Chapter 2

Mia Scott had always believed in true love.

Not the arranged kind. Not the strategic kind that her family had built their empire on, marriage as alliance, affection as currency, relationships measured by what they added to the Scott name rather than what they added to a life. Her father Martin Scott had never understood that distinction and never tried to. Her brother Mason had married Zoe Cooper, daughter of the most influential family in Ashford, and everyone had called it a perfect match. Mia had watched that wedding and quietly promised herself something different.

She had spent four years building that something different with Noah.

Now she was ordering her fourth drink at a bar she couldn’t remember choosing and wondering what exactly she had been thinking.

The alcohol arrived and she accepted it the way you accept things when the alternative is feeling everything at once. She drank with the focused determination of someone with a specific goal. The goal was simple: stop seeing Allie’s face. Stop hearing it was a mistake. Stop feeling the particular warmth of Noah’s hand on her waist and how hard it was to step away from it.

She drank until the bar blurred pleasantly at the edges. Then she drank more.

At some point she decided she needed the bathroom. She stood up. The floor had developed an opinion about her balance that it hadn’t had earlier. She moved through the corridor with great concentration, which was why she didn’t see the man until she had walked directly into him.

He was in a clean dark suit. Expensive kind, she registered that even through the fog, some instinct of a woman raised around wealth identifying it automatically. She opened her mouth to apologize and what came out instead was the contents of her last three drinks, directly onto his jacket.

There was a moment of absolute silence.

Then two large men in earpieces materialized from somewhere and she found herself firmly relocated to the floor of the corridor, her back against the wall, the suited man being steered away by people who clearly considered her a resolved problem.

She tried to stand up to apologize properly. Her legs submitted a formal objection. She sat back down.

The last thing she registered before the evening ended entirely was his face turning briefly back toward her, sharp features, dark eyes, an expression she was too drunk to read and then the corridor tilted and everything went pleasantly dark.

She woke up outside.

Specifically she woke up in the car park, her cheek against her own folded arms on the floor close to a car that was not hers. For a moment she simply existed, breathing, not moving, taking inventory of what hurt and in what order.

Everything hurt. In every order.

She found her car eventually. Sat in the driver’s seat without starting it and looked at her phone.

10:04 a.m.

Twenty missed calls. Noah. Allie. Noah again. Allie again. The names alternated down her screen like a particularly cruel joke.

She set the phone face down on the passenger seat.

The shame arrived with the morning light, quiet and thorough, the kind that doesn’t announce itself but simply covers everything. The only daughter of the Scotts. The girl the whole of Dorcount city knew existed but had never seen, protected and private and spoken about in careful tones by the few who had actually met her. Beautiful, they said. Educated. Brilliant with finance, though she had spent four years using that brilliance to build Noah’s family company rather than her own.

She sat with that last thought for a long moment.

Four years. She had given Noah four years of herself, her knowledge, her network, the quiet connections that came with being a Scott even when she refused to use the name publicly. She had helped restructure his family’s finances. She had stayed away from her own family’s business. She had defended him to her father until Martin Scott stopped speaking to her for weeks at a stretch.

Was he using her?

The question sat in the car with her, too large and too quiet.

Did he ever love her at all?

She started the engine. She didn’t have answers and the car park of a bar at ten in the morning was not the place to find them. What she had instead was a decision.

She was done.

She went straight to her father’s house. Ordered a bath, took something for her head, ate lunch alone in the silence she had grown comfortable with over years of chosen distance from her family.

By dinner she was ready.

The dining hall felt larger than she remembered. Her mother Margaret’s face when she walked in was carefully composed, the way faces get when they have been practicing an expression for the possibility of this exact moment. Mason looked up from beside his pregnant wife Zoe with something between relief and uncertainty. The chair at the head of the table where Martin Scott sat carried the particular weight of a man who had not changed his opinion of anything in years.

The silence stretched.

“It’s nice seeing you today,” her mother said finally, breaking it the way you break something carefully so it doesn’t shatter.

“Why are you here?” her father said, which was Martin Scott’s version of the same sentiment delivered without the care.

Margaret frowned at her husband. Zoe said they had missed her. Mia managed a smile she didn’t entirely feel.

“We won’t accommodate anyone unwilling to be part of this family’s business,” Martin said. Then he left the table. 

The remaining three looked at her. What happened. Are you okay.

“I’m here,” Mia said simply. “That’s all that matters right now.”

Her mother was not satisfied. She came to Mia’s room after dinner, sat on the edge of the bed with the patient stillness of a woman who had been waiting for this conversation for years.

Mia told her everything.

The words came out in pieces at first and then all at once, Noah, Allie, the anniversary she had planned, the Rolex still in her bag, the ginare wine she had carried home without knowing why. She cried properly for the first time since the bar. Not the shocked silent tears from the doorway. Real ones. The kind that comes when you are finally somewhere safe enough to fall apart.

Her mother held her and said nothing.

When it was quiet Mia wiped her face and looked at the ceiling and said: “I’m done with love. I want to be part of the business. Tell Father.”

Margaret Scott nodded slowly.

She didn’t look entirely surprised.