Page 70 of Waiting for You

I stared down at my hands.

"You asked me to think about it," I started, my voice barely above a whisper. "About whether I could try. Whether we could build something real out of this arrangement." I took a jagged breath. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about it. I know what I want now. And the honest truth is that until I stop wanting it, I'm never going to be capable of wanting something else. Not for real." I lifted my eyes to meet his. "Pretending otherwise isn't fair to you."

He looked down at the carpet, taking it in, then lifted his gaze back to me.

"I understand," he murmured.

"I'm so sorry, Andrew."

"Please, don't be." He straightened a little. "But I want to be transparent with you too." He picked up his phone, turning the dark screen over in his hands before setting it back down. "This arrangement was never only about romance. You know the math. There are enormous assets at stake here, your father's holdings, the merger, everything Henry built this pipeline toward. I'm not asking you to change your mind. But I think you need to understand the size of what you're walking away from."

"I know what it costs," I said firmly.

"It's a staggering amount of leverage. And we don't have to be in love for this to work, Sloane. That was never the requirement. Plenty of arrangements like this run fine without it. We could build something livable. You'd get a level of independence you don't have now, I'd get the leverage I came for, and neither of us would ever have to pretend to feel things we don't."

I stared at him. He wasn't wrong about a single word. He was practical, he was offering me a logical exit, and I wasn't built to survive it.

"It's true love that I want," I confessed. "That's all it is. I don't care about the money. I never have. The empire was never mine, and I was never going to treat those assets like they were." I shook my head. "You'd never blow up your whole corporate life for a feeling. I understand that. I'm not judging your map. But I would. I'd burn everything to the ground for it, and that's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to stop wanting the love I want just because it's inconvenient."

He sat quietly, absorbing the finality of it.

I'd already wrecked Xavier once. I'd devastated him when I was young and paralyzed by terror, and I'd spent eight years convincing myself it was the only survival option. Then I'd flown to Hawaii and hurt him all over again. I'd been reckless with his heart, reckless with Andrew's time, reckless with Eliza's dignity. I was worn out by the version of myself I'd become, and I was finished being her.

He gave a respectful nod. He stood, grabbed his leather duffel from the foot of the bed, and unzipped it on the mattress. He packed without rushing, folding his shirts, rolling his belts, tucking his toiletry kit into the side pocket. He wasn't performing calm. He was just calm. I watched his steady hands and felt the tension finally drain from my own shoulders.

He scooped his keycard off the nightstand.

"For whatever it's worth," he offered, pausing at the threshold, "I hope you find what you're looking for."

"I hope you do too," I replied. "I mean that."

He stepped into the hallway, pulling the heavy door shut, and the latch clicked with a finality I felt in my teeth.

The suite went silent.

I stayed put in the armchair. I didn't move to the bed, flip on the lights, or reach for my phone to distract myself. The single bedside lamp threw a small circle of yellow light in the dark room, and I sat inside that glow and let the quiet settle over me.

The Andrew arrangement was dead, and I was no longer pretending to move on from Xavier while my heart did the opposite. Every spinning plate I'd been trying to balance had crashed, and the only thing left in the wreckage was the guilt I'd been burying underneath it. It pressed down on me, the truth of having gutted a man who'd never deserved it, having had eight years to sit with it, and having done nothing healing with the time.

I'd hurt Xavier. I'd damaged him so badly that he couldn't believe me when I finally handed him the raw truth, and that was the tragedy I was going to have to live with. I wanted the history to be different. I'd have rewritten the whole timeline if I could go back and be a braver girl, one willing to look her father dead in the eye and refuse the ultimatum.

But I couldn't go back. Xavier had moved on. He had Eliza, he had a life he was building, and he had a sapphire ring he was going to use. The best thing I could do for both of us now was to stop pulling at the threads. I needed to let him have the peace he was building and stop being the hurricane that kept making landfall in his life.

I was going to try to move on for real this time, without the performance, without chasing him while I told myself I wasn't, without lying to myself about my intentions. I'd been dragging Xavier's ghost around for years, and his memory had shaped everything: the location of the studio, the isolation in the city, every romantic relationship I'd blown up before it could turn serious. I needed to put the ghost down. Not to stop loving him, just to try to live anyway.

I turned his parting words over in my mind. He'd been right that I kept making unilateral decisions for everyone in my blast radius, that I bulldozed into his life and wrecked what he was trying to build, that my whole presence on this trip had only added fresh pain to a man who'd survived enough of it. I'd never meant to hurt him, and the tragedy was that my intentions had never mattered.

I fell asleep slumped in the armchair with the bedside lamp still burning. When I jolted awake, the room was pitch black and the muscles in my neck were screaming.

My phone rattled on the desk.

I reached for it and saw my father's name glowing on the screen. Andrew must have called him the second he walked out of my room. I'd been bracing for this.

I swiped to answer.

"Is it Xavier?" No hello, no warning, nothing.

"No," I answered, my voice raspy with sleep. "I've told you this before. It isn't that simple."