with Eliza's dignity.
I was worn out by the version of myself I'd become, and I was finished being her.
He gave a respectful nod. He stood, grabbed his leather duffel from the foot of the bed, and unzipped it on the mattress.
He packed without rushing, folding his shirts, rolling his belts, tucking his toiletry kit into the side pocket.
He wasn't performing calm. He was just calm.
I watched his steady hands and felt the tension finally drain from my own shoulders.
He scooped his keycard off the nightstand.
"For whatever it's worth," he offered, pausing at the threshold, "I hope you find what you're looking for."
"I hope you do too," I replied. "I mean that."
He stepped into the hallway, pulling the heavy door shut, and the latch clicked with a finality I felt in my teeth.
The suite went silent.
I stayed put in the armchair. I didn't move to the bed, flip on the lights, or reach for my phone to distract myself. The single bedside lamp threw a small circle of yellow light in the dark room, and I sat inside that glow and let the quiet settle over me.
The Andrew arrangement was dead, and I was no longer pretending to move on from Xavier while my heart did the opposite.
Every spinning plate I'd been trying to balance had crashed, and the only thing left in the wreckage was the guilt I'd been burying underneath it.
It pressed down on me, the truth of having gutted a man who'd never deserved it, having had eight years to sit with it, and having done nothing healing with the time.
I'd hurt Xavier. I'd damaged him so badly that he couldn't believe me when I finally handed him the raw truth, and that was the tragedy I was going to have to live with.
I wanted the history to be different. I'd have rewritten the whole timeline if I could go back and be a braver girl, one willing to look her father dead in the eye and refuse the ultimatum.
But I couldn't go back. Xavier had moved on.
He had Eliza, he had a life he was building, and he had a sapphire ring he was going to use.
The best thing I could do for both of us now was to stop pulling at the threads.
I needed to let him have the peace he was building and stop being the hurricane that kept making landfall in his life.
I was going to try to move on for real this time, without the performance, without chasing him while I told myself I wasn't, without lying to myself about my intentions.
I'd been dragging Xavier's ghost around for years, and his memory had shaped everything: the location of the studio, the isolation in the city, every romantic relationship I'd blown up before it could turn serious.
I needed to put the ghost down. Not to stop loving him, just to try to live anyway.
I turned his parting words over in my mind.
He'd been right that I kept making unilateral decisions for everyone in my blast radius, that I bulldozed into his life and wrecked what he was trying to build, that my whole presence on this trip had only added fresh pain to a man who'd survived enough of it.
I'd never meant to hurt him, and the tragedy was that my intentions had never mattered.
I fell asleep slumped in the armchair with the bedside lamp still burning. When I jolted awake, the room was pitch black and the muscles in my neck were screaming.
My phone rattled on the desk.
I reached for it and saw my father's name glowing on the screen. Andrew must have called him the second he walked out of my room. I'd been bracing for this.
I swiped to answer.
"Is it Xavier?" No hello, no warning, nothing.
"No," I answered, my voice raspy with sleep. "I've told you this before. It isn't that simple."
"Answer the damn question, Sloane."
"I am answering it. It isn't Xavier." I sat up straighter, wincing at the stiffness in my neck.
"I made a mistake coming on this trip with Andrew.
I knew before I even boarded the flight that it was never going to work.
We have different philosophies about what a successful life is supposed to look like.
Different metrics for what matters. I didn't want him then. I don't want him now."
"This is not the time—"
"And yes," I bulldozed over him, my voice rising.
"The only man I've ever wanted was Xavier.
You took him from me. You made that threat.
And now I'm supposed to quietly live with the fallout of that decision, and I am, and I will.
But I'm not going to survive it by marrying some corporate stranger I don't give a damn about just because it balances your ledger. "
He went terrifyingly quiet.
"This is not the time to indulge your feelings," he warned, his voice dropping to a dangerous register.
"This has nothing to do with my feelings," I fired back, exhausted. "This is me being bone-deep tired. I'm tired, Dad. I'm so damn tired of all of it."
"I'll fix this," he said coldly, and the line cut to static before I could get another word out.
I sat gripping the dead phone in the dark.
I had no idea what kind of pressure he was going to apply next.
He'd been shaping the architecture of my life for as long as I'd been alive, and I'd spent years trying to crawl out from under his shadow.
I wasn't free yet. I could feel it. The pull of him, the reach of his decisions, his ability to make himself the center of gravity even when I thought I was making a choice for myself.
I wanted to be different. I'd wanted to be a different woman for a long time, and I'd made progress in the easy areas that didn't cost me anything while avoiding the battles that did.
I wanted to live my own life, be my own person, and stop letting his version of my future stand in for a breathable one.
And I wanted, if there was even a microscopic chance left to want it, to somehow earn Xavier's forgiveness.
Getting him back wasn't the goal anymore.
I'd let go of that somewhere in the dark corridor, somewhere in the space between my life was yours and I've chosen Eliza. What I wanted now was to stop being the thing that kept hurting him, and for him to know, down in his marrow, that I'd been telling him the truth.