Page 71 of Waiting for You

"Answer the damn question, Sloane."

"I am answering it. It isn't Xavier." I sat up straighter, wincing at the stiffness in my neck. "I made a mistake coming on this trip with Andrew. I knew before I even boarded the flight that it was never going to work. We have different philosophies about what a successful life is supposed to look like. Different metrics for what matters. I didn't want him then. I don't want him now."

"This is not the time⁠—"

"And yes," I bulldozed over him, my voice rising. "The only man I've ever wanted was Xavier. You took him from me. You made that threat. And now I'm supposed to quietly live with the fallout of that decision, and I am, and I will. But I'm not going to survive it by marrying some corporate stranger I don't give a damn about just because it balances your ledger."

He went terrifyingly quiet.

"This is not the time to indulge your feelings," he warned, his voice dropping to a dangerous register.

"This has nothing to do with my feelings," I fired back, exhausted. "This is me being bone-deep tired. I'm tired, Dad. I'm so damn tired of all of it."

"I'll fix this," he said coldly, and the line cut to static before I could get another word out.

I sat gripping the dead phone in the dark.

I had no idea what kind of pressure he was going to apply next. He'd been shaping the architecture of my life for as long as I'd been alive, and I'd spent years trying to crawl out from under his shadow. I wasn't free yet. I could feel it. The pull of him, the reach of his decisions, his ability to make himself the center of gravity even when I thought I was making a choice for myself.

I wanted to be different. I'd wanted to be a different woman for a long time, and I'd made progress in the easy areas that didn't cost me anything while avoiding the battles that did. I wanted to live my own life, be my own person, and stop letting his version of my future stand in for a breathable one. And I wanted, if there was even a microscopic chance left to want it, to somehow earn Xavier's forgiveness.

Getting him back wasn't the goal anymore.

I'd let go of that somewhere in the dark corridor, somewhere in the space between my life was yours and I've chosen Eliza. What I wanted now was to stop being the thing that kept hurting him, and for him to know, down in his marrow, that I'd been telling him the truth.

SEVENTEEN

XAVIER

I couldn't stop replaying the confession.

If Sloane's father had threatened to burn down everything I'd built. If that scenario was real. If that was what happened in that locked office, then she hadn't wanted to leave me. She'd been terrified, she'd been young, she'd been isolated under her father's thumb, and she'd made the only choice that felt survivable at the time. If that was true, then the years I'd spent drowning in confusion landed differently. The sapphire ring burning a hole in my pocket, the story I'd built around her walking away without a word, the theory I'd constructed about her being a woman who could discard love that cleanly, all of it shifted.

I stood by the dark window of the suite, staring out at the crashing ocean, and made myself sit with the fallout of that thought.

The reality of practicing medicine was that it trained my brain to require hard evidence before committing to a conclusion. A patient walked in with symptoms, I ordered the tests, and I built toward a verifiable answer based on data, not on what I felt. I'd applied that same discipline to our argument in the corridor. Sloane claimed her father threatened to destroy my career, I had zero evidence of that threat, so I didn't believe it. The equation was clean. That was how my brain was built to operate.

But I also knew that refusing to believe a diagnosis wasn't the same as the diagnosis being false. And I knew, if I was willing to be honest with my own reflection, that a part of me had refused to believe her because accepting it would force me to dismantle every survival story I'd told myself about those years.

It would rewrite the note, the returned package, and what it meant that she'd been capable of ending our life so cleanly. Disbelief was easier than a full revision. I knew the difference between the two, and I'd been lying to myself about which one I was doing.

I didn't believe her. I'd stared her dead in the eyes and told her I didn't believe her. And the honest truth was that I still wasn't sure. Henry Ty was a ruthless man, and torching a no-name resident's career with a few phone calls was within his reach.

But the idea that he'd looked his twenty-one-year-old daughter in the face and laid it out as a flat ultimatum was an accusation that needed more proof than a tearful midnight confession to make it real. I also knew I hadn't been fair to her. I'd told her there was nothing she could say that would change my mind before she'd even finished saying it. That wasn't the same as listening.

The velvet ring box was still inside my suit jacket. I picked it up off the chair and held it without putting it on.

When I'd looked at her and declared that the best solution was for us to never see each other again, I'd meant it in the moment. I was less sure now. I'd fired that sentence off as a tactical strike to end the conversation, not because I'd evaluated the outcome. I was a man who thought things through from every angle, and I'd failed to do that in the hallway.

I draped it back over the chair and walked into the bedroom.

Eliza sat at the vanity mirror, working through her evening skincare routine with graceful and practiced ease, her dark hair pinned up. I lingered in the doorway, watching her. What I felt wasn't romantic love, and it wasn't cold indifference either, but a quiet respect that lived between the two. It was the regard you develop for a partner who'd been honest with you, treated you well, and demanded nothing unreasonable in return.

She caught my reflection in the mirror.

"Where'd you vanish to?" she asked.

"I stepped out for air. I ended up having a conversation with Sloane."