Chapter Fifteen

Divorce Rumors

The gossip columns moved quickly.

By Friday: Source close to the Lancaster family says the marriage is "struggling."

By Saturday: a photograph of Lucas and Vanessa at lunch — a working lunch his assistant had confirmed, arranged through channels Vanessa had carefully cultivated — ran on four different entertainment sites with four different captions, all of which said the same thing.

By Sunday, Vanessa called me.

I don't know how she got the number. I answered because the name wasn't in my contacts and I thought it might be a supplier.

"Sophia." Her voice was warm in the way that expensive knives are warm when they catch light. "I thought we should talk. Woman to woman."

"I don't think we should," I said.

"You're very brave," she said, as if I hadn't spoken. "Taking all of this on. But you have to understand — Lucas doesn't do feelings. He never has. This was always going to be temporary." A pause. "Let him go with some dignity, darling. For your sake."

I hung up.

I sat on the edge of my bed for a long time.

The thing was — she wasn't entirely wrong about the facts. He didn't do feelings. He'd said so himself. He'd written it into a contract. I'd agreed to the terms.

And I was sitting here eight months later, counting the seconds he'd held my hand in a lobby, remembering what it felt like when he checked my temperature in the dark.

I got up. Went to my closet. Pulled out the overnight bag I'd used for industry trips.

Started folding things into it.

Not all of it. Not dramatically. Just — a few things. Enough to go somewhere for a while. Enough to put some distance between myself and the man sleeping forty feet away who made me feel things that a contract said I wasn't allowed to feel.

I was a self-respecting woman. I wasn't going to stay somewhere I wasn't chosen.

I zipped the bag.

I put it by the door of my room.

Then I sat back on the bed and looked at it.

And didn't move it.

Not yet.

Chapter Sixteen

Too Late

I waited until Sunday breakfast, which felt like the right time to end things. Civilized. No drama. Two adults at a table with coffee and daylight, agreeing that something had reached its natural conclusion.

I'd had Clara send me a template. I'd filled it in myself. Clean language. Fair terms. All my additions in accordance with the original agreement.

Lucas was already at the table. Reading. Coffee. The particular composed morning version of himself that I'd memorized without meaning to.

I sat down. Slid the papers across.

He looked at them.

"We're six months from the agreed date," I said. "There's no reason to extend what isn't — what isn't working." I kept my voice even. "Let's end it cleanly. Now, while there's still something clean to preserve."

He was very still.

He looked at the papers the way he'd looked at my fabric swatch in the window light — with real attention, as if they contained information that mattered.

He picked them up.

My heart did something I told it not to.

He set them back down.

"Sophia."

"Lucas, please—"

"I'm not signing these."

The words landed in the kitchen like something physical.

I stared at him.

He was looking back at me — not composed, not calculating, not the boardroom version of himself that I'd been trying to hold at arm's length for eight months. He looked, for the first time, like a man who was afraid.

Lucas Lancaster. Afraid.

"This is what we agreed to," I said. My voice was less steady than I wanted.

"I know."

"You said yourself — no feelings. No entanglement. A contract—"

"I know what I said."

"Then sign the papers."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"No," he said.

I stood. I didn't trust myself to sit still any longer. I crossed to the window. The city below was Sunday-slow and indifferent.

"This isn't fair," I said quietly. To the glass. To myself.

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

I heard him behind me. Not moving. Just — there.

I didn't turn around.

I already knew that if I turned around, everything I'd been carefully not saying was going to have nowhere left to hide.

Chapter Seventeen

The Airport

I booked the flight two days later. Paris Fashion Week — I had a legitimate reason, a real one, four scheduled meetings and a runway appearance I'd been confirmed for three months ago.

I packed everything this time. The studio would handle the rest remotely.

Lucas didn't stop me. He said nothing about the suitcase in the hall, nothing about the car I'd booked, nothing when I came to say — whatever I was going to say.

He was in the study. He looked up when I knocked.

"I'm going to Paris." Unnecessary. He knew. "For Fashion Week."

"I know." He looked at me steadily. "Have a good trip."

I stood in the doorway for a moment. Looked at him. Looked at all of him — the composed surface, the careful hands, the way he'd rearranged himself into something untouchable again.

Then I left.

* * *

I was at the gate when I heard it.

Not a sound — a shift in the ambient noise of the terminal. Heads turning. Phones going up. The particular stir that happens when someone unexpected walks into a space.

I turned.

Lucas Lancaster was walking through the terminal.

No luggage. Still in his suit. The same suit he'd been wearing when I'd knocked on his study door an hour ago. He was moving with the singular focus of a man who had decided to do something that terrified him.

He stopped in front of me.

Around us, the gate area was very still.

"I don't do feelings," he said. His voice was low, controlled — but barely. "I made that rule before I understood that some rules exist to protect you from things you haven't faced yet." He looked at me. "My father loved with everything he had and destroyed my mother. I watched it happen. I decided I would never be that — I would never lose myself to something I couldn't control."

"Lucas—"

"I'm not finished."

I closed my mouth.

"I have been methodical my entire life," he said. "I have controlled everything I could control. I signed a contract that said I wouldn't feel anything — and for eight months I have been failing that contract in every possible way." His jaw tightened. "When you packed your bag, I couldn't breathe. I sat in my study for two days and told myself it was rational. That you had every right. That I'd known from the beginning this was temporary."

The gate agent called final boarding.

Neither of us moved.

"I don't know how to love someone the right way," he said. "I have never tried. I don't have a model for it that doesn't end in damage." Something cracked in the composure — just the edge of it. "But I know that I have been watching you for eight months and finding excuses to stay in whatever room you're in. I know that I memorized how you take your tea without deciding to. I know that the night you had a fever, I canceled a thirty million dollar meeting because the thought of being somewhere you weren't seemed"—he paused—"impossible."

The gate agent called final boarding again.

I was crying. I didn't remember deciding to.

"Say something," he said quietly.

I looked at him. At the man who'd structured his entire life around not needing anyone, standing in the middle of a public terminal, dismantling that structure word by word.

I turned. Picked up my carry-on.

Walked down the jetway.

He didn't call after me.

He understood — I thought he understood — that some things need to be felt in private before they can be answered out loud.

But at the end of the jetway, before I turned the corner, I looked back through the window.

He was still standing there.

Watching.

Waiting, for the first time in his life, for something he couldn't control.