Why

Jade

Dinner was served on the lower deck with the water below us and the sky going dark overhead and the kind of easy conversation that came from good food and people who knew each other well enough to be comfortable.

Hayes sat at Leo’s end of the table. Lena was on his left. They were not touching, but the proximity had a quality to it that I had learned to identify and not look at directly. I sat at the opposite end between Brooke and Talia, and I focused on my food and the conversation happening immediately around me, and I did a competent job of it.

Leo was a natural storyteller. He moved through subjects the way water moves, finding the path of least resistance and making it look effortless. Somewhere between the main course and dessert, the conversation at the table unified the way it occasionally does when something genuinely interesting enters the room.

“I have to tell you all something about this man,” Leo said, nodding toward Hayes with the affectionate authority of someone who had known him a long time. “Because nobody here seems to know it, and it is the most interesting thing about him.”

Hayes looked at Leo with the flat patience of someone who had heard whatever was coming and had decided it was easier to let it happen.

“Three years ago,” Leo said, “Hayes walked away from a managing director role at Whitfield Capital. His name was already on the shortlist for the youngest MD in the firm’s history. His father had spent twenty years building that relationship specifically so Hayes would have a guaranteed path in.”

The table had gone quiet the way tables do when someone says something that reorients the room.

“He walked away,” Leo said again, enjoying himself. “To take the creative portfolio division at Calloway Group, which at the time had three staff members and a budget that wouldn’t have covered one quarter at Whitfield. Everyone thought he had lost his mind. His father didn’t speak to him for six months.”

Talia made a sound of disbelief. Brooke raised her eyebrows.

Leo turned to Hayes. “Tell them what the division is worth now.”

“That’s not dinner conversation,” Hayes said.

“It’s absolutely dinner conversation.” Leo looked back at the table. “The creative division is now the highest-performing arm of the entire Calloway Group. He built that from three people and a budget. In three years.”

The table responded the way people respond when numbers are implied to be large. Impressed noises. Questions directed at Hayes, who fielded them with the minimum of words required to be considered engaged.

Then Leo leaned back in his chair and asked the one question that changed the texture of the conversation entirely.

“But I’ve always wanted to ask you properly,” he said. “Why? You had everything handed to you at Whitfield. You had the title, the trajectory, the relationship your father built his whole career to give you. Why did you walk away from all of it?”

The table went quiet again. A different kind of quiet.

Hayes looked at his wine glass.

It was a small thing. He looked at his wine glass, and he did not answer immediately, and for someone who moved through every room and every question with the same composed indifference, that was the equivalent of someone else stopping mid-sentence and looking out a window.

Something moved across his face. I registered it from the other end of the table before I could stop myself from looking. Not grief exactly. Not regret exactly. Something underneath both of those that did not have a clean name and was gone so quickly—I might have convinced myself I imagined it if I had not been watching him at exactly the right second.

Leo had asked why.

And for one fraction of a moment Hayes Calloway looked like a man who had a real answer to that question and no intention of giving it to anyone at this table.

He raised his glass and took a drink.

Then he looked up.

His eyes found mine across the table.

I had been watching him for exactly one second too long, and we both knew it. His gaze landed on my face like someone who had been aware of being watched and had simply waited for the right moment to address it. For one suspended beat, we looked directly at each other across the dinner table, across the candles and the wine glasses and the eight other people between us.

Then something happened in his expression that I had seen once before, on a sidewalk outside the Whitmore Grand three years ago. A temperature drop. An internal door closing so completely that the room on the other side of it ceased to exist.

He set his glass down. Pushed his chair back. Stood.

“Excuse me,” he said to no one specifically, and walked inside.

The table absorbed his absence with a moment of uncertain silence.

Leo cleared his throat. “He does that,” he said with the ease of long familiarity, and reached for the wine bottle, and the conversation found itself again.

I looked at my plate.

I ate.

The house had a wide hallway that connected the main living area to the bedrooms at the back. I walked through it forty minutes later on my way back from the bathroom, my heels quiet on the hardwood, the sounds of the dinner conversation behind me and muffled.

He was standing at the far end of the hallway.

Not in a room. Not headed anywhere. Just standing with his back against the wall and his phone in his hand, the screen dark, looking at nothing specific with the expression of someone who had stepped away from a room to be somewhere that had no one in it.

I kept walking.

I had no other option. The hallway was the only way back to the deck, and I was not going to stand here and wait for him to move.

My heels on the hardwood counted off the distance between us. Twelve feet. Eight. Five.

He heard me before he looked up. I saw it in the slight shift of his posture, the way he straightened almost imperceptibly from the wall.

Then he turned his head.

We were going to pass each other in a hallway wide enough for two people and narrow enough that two people passing in it would share the same six inches of air.

I kept my eyes forward and my pace even, and I did not slow down.

Three feet. Two.