Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE : The Weight of a Name

~Zella's POV~

I stayed in my room for the rest of the day and stared at the ceiling and had the same thought on repeat like my brain had gotten stuck on it and couldn't find its way to anything else.

'I lost my virginity to a stranger and the stranger turns out to be my best friend's father.'

Every time the thought completed itself I felt a fresh wave of something that wasn't quite horror and wasn't quite embarrassment but was somewhere in the specific territory between both. I pulled the duvet up over my face like that would help. It didn't help. The thought was still there when I lowered it again.

I took the card from my pocket and looked at it again. Turned it over. Looked at the front. 'Evander Ashford.' I stared at it like staring hard enough might change the letters into something different, might reveal a typo, might give me some tiny window of possibility that I had gotten this wrong. Maybe they just looked alike. Maybe it was a cousin. Maybe Brynn had two different people in her life named Evander Ashford which was statistically unlikely but felt worth considering given the alternative.

The alternative being that I had walked into a dark hotel room and slept with the man who had stood in the London rain and held an umbrella over my head while I was soaking wet and barely functioning and asked a stranger to sleep with me. The man who had put me to bed and left without taking anything I'd offered. The man who, apparently, had then booked an escort for Christmas night because he was human and had needs and I had shown up in his room by accident and complicated absolutely everything.

I put the card face down on the bed.

Then I picked it up again.

'Same name. Same face. Same man.'

I fell back against the pillow and genuinely wished the mattress would open up and absorb me entirely.

The logical solution was obvious. I needed to leave. Go back to London, back to my empty flat, back to the bottles and the takeaway boxes and the wedding dress in the wardrobe I still hadn't touched. At least in London the humiliation was familiar. At least in London Evander Ashford wasn't somewhere in the same building, walking around with that face and that jaw and the full knowledge of exactly what had happened in that hotel room eight hours ago while his daughter slept down the hall completely unaware.

I was already mentally packing when Brynn knocked.

I shoved the card under the pillow.

"What's up, girlie." She opened the door without waiting, which she always did. "You've been unbelievably quiet since this morning. What happened?"

"Nothing."

She looked at me. "Nothing."

"Nothing. I'm fine."

"Is it my dad?" She tilted her head. "You went weird right after breakfast. Are you intimidated by him or something? He's not that scary, I promise, he just has a face that..."

"No, it's not that." I cut her off before she could finish describing her father's face to me, which felt like more than I could handle right now. "It's nice to finally meet him after all the times you've talked about him. Really. He seems.... lovely."

Lovely. I had just called Evander Ashford lovely to his daughter's face. I needed to leave this country.

Brynn's expression shifted into something softer and more knowing. "Is it Cole? Are you thinking about him and Dara again?"

The exit appeared so cleanly I almost felt guilty taking it.

"Yes." I let out a breath. "Yeah, that's it. I just.... I genuinely didn't expect it from her, you know? Even if Cole decided to be whatever he decided to be. She didn’t just take him… she knew what he was to me.”

"I know." Brynn sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand over mine briefly. "I know. And you have every right to feel that. But tonight you're not thinking about either of them because my dad is taking us out." She said it with the kind of finality that meant the conversation had already ended in her head.

"Taking us where? Can't we just stay here, I don't really feel like..."

"His penthouse. We're going there now to drop our things and get ready for the party tonight." She was already moving toward my wardrobe. "He's already called twice asking us to hurry up so I need you to pack whatever you need and let's go."

"Brynn, I really don't think..."

"I'm helping you pack." She pulled the wardrobe open. "Where's your overnight bag?"

---

I ended up in the front seat of the car next to the driver because all my bags were already in the boot by the time I got downstairs and Brynn had arranged herself in the back beside her father before I had a chance to think about the seating situation. Which meant I spent the entire drive staring out of the passenger window listening to Brynn's voice fill the car behind me, laughing at something, asking questions, doing what Brynn did which was make every space she entered feel occupied and alive and every few minutes she would say my name and try to pull me into the conversation and I would turn and smile and say something that technically counted as a response and then turn back to the window.

I couldn't hear what he said without feeling my face do something I had no control over. Every time his voice came from the backseat, low, unhurried, the way it had sounded in the dark of the hotel room when he said 'I'm not', I felt the heat crawl up the back of my neck and I was grateful beyond measure that I was facing forward and nobody could see my face.

The car slowed, then stopped.

I didn’t move immediately. My hand stayed on the door handle a second longer than it needed to, like stepping out would make everything more real.

“Zella?” Brynn called from the back.

“Yeah… I’m coming.”

I stepped out into the cold air and shut the door a little too carefully.

The penthouse was something else entirely.

Floor to ceiling windows looking out over the city, everything inside clean and expensive in a way that didn't announce itself, the kind of wealth that doesn't need to explain itself because it's simply the baseline. Brynn grabbed my arm the moment we were inside and dragged me through rooms showing me everything, the kitchen, the terrace, the guest rooms, talking fast and happy the way she got when she was proud of something that wasn't even hers to be proud of.

My room had a bed the size of a small country and curtains that reached the floor and a bathroom with heated tiles. I stood in the middle of it for a moment and thought about my flat in London with the empty bottles on the floor and the curtains I'd kept shut for five days.

I went back downstairs to get the last of my bags from the entrance.

Evander was standing in the hallway.

I saw him before he saw me and I had approximately one and a half seconds to decide what to do with my face before he looked up and it was not enough time. I dropped my eyes to the floor and moved toward the door and was already calculating how quickly I could grab the bag and get back upstairs when he said my name.

"Zella."

I stopped. Turned around slowly.

"Mr. Ashford."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "Evander."

"I prefer Mr. Ashford." I kept my voice even. "Sir."

"Evander," he said again, in exactly the same tone, like we were going to keep doing this until one of us gave in and he had already decided it wasn't going to be him.

I looked at him properly for the first time since the lobby that morning, the grey in his hair, the sharp line of his jaw, the way he stood like a man who had never been in a hurry in his life. My face was doing the tomato thing again. I could feel it and I could not stop it.

"Why did you stop me?" I asked. "Sir."

He looked at me for a moment. "I'd like to talk with you. Later tonight."

The hallway felt smaller than it had thirty seconds ago. "Talk about what?"

"Not here."

"Mr. Ashford, I don't think there's anything that..."

"Evander." He said it quietly, without moving, without any particular force behind it, just patient and certain in a way that made it feel less like a correction and more like something he had already decided. "And there is. Tonight, Zella."

He picked up his jacket from the chair by the door and walked past me toward the stairs and I stood in the hallway holding my bag and watching him go and trying to remember how breathing worked.

Then his voice came from the top of the stairs, without him turning around.

"And you can stop looking at the floor every time I'm in the room. I'm not going to say anything."

His footsteps continued up the stairs and disappeared.

I stood there for a long moment.

Then I put my bag down, sat on the chair by the door, and pressed both hands flat against my face.

'He knows.'

Of course he knew. He had known from the moment the lamp came on. He had known through all of breakfast and the lobby and the car ride and every single second since and he had said absolutely nothing and shaken my hand and called me his daughter's friend and now he wanted to 'talk' and I was sitting in his hallway on his chair in his penthouse in Paris and I had absolutely nowhere to go.

I picked the bag back up and went upstairs.