Page 74 of Waiting for You

Eliza and I walked back down the manicured estate path toward our suite. She didn't speak at first, just walked with her arms crossed, until she said, "Well, this means I have to sort out where I'm staying. I need to get settled somewhere quiet before I tackle my inbox."

"You could stay in New York," I offered. "It's a great city. And your job doesn't tie you to one office."

She studied the woven ceiling of the open-air corridor for a second. "That's true," she murmured. "I'll book a hotel. I obviously won't be staying at your new house."

"As long as you're comfortable," I said.

"I'll be fine," she assured me.

At the private airport terminal, Sloane kept her head down. She had her noise-canceling earphones in before we even climbed out of the SUV, she marched across the tarmac with her eyes glued to the pavement, and she refused to look at any of us. The rest of the group kept their voices low.

I stared at her tense shoulders and debated walking over just to say something simple, a basic check-in, but then my brain ran through all the previous times I'd walked over to her and said the opposite of what I meant.

Eliza had handed me two conflicting theories, and I was still juggling both. Two different lenses on the same woman, and I didn't know which one fit the data. I didn't trust myself to start a conversation with Sloane until I did. I had a catastrophic talent for delivering the wrong sentence at the wrong moment when it came to her, and she'd survived enough for one week.

The most responsible thing I could do right now was shut my mouth and think. We both needed distance to work out what had detonated between us, and to figure out what, if anything, either of us wanted from the fallout.

We touched down in New York, and the group splintered. Eliza stopped me near the private gate. She pulled me into a brief, platonic hug. "We can stay friends," she said against my shoulder. "That doesn't have to disappear."

"Okay," I agreed, hugging her back. "Thank you, Eliza. Truly. For what you said back at the estate."

She pulled back, held my gaze one long second, and walked away without another word.

Simon and Violet had already grabbed their luggage. Sloane had walked out of the terminal with them, and I stood alone near the tarmac, watching the three of them head for the exit. I caught Violet resting a protective hand on Sloane's arm, and then the city swallowed them.

I slid into my waiting town car and told the driver to take me to the new house.

The house was silent. The air in the empty rooms had a stale quality, every surface sitting where I'd left it days ago. I wheeled my luggage into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress.

My phone went off in my pocket. I pulled it out.

A text flashed on the screen from a number I didn't recognize, a curt three-word request to talk. I tilted my head, eyes on the screen. I read it twice. The sender's name sat right there in the signature block, and I kept my eyes on it until the letters blurred.

Henry Ty.

A second message pinged through, naming a time and place, lunch the next day at a café a few blocks from my new property.

I set the phone face-down on the nightstand. I let out a jagged exhale, then fell backward onto the mattress. I didn't fall asleep right away. When I finally did, I slept like the dead, and woke to the muffled sounds of the housekeeper moving through the other rooms.

I reached for my phone. The messages were still sitting in my inbox, proof it hadn't been a stress hallucination.

I had no idea what Henry Ty wanted. I had nothing I wanted to say to the man. I lay in the bed, weighing the invitation, running through all the ways a private conversation with that tyrant could end, and none of the scenarios looked useful.

And then my brain snapped back to Sloane, to what she'd screamed in that dark corridor. She'd said her father swore to burn my whole life down. She'd said the word scared. I kept circling what it meant to be a terrified, isolated twenty-one-year-old locked in an office with a monster like that.

Maybe this sit-down was how I'd finally get the data. Maybe this was how I'd know if it was true, if Henry Ty was a man capable of looking his only daughter dead in the eye and threatening to destroy the person she loved.

I checked the clock. It was nearly lunch. I got up, showered, dressed in a sharp suit, and walked out the front door.

The café wasn't far. I walked the few blocks in the bright light of a New York afternoon, horns stacking up at the crosswalk and the lunch crowd parting around me without a single glance. Henry Ty was already seated at a secluded table by the window.

I recognized his face from old society photographs. Sloane used to keep a framed picture of him on her apartment dresser, the two of them at what looked like a formal gala, her face frozen in a practiced corporate smile while his heavy hand rested on her bare shoulder. He looked older now. He had his suit jacket folded over the empty chair beside him with his hands resting easy on the table, his chin tilted up. His sharp face gave up nothing as I crossed the room.

I pulled out the chair and sat across from him.

"Xavier Paige," he noted.

"Yes," I confirmed, giving him nothing.