“Then how,” I say, much less confident.
He doesn’t say anything else to me. He pulls his phone out of his jacket, and for a second I think he’s going to show me something, and then he taps a name and lifts it to his ear, and then, watching me the whole time, he brings it back down and puts it on speaker, holds it flat between us in the middle of the hallway, so I can hear every word that comes out of it.
It rings once.
“Cup!” Robert Ermington’s voice fills the hall, big and warm and delighted, the voice of a man who has never once in his life been anything but glad to hear from his son. “There he is. You land okay? You ready for tomorrow?”
“Landed fine, Dad.” His eyes stay on the phone. “Hey, quick question. Did you do something with Aspen’s work this week?”
Robert laughs, pleased with himself, not a scrap of guilt anywhere in it.
“She made it, then? Good. Good.” A warm, easy pause. “Yeah, I know a couple of people. I made a call. They had a spot at the summit, and I figured, you’re both going to be in the same city, the two of you never get a minute, you’re always running off in opposite directions. Thought she’d have a nice time. Thought you’d have a nice time, God knows you both work too hard.” He says it like he knows our work schedules. “Did I overstep? Carolyn said I might be overstepping. Tell me if I overstepped, son, I can—”
“No,” Stanley says. “You didn’t overstep.”
And I watch it land on his face. The whole of it, all at once. I watch him understand, in real time, that there was no scheme, no plan — just his father, who thinks the two of us are real and in love and run ragged, deciding to do a kind thing for the girl his son brought home.
His jaw comes unclenched. Something heavy goes out of his shoulders.
“You sure?” Robert says. “Because I can—”
“Dad. You didn’t overstep,” he says again politely.
And then he looks at me. The questions sitting right there on his face, plain as anything.Do you hear my dad? Do you hear that there’s nothing under it?
And I do. I hear it.
There is nothing under it. There’s only a man who loves his son so much that it runs over the sides and onto every person the son loves, and somewhere it started to include me. And unfortunately for me, I’ve twisted it, since betrayal is a language I happen to know better.
My chest goes light. The whole weight since I’ve seen him just lifts clean off me, because it turns out it was never the wrong reason at all. The reason was love. Innocent, oblivious, overstepping love, from a man who would be wrecked to learn this was all built on a lie.
“Everything all right over there, son?” Robert asks. “You’ve gone awful quiet on me.”
Stanley clears his throat. His eyes stay on mine.
“Yeah,” he says. “It was just — quite the surprise, Dad. That’s all.”
“Ha. The good kind, I hope.”
“Yes, the good kind.”
Stanley tells him he’ll call after the meeting. Robert tells him to sleep, to eat something, and to be sharp tomorrow. Then the call ends, and the phone goes back in his jacket, and the hallway goes quiet around us.
But just like on Friday, when everything faded away, what’s left is fear.
It has its teeth in me. I can’t do this again. I swore I’d never hand anyone that kind of power over me twice.
And God, it’s obvious he isn’t Gavin. Gavin couldn’t cross a bathroom door, and Stanley put his own father on speaker rather than let me believe one more second that he’d do this to me.
But knowing he isn’t Gavin doesn’t kill it. Because the fear was never about whether Stanley’s good. It’s about choosing this with my eyes open — walking in on purpose, no lie to hide behind — and ending up second to the sport anyway, in some other room, a year from now.
“Linwood,” he whispers, and my heart twists. “Don’t look at me like that.”
I swallow. “Like what?”
“Like you want nothing to do with me.”
I keep my eyes on him. I haven’t moved. I’m standing at my own door with the key card in my palm. The fear is screaming at me to go in and leave this all behind. But I haven’t moved an inch, because the part of me that wants him is louder than all of it, and I can’t think straight over the noise.
