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.

Chapter Eighteen

Choose You

Paris is easy to get lost in. That's partly why I'd wanted to come.

I moved through the first two days on professional autopilot — meetings, fittings, the particular focused energy of an industry week that demanded presence. I was present. I was professional.

I was also carrying an airport around inside my chest.

The third day, my studio manager Ji-woo called with a question about our three new interns — the ones who'd started a month ago through a design scholarship program.

"The Bennett Initiative placement?" I said.

"Yes. Do you want to sign off on their project assignments, or should I—"

I stopped walking. "What's the Bennett Initiative?"

A pause. "The scholarship program. The one funding the interns. It's been running for — I thought you knew? Six months now."

Six months.

I was in the middle of a Paris side street when I called Lily.

"The Bennett Initiative," I said when she answered. "Who set it up?"

A long pause. "Sophia—"

"Lily."

"It's anonymously funded through a trust. I didn't ask questions because the money was legitimate and the candidates were excellent."

"Find out."

She called back in twenty minutes.

I already knew before she said it. Some part of me had known the moment Ji-woo said six months.

Six months ago, I was still sleeping under the same roof as a man who'd told me on our first meeting that he didn't do feelings.

I called Daniel, Lucas's driver.

"The night I had a fever," I said. "The meeting he canceled. What was it?"

A pause. "Miss Sophia, I'm not sure I should—"

"Please."

A longer pause. "The Singapore acquisition. Thirty million dollar window. It closed without Lancaster Group."

Thirty million dollars.

He'd sat in a chair and watched me sleep through a fever and called it unimportant.

I thought about every cold evening he'd been waiting when I came home late. Every time he'd deflected a journalist's pointed question with phrasing that placed me not beside him but with him, differently. The acquisition offer — the one that was so fair it was almost a gift. His hand in mine in the lobby, three seconds too long.

He'd been telling me.

For months, in every language except the one that terrified him, he'd been telling me.

I stood in Paris and looked at the sky and thought about a man standing in a terminal watching a jetway long after the plane had pushed back.

I opened my laptop and booked the first available flight home.

Then I went back to my hotel and packed faster than I'd packed in my life.

This time I was the one running toward something.