Page 17 of Waiting for You

I'd written those venomous words because I needed him to swallow the lie. I needed him to believe, down to his marrow, that I was a gold-digging monster who valued a fat bank account over love. I needed him to think I saw his residency as a pathetic failure, that I walked away because he couldn't afford me. I wrote it to be believed. I mailed it, and I spent every waking day since agonizing over how badly it must have wrecked him to read it. That damage was the whole point. It was the brutal mechanism I used to protect his future from my father.

His hand slid across the table and settled over mine. My fingers had been picking at my cuticles without me noticing, a nervous tic I fell back on whenever I had nowhere safe to put the anxiety. His warm palm covered my frantic fingers and stilled them.

His hand was so warm. It always had been the steady hand of a surgeon.

"There's nothing stopping us from being friendly," he said. "We don't have to waste energy hating each other."

He flashed a genuine smile, dark eyes holding mine. "You being this quiet isn't like you. I've never known you without a sharp comeback."

"I'm just… surprised." My voice came out small, stripped of its usual armor. "I really thought you'd still hate me."

He paused, one broad shoulder lifting in an easy shrug.

"Hating you after all this time would mean I'd been thinking about you," he said. "And honestly? I've barely thought about you at all. When I saw you across the room earlier, I was struggling to remember what you looked like."

I stared at him, the air emptying out of me. "So I was never relevant to your life?"

He hesitated. His jaw shifted once, his eyes dropping to the tablecloth before flicking back up to mine.

"You were relevant once," he said. "But the moment I opened your package, you stopped being."

He pushed back his chair and stood.

"I should go find my sister." He buttoned his jacket. "It was good to see you again, Sloane."

I sat paralyzed, watching him walk away.

He worked the crowded room with easy charm, stopping to greet familiar faces, resting a loving hand on Violet's shoulder, his deep voice carrying a warm laugh I was too far away to hear. The sea of guests parted for him and closed the second he passed. He never looked back.

I didn't move.

I'd spent eight years carrying what I'd done to save him. I'd built the whole foundation of my adult independence with the guilt of that sacrifice buried right underneath it.

I'd thought about him when my life was chaos, and I'd thought about him when my life was quiet.

He had been the gravitational axis I'd organized my entire universe around, even when that meant forcing myself to stay away from him.

And he had barely thought of me at all.

I'd spent eight years mourning a man who had moved on without effort, a man who took the broken pieces I handed him, built a spectacular empire, and then thanked me for leaving.

I'd been such a fool.

FIVE

XAVIER

It was a lie.

Every syllable I fed Sloane Ty at that banquet table was false.

My mornings started with the thought of her, and my nights ended the same way. She haunted crowded rooms, empty hallways, the pauses in other people's conversations. I thought about her while driving, while eating, while scrubbing in at the clinic, the scalding water running over my hands, my brain fixed on her. There was no version of my life that didn't have her ghost in it. She lived in the background of every space I'd walked into since the morning I ripped open that package, read her venomous note, and accepted she was gone.

The last thing she'd ever been was irrelevant.

I'd fed her that lie because the alternative wasn't possible. I couldn't sit beside her in that stunning room she'd designed and let her see what her absence had done to my life. I wanted to know what she was carrying, whether she felt any guilt at all, or whether the last eight years had dragged on as hard for her as they had for me.

She'd been glued to her phone since the dinner plates were cleared.