CHAPTER FOUR

“Are you okay?” Julian asked again, when she didn’t answer right away.

“I’m okay.” She waved him off and reached for the tin of mints on the counter, popping one into her mouth to chase the sour taste. “I sat out in that storm for almost an hour last night. My body’s just complaining about it now. Come on, get the car loaded before I chicken out.”

He didn’t look convinced, but he picked up the suitcase, and neither of them said the thing that hung quietly in the air between them.

The airport was loud and bright and indifferent, the way airports are, and it made the goodbye easier and harder all at once. At the security line Julian gripped her by both shoulders.

“The moment you land, you call me. I’m serious. And every single day after that.”

“Every day is a big promise to make.” She was smiling, but her eyes had gone glassy.

“Every day, Evangeline. No excuses.”

She nodded, not trusting her voice, and stepped into the line. When she looked back once more he was still standing there, one hand raised, and she made herself turn around because if she didn’t she wasn’t going to be able to leave at all.

The truth she carried through the gate was a stubborn one: she still loved him. Even now. Even after the papers and the slap and the rain, some traitorous corner of her heart was bruised purple with loving Dominic Voss, and she hated it. But love had never once been enough to make him kind, and she was done waiting to be chosen by a man who’d already chosen someone else.

Let him keep his Camille, she thought. They’re welcome to each other.

She found her seat, pressed her forehead to the cold window, and watched the city she was leaving tilt and fall away beneath the wing.

“You’ve got this,” she whispered to the glass. “Whatever you wanted is still waiting out there. Go get it.”

And somewhere over the ocean, the knot in her chest began, at last, to loosen.

Dominic learned she was gone from a phone call.

He was in his office at Voss Tower, a contract open on the desk in front of him, the same clause read four times without a single word of it reaching his brain. He’d been like this since the night before, useless, distracted, snapping at people who didn’t deserve it. He kept seeing a figure in the rain. He kept hearing a door close.

When his phone rang he answered it on reflex, eyes still on the page.

“Sir.” It was the man he’d had keeping loose track of the situation. “Figured you’d want to hear this. Miss Hart got on an international flight about an hour back. She’s out of the country.”

The pen stopped moving.

“Say that one more time.”

“She’s gone, sir. Booked a one-way ticket first thing this morning.”

The line went quiet. Dominic set the phone down very carefully, as though it might shatter, and turned his chair toward the window. The city stretched out below him, grey and rain-washed and enormous, and somewhere out past the edge of it a plane was carrying away a woman he’d spent three years refusing to see.

Gone. He’d wanted her gone. In a sense he’d written that word himself, the moment he slid those papers across the glass. So there was no reason on earth for the word to land in his gut the way it did, heavy and final, like a door locking from the other side.

It doesn’t mean anything, he told himself. Just a strange mood. Tomorrow things go back to how they should be. Camille beside me. The name Hart something I never have to think about again.

He believed it, too.

It would be five years before he understood how completely wrong he’d been.