Page 69 of Waiting for You

He looked at me with an expression I couldn't place.

"We need to end this," he said, level. "Whatever this is between us, it has to end."

"Yes," I whispered. "It does."

He turned and walked away.

I stood in the silence of the corridor until the echo of his footsteps faded. I stumbled back through the maze of hallways, through the dim light, until I found the door to my own room.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.

I'd never wanted any of this. I'd never wanted to hurt him, and I'd dismantled his life anyway, and now he didn't believe the one truth that might have saved us. I'd watched him walk away twice, once years ago and once just now. This second time was harder, because now I knew what I was losing.

He didn't believe me. He didn't believe a word.

I pressed my palms into my eyes and finally let myself sob, alone, with no one left to witness the wreckage.

SIXTEEN

SLOANE

I navigated back to my room with my hands shoved deep into my pockets, my face wet, the fragments of the conversation settling like broken glass around me.

I hadn't seen any of it coming. I hadn't expected to confess the truth about my father. I hadn't expected Xavier to stand there, his jaw locked like granite, and coldly tell me he'd have let his whole life burn before he let me make that call for him.

And I hadn't braced for the barrage that followed: My whole life was yours. You had no right. Stop making decisions for me.

I'd stood in that corridor, handed him the most agonizing secret of my life, and he'd refused to believe it. That was the realization crushing down on me as I walked.

The argument didn't gut me, and neither did the sight of him walking away. What gutted me was that there was nothing left I could do about it. I couldn't force him to believe me, I had zero evidence to prove it, and I was going to have to drag that helplessness around for the rest of my life.

I pressed my palms against my swollen eyes as I walked.

He'd stared at me right before he turned his back, his jaw set, his dark eyes offering no grace. After all those years, after every toxic choice I'd made just to keep his life intact and shielded from my family, his face when I finally told him the truth was the face of a man who'd already settled on his verdict. He believed I'd invented my father's threat as a dramatic excuse in a dark hallway, once the easier explanations ran dry.

And the bitter irony was that I understood why. I'd never given him a single reason to trust me with anything. I'd mailed a devastating package and a toxic note, then shown up years later and pushed back into his orbit with no right to be there. I had no standing to demand his trust now. I needed him to believe me, he didn't, and I was going to have to figure out how to survive that.

I reached the suite and let myself in.

Andrew had left the bedside lamp on and sat on the edge of the mattress with his shoes still on, his phone face-down beside him. He looked up the second the door clicked shut, his blue eyes zeroing in on my face.

"What happened?" he asked.

I ignored the question and crossed to the bathroom. I ran cold water over my hands, splashed my face, and patted it dry with a thick towel. My eyes were bloodshot and swollen, and there was no cosmetic fix for that. I walked back out and sank into the armchair across from the bed.

I'd been turning this over the whole walk back. The Xavier situation was a separate category of pain I wasn't equipped to sort through right now, so I made myself focus on the Andrew situation instead. I agonized over what it meant that I'd boarded a flight to Hawaii willing to use him as a prop in a performance he didn't even know he was part of.

He'd been honest with me from the beginning. He laid out the arrangement, named what he was after, and I'd smiled and pretended to be a willing participant while spending every meal and every afternoon unable to keep myself away from another man. Andrew deserved better than that. He hadn't done a single thing to deserve the crossfire I'd dragged him into.

And then there was Eliza. I hadn't spent nearly enough time thinking about Eliza. She'd boarded a flight with Xavier, and I'd spent the whole week watching them, logging their interactions, too consumed by my own wreck to see her as a person at all.

She was a woman in a committed relationship who'd flown to a tropical island, only to watch the man she came with drift toward someone else every available hour, and she'd refused to make a scene about it. I'd been foolish and selfish, and this week wasn't something I'd ever be able to look back on with a clean conscience.

I couldn't keep using the people around me to prop up my own pride and calling it moving on.

"I need to talk to you," I said.

Andrew waited. He stayed seated with his hands resting flat on his thighs, his blue eyes fixed on me, his face open and unbraced. In my head, I'd imagined this being easier if he bristled, pushed back, or acted like a jerk to make me feel justified in ending it. He wasn't going to do any of that. I was going to have to sit in the full discomfort of what I was about to do with no excuse to hide behind.