Chapter 1

Asher's POV

I turned off my phone and walked out of the hotel. The doorman hailed a cab for me. Before the car drove away, I looked back through the window.

My fiancee's assistant, Jace Stetson, savored his drink while my fiancee, Lucinda Walker, stood beside him, shielding him from passersby.

At 1:00 am, I heard the door unlock. Lucinda put her keys by the entrance. When she saw me sitting in the living room, she frowned slightly. "Why aren't you asleep yet?"

"I was waiting for you."

She paused while taking off her coat. "Didn't I tell you not to wait?"

I looked at the faint reddish stain on her cuff and asked, "What time did the team dinner end?"

"After ten."

"What happened after that?" I asked.

"I drove a colleague home. He had been drinking. It wasn't safe for him to be alone," she said calmly, without a trace of hesitation that might suggest she was lying.

I pressed, "Which colleague?"

Lucinda looked up at me and answered, "Jace. He just returned to the country and transferred here. He lives pretty far out, and he couldn't get a cab."

She poured herself a glass of water, her tone gradually turning impatient. "You're not seriously making an issue out of this, are you?"

I took the dessert shop queue ticket from my bag and placed it on the coffee table. Our number had already been called. I said, "You promised you'd go to the dessert shop with me."

Lucinda's grip tightened around her cup, and she sounded indifferent. "I'm sorry. I forgot."

She took a card from her wallet and pushed it toward me. "Buy something you like tomorrow. You know the PIN."

She had done the same thing whenever she forgot a promise she had made to me. She would transfer money, apologize, and then wait for me to deal with it on my own. I didn't take the card.

Lucinda placed the card on the dessert shop ticket. "We just need to wait in line. Can't we go next month?"

"But we've lost our chance today."

"Asher Patterson." She called me by my full name. "This is just an expired queue ticket. You can't keep using these trivial things to make everyone accommodate you."

My fingers trembled.

Lucinda noticed it, and a flicker of regret crossed her eyes. Yet, she didn't take back what she had said. She simply bent down and picked up the remote. "I'm tired. I don't want to argue."

The TV came on, showing the weather forecast. The presenter said that the first snow of the year would fall tonight. I suddenly remembered when Lucinda had first accompanied me to that dessert shop six years ago. The weather had been just like this.

Back then, the line stretched halfway down the block. She took one look at it and frowned. "Let's go somewhere else."

I told her that the pudding at that shop was made much like the one Mom had taught me to make before she passed away. After she died, I had never tasted that familiar flavor again.

She fell silent for a moment, but in the end, she joined me at the back of the line. But during that hour, she kept checking her watch and asking, "How much longer?"

Back then, I kept telling myself she simply hated waiting. It wasn't that she hadn't wanted to be there with me.

But six years had passed, and suddenly, I didn't want to make excuses for her anymore. "Will you be on time for the wedding next week?" I asked.

Lucinda's hand stopped on the remote. "What do you mean by that? We've sent out the invitations. How could I possibly not be there?"

"That's good." I picked up the queue ticket and headed back to my room.

Behind me, she called out, "Asher, Jace is just a colleague. He just got out of a relationship, and he's not in a very good place emotionally. Don't read too much into it."

"I'm not."

"So, what's with the attitude?"

I turned back to look at her. I said, "Lucinda, I was just wondering… If I had been the one waiting in line tonight, would you have waited 20 minutes for me too?"