All Chapters of Cursed To Love You: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

They met at a small coffee shop in Brooklyn that served the kind of coffee that didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was.Connor was already there when Isla arrived. He was sitting at a corner table, back to the wall, the way people sit when they’re used to needing to see what’s coming.He looked worse than his file.Thinner. Like something had worn him down in the two years since she left. His clothes hung slightly. His eyes had that particular quality of someone who’d spent a lot of time thinking about things he couldn’t change.He stood when he saw her.“Isla.” He said her name like it mattered.“Sit,” she said.She didn’t take off her coat. She didn’t sit close. She positioned herself across from him with the table between them like a barrier that needed to stay in place.“You look good,” he said immediately. His voice had that familiar tone — the one that had learned to apologize before anything even happened.“Don’t start with compliments. Just talk.”He nodded. He s

Three weeks later and nothing has changed except everything.They haven’t gone on a date. Haven’t kissed. Haven’t crossed any physical line except the ones they crossed before she knew the truth.But something has shifted.He stops texting her about work. She stops pretending their conversations are only about the installation. They talk about real things. About his mother. About her father who died when she was seventeen. About the particular loneliness of being in a city where nobody knows you.One evening, on the twenty-second floor after her team has left, she’s on a ladder adjusting the final ceiling anchor when he appears in the doorway.She doesn’t turn around immediately. She finishes what she’s doing. Comes down the ladder.“You keep doing that,” she says.“What?”“Appearing in doorways.”“It’s a building habit.” He walks into the space like he owns it, which he does. “How much longer on this?”“Two weeks. Maybe three.”He looks at the north wall. At the solution she created

The waiting room smelled like recycled air and coffee that had been sitting too long.Isla had been there for forty minutes before Zachary’s monitoring session ended. She’d found the chair closest to the window, positioned so she could see both the door to the treatment corridor and the street below, and she’d opened her laptop and pretended to work on the thirty-first floor proposal and failed completely.She wasn’t working.She was waiting.She had never been good at waiting. Her mother always said that about her — “Isla Simmons cannot sit still in the presence of uncertainty.” Which was ironic because uncertainty was basically her permanent address at this point.The door to the treatment corridor opened.She looked up.Lyra came through first — chart in hand, the particular unhurried efficiency of someone who moved through difficult spaces without letting them cost her anything. She looked at Isla once, nodded in the way that said he’s fine, and continued to the nurses’ station.T

Reid, Zachary and Isla sat at the kitchen table like a war council at three in the morning.The laptop was open. The discovery was very small and very large at the same time.Connor Dealt’s former company. Connected to the trial funding. Connected to Dorian.“Tell me what you know about this company,” Zachary said to Isla. His voice was controlled but something underneath it had shifted. Something sharp.Isla was looking at the screen. At the name that had lived in her past for two years and was now sitting in her present without permission.“When I was with Connor in London he worked for a financial firm called Ashworth & Cole,” she said. “It was small. Private. Very selective about their clients. He never talked much about what he did there — NDAs, he said — but I knew they worked with medical research companies. I remember him mentioning that once.”“How long did he work there?” Reid asked.“Two years. Maybe a little more. Before I met him he was there. When we were together he was

Two weeks of living together and the small moments became everything.She made tea in the mornings before he woke up. Not too strong, milk added while it was steaming. He'd find it on the counter and drink it like they'd been doing this for years instead of weeks. He never said thank you. He just picked it up and the fact that it was there, exactly how he needed it, meant something neither of them had words for yet.She learned he hated silence when he was thinking. So she started playing music — jazz mostly, nothing demanding, just enough to fill the space so his mind could work. He learned she hated silence for the opposite reason. When she was stressed about the installation the quiet made it worse, so he'd leave the radio on in the kitchen, suggest they listen to something while she moved around the apartment trying to outrun her own thoughts.They started reading the same book without planning to.He was reading one night and she asked what it was. He told her. She ordered a copy