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Her jaw snapped together so hard it clicked, and then she glanced away, her gaze fixing on the front windows. “Please don’t do this because of me.”
At that, Victor laughed. He didn’t really mean to, but he couldn’t help it. “I’m not moving because of you.”
At that, she turned, her brows raised high on her forehead. “Charlie saw you were selling your shares, and now you’re leaving this place. I have no words for how sorry I am, but—”
“‘I’m sorry’ works perfectly well,” Victor told her, already tired of her presence. “You don’t need to try to justify your actions.”
Alice swallowed heavily. “I am sorry. I never meant…” She licked her lips like she was trying to find the right words. “I thought it was a good match for both of us. I thought…I thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“That you were fucking my friend in our bed?” Victor asked with an incredulous laugh. “You thought I wouldn’t mind?”
“You never seemed very interested in me,” she defended.
He couldn’t really argue there. “We have nothing in common,” he conceded. “And I never did love you. It didn’t take me long to figure that out after I went on our honeymoon.”
She sucked in a breath. “That must have been hard.”
Victor smiled and shook his head. Every time he blinked, he saw Oliver’s face behind his closed lids—heard his laugh in the silence of the room. “It was amazing.”
Alice sighed. “You don’t need to play this game. I know you’re going to be fine, but—”
“I don’t really care if you believe me. It doesn’t matter.” He put one hand into his pocket, the other holding the back of the sitting chair near his fireplace to keep himself steady. “I found what I was looking for while I was away, and there’s nothing on this planet that would make me want to stay now that I know…”
“She’s out there?” Alice finished for him very quietly.
Victor sat with himself in a silent debate before realizing he didn’t give a shit what she thought. “He’sout there.”
Alice made a choking noise. “Are you coming out of the closet right now, Victor?”
“I’ve never been in,” Victor told her. “And if you had gotten to know me as a person instead of as some benefactor to donate to your father’s campaign, you would have known that.”
She let out a trembling breath. “I don’t know what you want me to say to that.”
Victor laughed again. “I don’t want you to say anything. You stopped mattering to me the moment I walked in here and saw you with Charlie.”
“You’re not making sense,” she said. “You wanted to marry me.”
That was true. But it was for all the wrong reasons. “I wanted a wife because I thought that would make my life less lonely. Turns out I was wrong. And whatever else happens, just know that you did me a massive favor.”
“I think you should talk to someone,” she told him, taking a step closer. “This isn’t rational.”
Victor pulled back and shook his head, fixing her with a glare. “Yes it is. You just don’t want to hear that what you did means nothing to me. I know you want to believe you held some importance in my life, but I could have replaced you with a houseplant, Alice, and most days, I wouldn’t have noticed a difference. And that’s not how I want to live.”
“You’ve never been cruel,” she told him.
Victor laughed. “I’m not being cruel. I’m just not interested in flattering you anymore. I don’t need to keep the peace. I need to move on with my life, and you need to show yourself out, and if we have the misfortune of meeting again, pretend like I don’t exist.”
“You don’t think we’re owed a chance to be friends?” she asked him.
He frowned at her. “Why the hell would you want that?”
She hesitated for a long moment, and then her shoulders sagged. “Because you’re honest. And I think that’s rare.”
“It’s not,” Victor told her. He brushed past her, moving as fast as his tired legs would allow, and he opened the front door again. “You’re just not looking in the right places.”
Alice moved toward him, her heels clicking on the polished floor, and she stopped a foot away. “I’m serious about being friends.”
Victor offered her a smile full of pity because he could tell she genuinely wanted that. “And I’m serious about forgetting all about you the moment you leave this apartment.”
