Chapter 5

The next morning, Julian went downstairs before me.

By the time I reached the dining room, he was already at the table by the window. Two breakfasts were laid out. In front of him, black coffee and eggs Benedict. Across from him, a bowl of oatmeal.

It was for me. He still remembered what I ate for breakfast.

I pushed the bowl of oatmeal aside. "Not hungry."

Julian looked up at me. The shadows under his eyes were even darker than yesterday.

"You look terrible today," he said.

"Didn't sleep well last night."

"You didn't sleep at all." His tone was certain. "There wasn't a sound from your room all night. Eleanor, a person lying in bed six hours without so much as turning over, that's not sleeping."

He had listened all night.

"I've always been a quiet sleeper," I said.

"You're not quiet." He set down the coffee cup, looking into my eyes. "You used to grind your teeth in your sleep. You'd kick the blanket onto the floor, crowd over to my side, shove your cold hands up under my shirt."

He paused.

"You're not this kind of person. You're not this dead thing lying in bed all night without moving."

I didn't answer.

He bowed his head and cut into the eggs Benedict, and halfway through he set the fork down.

"In the car yesterday, the thing about Sunny." He didn't look up, his voice dropping. "I thought about it all night. That 'don't bother coming back.' From the day I said it, I regretted it."

The hand holding my fork stopped midair. It was the first time he had brought that day up himself.

"Regretted it." I repeated the words, as if weighing them. "Does regret help, Julian?"

He finally lifted his head to look at me, and in his eyes was something I had never seen, something close to wretched.

"I know it doesn't," he said. "But I still wanted you to know. That day, I didn't mean it. I'd just come out of the liquidation meeting for your father's company, my head full of ruined accounts, and I picked up the phone and heard you crying, and I just—"

"And you took the ugliest thing you could say and threw it at me at the moment it would hurt the most." I finished it for him, my voice level. "I know. Every single time, all these years, you've aimed very carefully."

His face went white as the tablecloth.

"None of it matters anymore." I stood, nudging the untouched oatmeal back in. "Eat up and we'll go."

I walked out of the dining room.

At ten, we were back on the road.

Today's destination was a peninsula at Maine's northernmost tip. My endpoint.

Julian drove all morning without a word. I sat in the passenger seat, watching the scenery outside shift from Acadia's high ridges to coastal scrub and bare granite.

Past Columbia Falls, he suddenly pulled over to the side of the road.

He cut the engine, both hands on the wheel, and was silent for a long time.

"Eleanor. If I told you I never once stopped loving you, would you believe me?"

The car was very quiet. The sound of waves slipped in through the gap in the window.

"No," I said.

His back stiffened.

"You vanished for six weeks. My father's company went bankrupt in those six weeks. He had a heart attack and was hospitalized. I signed the consent for resuscitation alone. I signed the critical-condition notice alone. When you came back, you didn't explain a word, and then you went upstairs and shut the door. After that you never came home before two in the morning again."

I looked into his eyes.

"You tell me. What am I supposed to believe?"

His fingers gripped the wheel, knuckles white. His eyes had gone red.

"Viktor Cain." He forced the name out through his teeth. "Those six weeks, he was the one who trapped me."

"He was sitting on something that could snap the Ashford Group's financing on the spot, and under the cover of a cross-border merger, he lured me to Europe to 'negotiate.' Negotiation in name. House arrest in fact. He took my phone, cut off every line of contact I had, for six full weeks."

"He named one condition. Divorce you, sever ties with the Vance family for good. What he wanted was to swallow your father's real estate holdings, and I was the only one he was wary of, the only one who'd step in to protect you. As soon as I agreed to cut you off, he'd let me go, let the Ashfords go. I wouldn't do it."

"So he didn't wait for me to cave. While I was trapped out there, unable to reach anyone, he moved first on the Vance family, with no one to defend them. By the time I clawed my way free and got back, your father's company was already in ruins, and he'd collapsed, hospitalized. It was all too late."

His voice broke.

"Those six weeks, I didn't vanish. There was nothing I could do."

I looked at his face.

"And after? Why didn't you say anything?"

"Say what? That I'd been locked away six weeks, didn't even know your father had been hospitalized? That I'd thrown away half of Ashford's life rather than cut you off? That the way you looked at me back then was the way you'd look at an enemy?"

He drew a deep breath.

"I thought, then let me be the enemy. At least you'd still let me stay by your side."

"And after that? What about Vivienne?"

His lashes trembled.

I pulled the door open and stepped out. The mountain wind was strong. I walked to the railing at the cliff's edge and looked down at the churning, lead-gray sea below.

He sat in the car, watching me through the windshield.

I took out my phone and opened a thread. It was an old boatman on the northern coast, who had done sea burials his whole life.

"Within the next two days. Meet me below the lighthouse."

The seven days the Devil gave me were nearly at their end.

I locked the screen, walked back, pulled the door open, and got into the passenger seat.

"Let's go."