17. Xavier
SEVENTEEN
XAVIER
I couldn't stop replaying the confession.
If Sloane's father had threatened to burn down everything I'd built.
If that scenario was real. If that was what happened in that locked office, then she hadn't wanted to leave me.
She'd been terrified, she'd been young, she'd been isolated under her father's thumb, and she'd made the only choice that felt survivable at the time.
If that was true, then the years I'd spent drowning in confusion landed differently.
The sapphire ring burning a hole in my pocket, the story I'd built around her walking away without a word, the theory I'd constructed about her being a woman who could discard love that cleanly, all of it shifted.
I stood by the dark window of the suite, staring out at the crashing ocean, and made myself sit with the fallout of that thought.
The reality of practicing medicine was that it trained my brain to require hard evidence before committing to a conclusion.
A patient walked in with symptoms, I ordered the tests, and I built toward a verifiable answer based on data, not on what I felt.
I'd applied that same discipline to our argument in the corridor.
Sloane claimed her father threatened to destroy my career, I had zero evidence of that threat, so I didn't believe it.
The equation was clean. That was how my brain was built to operate.
But I also knew that refusing to believe a diagnosis wasn't the same as the diagnosis being false.
And I knew, if I was willing to be honest with my own reflection, that a part of me had refused to believe her because accepting it would force me to dismantle every survival story I'd told myself about those years.
It would rewrite the note, the returned package, and what it meant that she'd been capable of ending our life so cleanly. Disbelief was easier than a full revision. I knew the difference between the two, and I'd been lying to myself about which one I was doing.
I didn't believe her. I'd stared her dead in the eyes and told her I didn't believe her. And the honest truth was that I still wasn't sure. Henry Ty was a ruthless man, and torching a no-name resident's career with a few phone calls was within his reach.
But the idea that he'd looked his twenty-one-year-old daughter in the face and laid it out as a flat ultimatum was an accusation that needed more proof than a tearful midnight confession to make it real.
I also knew I hadn't been fair to her. I'd told her there was nothing she could say that would change my mind before she'd even finished saying it. That wasn't the same as listening.
The velvet ring box was still inside my suit jacket. I picked it up off the chair and held it without putting it on.
When I'd looked at her and declared that the best solution was for us to never see each other again, I'd meant it in the moment.
I was less sure now. I'd fired that sentence off as a tactical strike to end the conversation, not because I'd evaluated the outcome.
I was a man who thought things through from every angle, and I'd failed to do that in the hallway.
I draped it back over the chair and walked into the bedroom.
Eliza sat at the vanity mirror, working through her evening skincare routine with graceful and practiced ease, her dark hair pinned up.
I lingered in the doorway, watching her.
What I felt wasn't romantic love, and it wasn't cold indifference either, but a quiet respect that lived between the two.
It was the regard you develop for a partner who'd been honest with you, treated you well, and demanded nothing unreasonable in return.
She caught my reflection in the mirror.
"Where'd you vanish to?" she asked.
"I stepped out for air. I ended up having a conversation with Sloane."
Her hands went still.
She turned around on the stool to face me. She didn't say a word. She set the serum bottle on the dresser and fixed me with a look, her dark brows level, her mouth pressed closed.
I walked over and sat on the edge of the king bed.
I'd been sitting with it in the dark corridor, and I was still sitting with it now.
All these damn years. That was the loop I kept circling.
All these years, and I'd put in the work to move on.
I survived residency, ground through the years after, built the clinic empire, built a respectable life, and convinced myself moving on was a math problem of accumulation: enough time, enough distance, enough forward momentum.
I believed that one random morning I'd look up and the ghost I'd been dragging around would be gone.
The ghost never left.
When I walked into Violet's rehearsal dinner and saw Sloane standing across the room, I'd realized within thirty seconds that all my accumulation hadn't done a single damn thing.
I'd told Sloane I felt trapped in a cage.
It wasn't a cage made of corporate burnout or parental expectations.
It was a cage built out of still being in love with her.
I'd prepared myself to live the rest of my life trapped in it, to get comfortable pacing the same floorboards I'd described to her.
But I couldn't do it. I'd lectured Andrew about how romantic love wasn't a force capable of altering the trajectory of a life.
It was.
Love could strip me down and make me face what I'd been hiding from. And my reflection had been screaming the same truth at me for eight years. I'd refused to look at it.
"I've been lying to myself," I said to the quiet room.
Eliza looked at me.
"Is this about being in love with her?"
"Yes," I breathed.
She let out a slow exhale and looked up at the ceiling for a long moment.
"I knew it the second I saw her again," I went on, my voice rough.
"I knew it before this trip even started, if I'm being honest. I tried not to let her presence derail me.
But every time I stood next to her, I could feel the gravity of it anyway.
" I dropped my gaze to my hands. "Loving that woman is as involuntary as breathing.
Trying to stop is like trying to hold my own head underwater. "
She stayed silent. Then the corner of her mouth pulled into a humorless smirk.
"So this is the end of us."
"Yes," I confirmed. "I'm sorry, Eliza. I shouldn't have kept stringing this along knowing I'm still carrying the ghost of my past. You deserved better than that."
She held my gaze steady.
"You don't have to worry about my heart," she said.
"What we had didn't have real romantic feelings.
I want you to know that. I see this for what it is: a failed partnership, a contract that didn't close, and nothing more.
" She let out a soft exhale, studying my face.
"But honestly? I wish someone would love me with the same intensity you love that woman.
It's clear to anyone paying attention. The two of you are cut from the same cloth. "
I smiled. I couldn't help it.
"You planning to go back to her?" she asked, tilting her head.
"No."
She arched an eyebrow.
"I'm ending things with you because I refuse to keep lying to myself," I clarified.
"That's the only reason. Not because I'm running back to Sloane.
" I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
"I don't even know if what she confessed tonight is true.
And even if it is, I have no guarantee there wouldn't be another crisis where she'd throw me away again at the first sign of friction.
I've been stranded at the bottom of her priority list before.
I won't bet my life on that dynamic again. "
Eliza stayed quiet a moment, working through it. Then she made a thoughtful sound low in her throat.
"Maybe what you see and what's really happening are two different things," she said.
"To you, her actions look like she throws you away the second things get hard.
But to her, it might be that she refuses to let you face the danger of her own trouble.
She might be standing in front of you like a shield, not walking away from you. "
"But what's the point of love," I countered, "if not bracing against the storm together? Holding hands and walking through the wreckage side by side."
"And what if her version of love," she pressed, "is standing in the path of the storm, taking the full hit, so you never have to meet it at all?"
She picked the serum bottle back up and turned to the mirror.
"I don't want to keep dissecting this tonight," she said. "But you can think about what I said."
"Okay," I said.
I understood her boundary. As composed as she was about the breakup, there was something twisted about being dumped and then immediately asked to psychoanalyze the other person's baggage.
We hadn't been in love, but a failed agreement was still a failure, and there was a weight to that.
I had no right to lean on her any further.
I lay back against the mattress and stared at the white ceiling.
If Sloane's brand of love wasn't about bracing against the storm together but about standing in front of it so I wouldn't take the hit, it changed the architecture of our history.
I just didn't know how. It still left me in a dynamic where she made enormous decisions I hadn't been consulted on, deciding what trauma I could handle and what I couldn't without ever letting me weigh in on the risk. That still felt wrong.
But I held onto the thought anyway, the same protective way my thumb kept finding the velvet ring box through the fabric of my jacket. I wanted to see what it felt like to carry it.
Breakfast the next morning happened at the same table, the same expensive chairs, the same view of the crashing water, but the first detail my brain registered was Sloane sitting alone in the seat Andrew usually took.
Eliza settled into the chair beside me. Simon and Violet strolled in a few minutes later, there was a brief round of good mornings, and then the table lapsed into an uncomfortable silence.
Eliza leaned into my space.
"Is she okay?" she whispered, her eyes on Sloane.
I looked across the table. Sloane sat rigid with her black coffee untouched, her gaze fixed somewhere miles past the pavilion, her pale hands folded in her lap. The shadows under her eyes hadn't been there a day ago, and she'd touched neither cup nor spoon since we sat down.
"I don't know," I murmured back.
I reached across the table for the coffee pot, and my eyes locked onto hers. I cocked an eyebrow, a silent question. She held my gaze a half-second before looking away, staring back out toward the water.
"Wait, where's Andrew?" Violet asked, clocking that the headcount was off.
Sloane wrapped both hands around her mug.
"He left the estate," she announced, toneless. "Something came up at work. He had to fly back."
Violet stared at her. Simon became fascinated by his black coffee.
I watched Sloane's pale face: the tight line of her mouth, the way her eyes refused to land on anything in the room.
I thought about what that excuse probably meant, my brain flashing back to the devastation in the dark corridor, and I wanted to ask if she was okay. I kept my mouth shut.
My bruised ego didn't get the right to speak here.
I had no idea what had happened in her suite last night.
I had no idea if the argument between us had triggered whatever haunted expression was on her face now.
Whatever assumption I made now was the same one that had detonated our relationship the first time.
But she wasn't okay. The damage was plain enough from across the table; I didn't need to diagnose the cause to read the symptoms.