Page 62 of His Vow

The phone call was still in my body — his voice cracking open in the dark, the apology that sounded like it was being pulled out of him by the roots. I love you, Soleil. Three words I wasn't ready to hear from the man who made me doubt every true thing I'd ever felt. I almost broke. I heard myself start his name — Nolan — and the pull was so strong it was muscular, a reflex I had to override with every rational part of myself. Don't call me again. I said it and meant it and had been pressing on it since.

It still hurt.

A knock at my door. I crossed the room and opened it.

Rhys stood in the hallway looking like he'd slept in his car. The suit jacket gone, the shirt untucked, the collar open, wrinkled like he'd been wearing it for days. He hadn't showered. His hair was flat on one side, pressed from sleeping against something that wasn't a pillow. His eyes were bloodshot and raw and the skin beneath them was gray. The evasion had lived behind his smile for fifteen years, and the wall he hid behind at every dinner and every phone call where his voice went loose and wrong was gone. Whatever had cracked on those front steps when I walked out of our father's study had finished breaking, and he was standing in my doorway with the rubble all over him.

I stepped aside. He walked in, sat on my couch, and dropped his head into his hands.

I didn't fill the silence. I was done filling silences for the men in my family.

The minutes stretched. My radiator clicked. A car horn sounded on the street below. Rhys's breathing was ragged, uneven, the sound of a man working up to something that had been locked in his chest for half his life.

He lifted his head. His eyes found mine.

"Her name was Adira."

I sat on the floor across from him. Cross-legged. My back against the wall. I didn't move.

"We met at a party. Mutual friends. She was — " His voice caught. He cleared his throat. Started again. "She was nineteen. I was twenty. She was studying education. She wanted to teach. And she smiled at me across this crowded room, and I just — " He pressed his fist against his mouth. Held it there. His jaw was working behind his knuckles. "I meant it, Sol. That's what you have to understand. I wasn't playing with her. I loved her. I loved her the way you're supposed to love someone when you're twenty and stupid, and you think the world is going to let you keep the good things."

His hand dropped from his mouth. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his eyes on the floor.

"She got pregnant. And for about three weeks, it was the best thing that had ever happened to me. We talked about names. She wanted something that meant light. I said that was cheesy. She threw a pillow at me, and I caught it and pulled her onto the couch, and we just — we sat there. Laughing. Planning. Like the future was this thing we could hold in our hands."

The radiator clicked again. I pressed my fingernails into my palms.

"Then I told Dad."

The words dropped into the room like stones into water. The silence rippled around them.

"He didn't yell. He never yells. He just — his face changed. That thing he does where the warmth stays but everything underneath it rearranges." Rhys's hands were trembling on his knees. "Two days later, Adira's landlord stopped returning her calls. The management company that handled her building — it traced back to us. I didn't know that then. I found out later. Her employer eliminated her position. Out of nowhere. No warning. Then the stories started — whispered through the right circles. About instability. About a girl from nowhere chasing a name."

His voice went flat. The flatness was worse than breaking — it was the sound of a man who'd said these sentences to himself a thousand times in the dark and never once out loud.

"Dad sent me abroad. No warning, no discussion. One day, I was holding her hand, talking about baby names, and the next day, I was on a plane. His lawyers were at her door with a settlement and an NDA that said none of it happened." He swallowed. "The stress took the baby."

I pressed my hand over my mouth. The tears were hot behind my eyes, but I held them because this wasn't my grief. This was his. He was the one who needed to say it.

"I watched him erase her, Sol." His voice was barely audible now. "I watched my father take a nineteen-year-old girl who loved me and compress her into a nondisclosure clause. And I let him. Because I was twenty and scared and his voice was the only authority I'd ever known and I chose the easy thing." He looked at me. His eyes were wet. "And it destroyed someone I loved."

He told me about the photograph in his wallet. The block he drove past more often than geography required. The drinking that started after and never stopped — not because he couldn't stop, but because stopping would mean sitting with what he'd done in full clarity, and the clarity was worse than the hangover.

I looked at my brother. The polished heir was gone. The golden boy who smiled through everything and who drank too much at family dinners. What sat on my couch was a man who'd been drowning since he was twenty and had finally stopped pretending he could swim.

"Are you ever going to apologize to her?" I asked. "To Adira?"

He looked at his hands. His jaw worked. "Someday. Maybe. I can't — I can't face her yet. The shame is — " He shook his head. "How do you look at someone whose life you helped destroy and say you're sorry?"

I thought about Nolan on the phone. I want to make this right. However long it takes. Two men who hurt the people they loved and were both standing in the wreckage asking for more time.

I pushed that thought away.

"Then help me do something about it now."

The gallery was quiet when I arrived. The grandmother's kitchen hung on the far wall, the flour still suspended in the painted air. The concrete floor was cool under my boots. The space smelled like turpentine and the rosemary on the windowsill and the particular stillness of a room that was waiting to be filled.

Margaux was behind the desk. She looked up when I walked in, and whatever she saw on my face made her set her phone down and stand.