19. Sloane
NINETEEN
SLOANE
Sleep wouldn't come.
Work wasn't much better. I still showed up to the studio every day because going through the motions was the only routine I had left.
I opened the shop, flipped on the lights, brewed coffee, and sat with my pending commission sketches.
Mostly I stared at them. The lines were solid.
The ideas tracked. My hands just refused to cooperate.
My own sketches stalled, but the booked work didn't care how I felt. My two o'clock was back for the second half of his sleeve.
He'd been quiet the first time, three weeks earlier, his jaw set and his eyes on the wall while he braced for a pain he was too proud to name. Today he came in looser, carrying a coffee for each of us, and he asked about my weekend before I'd even snapped on my gloves.
I set up, wiped him down, and got the machine humming. For a while we kept it easy, talking about the weather and the playoffs and the guy who'd come in last month wanting his ex's name buried under a tiger.
An hour into the shading, I asked what the new piece was for. Most people had an answer ready, and the ones worth tattooing always did.
"My niece," he said. "She's got a date on the inside of her wrist already. This fills out the rest of it."
"What's the date?"
"The day her mother signed her over to me." He watched the needle move across his skin. "My sister wasn't in a state to keep her, and everybody on God's earth had an opinion about whose fault that was and what I ought to do about it. I stopped asking them and filed the paperwork myself."
"That's a big thing to take on."
"Taking her was the easy part." He flexed the hand I wasn't working on.
"People hated me for it, my sister most of all, for a long while.
I was the man who took her kid." He was quiet a moment.
"I'd sign it again tomorrow. The thing that stays with me is the year before it, when I knew something was wrong in that house and kept telling myself it wasn't my place to step in. "
I kept the needle steady against his arm.
"That's the part that finds you at three in the morning," he said. "The hard thing you go and do, you learn to live with. The one you watched yourself skip just sits there and waits for you."
"You get this philosophical under the needle with everybody?" I asked, keeping my voice light, because the alternative was admitting how close to the bone that cut.
"It's the only place anybody makes me hold still long enough to think." His mouth edged toward a smile. "My wife says I should be paying you double. Half for the ink and half for the counseling."
I laughed, but my hands had gone careful, and my mind was across the city in a study with a mahogany desk, sitting across from a man who had spent thirty years deciding what was best for me and calling it love.
"I've got no use for what-ifs," he said, half to himself, watching the line come together. "A what-if is just a thing you were too much of a coward to go and find out."
I finished the shading without saying much after that.
When it was done, he studied the fresh work for a long time, the name resting between the two dates, the skin already flushing pink around it.
"Worth being the bad guy," he said. "Every single time."
I wiped him down, taped it, and told him to keep it out of the sun. At the door I stopped him, because I didn't want him to be just another arm I'd worked on and forgotten.
"Hey. What's your name again? I'm hopeless with them."
"Marcus."
"Marcus." I shook his hand. "Come back when it's healed and I'll touch up whatever needs it."
"I will." He lifted two fingers off his temple, half a salute, and was gone.
I sat alone in the empty studio with the buzz still ringing in my ears.
I'd been telling myself I'd deal with my father once I was ready. Once I was strong enough, settled enough, far enough out from under him to walk into that house and not shrink. I'd been telling myself that for eight years, and the readiness had never come.
I didn't do anything about it. I rinsed my tubes, wiped down the station, and filed his words away with everything else I wasn't ready to look at. But they wouldn't settle. They kept knocking.
My father wasn't the only hard thing I'd watched myself skip.
My mind kept replaying the Hawaii confrontation. I'd rehashed Xavier's words until they lost all meaning, but it was my own behavior that wouldn't let me go. Stripped of the lies I'd told myself, the truth was ugly. I'd called it moving on. It was nothing so clean.
It gutted me that he'd moved on, or that he'd looked like he had.
What I felt wasn't rage, and it wasn't some debt I thought he owed me.
It was pride, plain and wounded. I'd watched him across the room at Violet's wedding, whole and easy and over me, and I couldn't bear for him to see I was anything less.
So I'd brought Andrew and tried to look like a woman who'd landed on her feet.
But the performance kept failing. I kept swapping seats to end up next to Xavier, kept stretching out every conversation, kept telling myself it was nothing.
It wasn't nothing. I was pulling threads loose in a life I no longer had any right to touch.
Xavier read my actions as a pattern, and he was right. I'd dressed up that same behavior as innocent coincidence. I was lying.
The worst part was that he hadn't moved on. He carried the same burden I did. He'd been trying to look past the damage I'd caused, building a livable life, and I crashed back in and pulled it apart anyway, too consumed with proving I was fine to care what it cost him.
I'd hurt a man who was already bleeding. I'd been selfish and proud, and I refused to admit it until Hawaii burned away my excuses. I didn't deserve Xavier. I wasn't sure I deserved much of anything.
To be fair, he hadn't fought for me either.
He took my packaged ring and vague note without a single question, and when I finally told him the truth in that corridor, that my father had sworn to burn his whole life down, he called it movie-villain fiction and turned to stone.
We'd both walked away from the same fire and blamed the other for the burns.
But with Marcus's words still ringing in my ears, I was tired of keeping score. Keeping score was just another way of sitting in a dark studio waiting for a readiness that was never coming.
Still, why hadn't he believed me? I stood in that dim corridor, told him my father had sworn to burn his whole life to the ground, and watched his face turn to stone.
He dismissed it as movie-villain fiction.
I didn't know how to make him see the truth.
I'd sacrificed our whole future to keep him safe, and he called me a liar for it.
Why couldn't he trust the depth of what I'd felt?
You don't walk away from a years-long relationship and a marriage proposal on a whim.
Why didn't he look at our history and conclude I'd had a catastrophic reason?
Even after I handed him the ugly truth, he refused to sit with it.
He refused to try. I didn't know how to live with that.
I laid all my cards on the table. He walked away. I cut ties with Andrew. Then I spent two days staring at my apartment ceiling, crushed by the exhaustion of a woman who'd played every hand wrong and run out of moves.
I sat with that until the story I'd been telling myself rearranged itself.
For eight years I'd cast my father as the villain and me as the girl who'd had no other move.
But I'd always had a move. I just kept making the same one, dressed two different ways.
With him, I surrendered every choice and called it survival.
With Xavier, I tore every choice out of his hands and called it protection.
The giving up and the taking over looked like opposites, but they grew out of the same scared place.
If I decided how things ended before anyone else got a say, then no one ever got the chance to see the whole of me and stay, or not.
That was the hard thing I'd spent my life walking the long way around.
Standing still with my hands at my sides, letting someone I loved weigh me and choose, knowing the answer might gut me.
I'd never once been brave enough to find out.
Knowing it didn't make me ready to do anything about it. So I did what I'd done for eight years. I locked up the studio, went home, and let the ordinary days fold back over the thought until it almost stayed buried.
Walking toward the shop on Wednesday morning, I nearly collided with someone rounding the corner.
It was Eliza.
We both went still. Her dark eyes widened before smoothing into something composed. We stood on the pavement, neither of us speaking.
"Are you okay?" she asked. "Your last day at the estate seemed rough."
"I'm fine."
Eliza tilted her head, her mouth pressing into a thin line. "I don't buy that. Come sit with me. There's a coffee shop right here."
I almost declined, then gave in, leading her to an espresso bar half a block from my studio. We grabbed a corner table. The chatter muffled the traffic outside.
She set her mug down.
"I knew about you before Hawaii," she said. "Not your name, obviously. But when you date someone, even casually, you sense when their mind is elsewhere. Xavier was checked out most of the time. I knew there was a ghost. I just didn't know whose."
I stared down at my black coffee.
"The trip filled in the blanks."
"Did you hate that I was there?" I asked. "That we kept ending up in the same orbit?"
She turned her mug. "Honestly? I told myself I should. But it was hard to hold a grudge when the dynamic was so obvious. Can I tell you the truth about Xavier and me?"
I looked up.
"It was never a real relationship. Xavier refused to fall in love again, and I didn't want the burden of a commitment either. We settled for comfortable company. It was just an arrangement—an agreement—with no romance, zero expectations."
Xavier had gone looking for something that couldn't wound him. He'd built a fortress with no feeling in it, and I'd spent the whole week assuming he'd cleanly moved on. He hadn't rebuilt his life. He'd barricaded it.
And I was the architect of that.
"Meeting you in Hawaii cleared a few things up." Eliza's gaze dropped to the ink at my wrists. "You aren't someone a man easily forgets. Kind of like a tattoo."
I traced the linework on my skin. A tight knot in my chest loosened.
"Once ink settles in the skin, it's permanent," she said. "Xavier loved you. He tried burying it for years." She offered a wry smile. "He failed, and badly."
He was surviving the same grief in a different room. We'd been mirroring each other's misery without knowing it.
Eliza said their arrangement had no romance in it, but it had still cost a year of her life. She'd chosen him. And now she sat across from the woman who'd haunted her ex's thoughts, telling me to fight for him.
"I'm sorry," I murmured. "I never wanted to be the collateral damage that cost you a year."
"Don't apologize. We're grown women. There's no bad blood here, and we shouldn't hate each other over a man."
"I could never hate you."
"The feeling's mutual." She took a sip of her coffee. "Xavier's trying to understand your choices. Why you left, the situation with your father, all of it. He's working through the fallout. But you need to bridge the gap. He's too stubborn to make the first move."
"How?"
"Go to him. Talk. Stop waiting for the universe to align. I watched you in Hawaii. You know how to be brave when the stakes are high. Do it again."
She was right. I'd blown up my engagement out of terror. My father dictated my reality, and I let him. For eight years I justified my cowardice as protection. If I'd fought back earlier, if I'd stared Henry Ty down and refused to surrender that sapphire ring, I didn't know how it would have ended.
But I hadn't even tried.
I chose submission, and I carried that choice into every part of my adult life.
"I'll fight for him."
"Good."
"Thank you, Eliza. For the grace."
"Maybe we grab a drink sometime. As friends."
"I'd like that."
We stood and shared a brief, real hug. When I pulled back, a small smirk touched the corner of her mouth.
"Go get your man," she said.
I didn't hesitate.
Out on the pavement, I pulled out my phone. Calling Xavier directly felt reckless. I had no guarantee he'd answer, let alone tolerate my voice before I'd drafted a coherent apology. I dialed Violet instead.
"I need Xavier's address. I can't call him blind."
Violet let out a startled laugh. "Just come to my apartment. He lives right down the street. But figure out your pitch first. What are you going to say?"
"I'm going to fight. I should've gone to war for him years ago, and I didn't. I just pray I'm not too late."
"You aren't. Get over here."
I sprinted the few blocks to Violet's building and took the stairs instead of the elevator. At her floor, I rapped my knuckles against the heavy door. Footsteps echoed from inside, then the metallic click of the deadbolt.
She pulled the door open.
Over her shoulder, sitting rigid on the living room sofa in his tailored jacket, was Xavier.