Page 34 of Waiting for You

I shoved the phone into my pocket and started walking.

As I rounded the corner, Sloane was pushing through a heavy door at the far end of the hallway, a half-empty cocktail glass dangling from her fingers. We both froze.

"Heading back to the ballroom?" she asked.

"I don't know," I admitted, my chest still heaving. "I just needed to keep moving."

She studied my face. Her dark eyes tracked the tension in my jaw and the rigid set of my shoulders, but she didn't press.

"The main hall's basically a ghost town," she offered. "Violet and Simon just went up. There are a few stragglers left around the open bar."

"I know. I just ran into the bride and groom."

She let a moment pass. "Are you alright, Xavier?"

"My mother just called."

Her chin dropped a fraction.

"Ah," she murmured.

"Yeah."

"You want company right now," she asked, "or do you need space?"

What my brain wanted was to demand space and mean it. I wanted to find a dark room and let the adrenaline burn out without an audience. What my mouth said instead was, "Company."

She fell into step beside me.

We wandered the silent mansion with no destination, drifting through the maze and letting the rooms present themselves. In the second-floor gallery she pointed her glass at a massive Renaissance painting and said the aristocrat looked like a man who'd made one catastrophic, highly specific bad decision and physically couldn't move past it. I told her the aristocrat looked like my father. She let out a startled bark of laughter, and I laughed with her, the vise grip around my chest loosening a degree.

We drifted outside and settled onto the stone steps at the front of the estate. The midnight air rolling off the manicured grounds was cold and still. She left her cocktail glass somewhere in the grass. I dropped onto the stone beside her, resting my elbows on my knees, staring into the black tree line at the edge of the property.

"Did you ever regret it?" I asked.

She went still. "You said we were leaving the past buried."

"I know what I said," I pushed back. "But I've spent eight years wondering anyway. Did you?"

She kept her eyes on the silhouette of the trees.

"Yes," she whispered. "I regretted it."

"Then why did you do it?"

She turned her head to face me. Her jaw was set, her dark eyes guarded, the lids dropping to shield whatever was behind them. "I had my reasons."

"Would you ever consider telling me what they were?"

"I don't know." She tore her gaze away, back to the night. "The truth is I made a massive, unforgivable mistake. And it's not a decision I can take back."

I studied her profile in the dim moonlight, the stubborn line of her jaw, the rigid set of her bare shoulders.

I wanted to grab her and say: It isn't something you can take back, but we could start over. We could build the whole thing from scratch. We could hold each other's hands again, and I wouldn't have to carry a velvet box in my pocket, because the commitment would be real and shared between us instead of carried by me alone.

I swallowed the words.

She'd left me. She'd woken up one morning, gone right past my heart, and made a ruthless exit. Whatever her guarded reasons were, the final call had been hers, and she'd made it cold. She'd just admitted she regretted the fallout, admitted she had hidden motives, but flatly refused to promise she'd ever explain them.