A THOUSAND REASONS To LEAVE

CHAPTER One.

Elena — First Person

                                  “There nights you remember not because something beautiful happened but because something inside you shifted,quietly, without permission and nothing was ever quite the same again.”

     “That night was one of them.”

I didn't want to be at the Whitmore Gala. I never wanted to be at a place full of polished and fake smiles with rehearsed conversations,where everyone said exactly nothing while pretending to say everything. But my mum had pressed  my dress into my hands with that look she always gave me,

“the one sitting between please come with me”

“and you must come with me”,

and I have learned long ago that some battles weren't worth fighting especially when it comes to my mum.

So I went.

                    The Whitmore Grand hall was everything money could buy and taste could arrange.Crystal  chandelier dripped light across the ceiling like frozen rain. Women in expensive dresses and diamond jewellery sets floated between tables,while men in tailored suits laughed too loudly at jokes that weren't funny. The air smelled of champagne and expensive perfume and the particular kind of desperation that came from people trying hard to appear like they weren't trying at all.

                              I moved through the crowd with a glass of sparkling wine I had no intention of drinking, nodding at faces I half recognised and smiling at people whose names I had already  forgotten. My mum was somewhere near the east wing,networking with people,my father stayed home,as he always did at events that carried any risk of running into them

“The Ashfords.”

Even thinking of the name felt like swallowing glass. 

                            I had grown up with the name as a synonym for everything wrong in our lives. It was the name my mother whispered lightly with suppressed anger. The name my father refused to speak about,and though saying it out loud would summon something dark and irreversible .I knew the shape of their sins before any other thing about them. How Reginald Ashford had stolen my grandfather's business partnership, how the betrayal had unravelled our family's finances, how the wound never truly healed but was just swept and hidden under the surface of every family dinner and every quiet argument  I'd overhead through closed doors.

“I knew all of that.” 

                      What I didn't know was that nobody had warned me about what it would feel like to look across a crowded room and feel the air leave your lungs because of one person. 

I noticed him before I knew who he was.

                             That's the part I keep coming back to. For one unguarded moment, I saw him simply as a man_tall,darksuited,standing slightly apart from the nearest group of guests as though closeness to people was something he tolerated rather than enjoyed.His jaw was sharp,his expression unreadable,and there was something in the way he held himself that was less arrogant and more shielding. Like someone who learned very early that the world was something to be braced against.

“Our eyes met.”

I don't know how to explain what happened in that second. It wasn't an attraction or at least I thought so,I told myself it wasn't. It was more like recognition. Like something in me registered something in him before my mind had any say in the matter.

Then a woman beside me leaned closer and murmured, “That's Adrian Ashford.The heir to the Ashford, he's gorgeous,isn't he? Shame about the family.”

The glass nearly slipped from my hand.

“Ashford”

The name landed like stone in still water,and every carefully constructed wall inside me slammed back into place. I looked away,made myself focus on the chandelier,on my wine glass,on the pattern of the marble floor, anything that wasn't him.

You don't look at him,I told myself.You don't think adout him .You don't.

But the thing about walls is that they only work when the threat stays on the other side.

               I had moved to the  peaceful end of the hall,near the tall windows that looked out_over the city lights below,when I heard his voice.

“You look like someone who's counting down the  minutes until this is over.” 

Low,calm and closer than it should ever have been.

I turned slowly knowing who it was, I was already dreading. 

He was standing two feet away,but to me he was very close to me,his eyes were a shade of grey I hadn't expected and a mouth that carried the ghost of smile that hadn't quite committed to existing yet.

“I'm fine,” I said,the words coming out cooler than I intended.

“I didn't ask if you were fine.” He looked out at the crowd, not at me. “I said you looked like someone counting down the minutes.”

He was right. I had been.But I wasn't going to give him the answer he expected

“Do you have a habit of approaching strangers at parties?” I asked.

Only when they're standing alone and holding a drink they haven't touched once.” He glanced  at my glass,then back at the city below.

I didn't respond. The silence stretched between us. And I became Actually aware that I should leave that very second.

But I didn't move

And neither did he.

Adrian Ashford,”he finally said,not looking at me,as though he already knew what the name would do.

My jaw tightened.He knew I already knows his name,but just said it to break the silence.

“Elena Hart,” I replied.

The air between us charged. 

                             He turned to look at me then,fully and for a moment something flickered behind those grey eyes. Not cruelty. Not triumph something far more unsettling.

We talked for twenty-three minutes.I knew because I counted. Twenty three minutes of careful words and careful silence and a pull I had no name for yet. Twenty three minutes standing beside a man whose name I had been raised to hate,thinking thoughts I had no business with. 

When he finally turned to leave,he paused. Just once. Just briefly. And looked at me over his shoulder with those grey eyes that saw too much and smiled. Not the ghost one. The real one. Small and private and meant only for me. 

I stood at that window long after he was gone,my untouched drink warm in my hand,the city lights blurring below me.

— ✦ —

I should have walked away the moment l heard his name.

But I didn't And somewhere between his voice and the city lights and the way he looked at me like I was a problem he had already decided to solve something inside me made a choice my mind hadn't approved yet.

I didn't know it then. I wouldn't admit it for months. 

But that was the night I stopped belonging entirely to myself. 

And the worst part?

He knew it before I did.