Preston slowly turned.
For months, perhaps years, he had trained himself to expect a particular version of me.
Crying Eleanor.
Begging Eleanor.
The woman who waited outside elevators asking why he had ignored her messages.
The woman who checked Brielle’s photographs at two in the morning and wondered if beauty was a form of theft.
The woman who accepted one gentle sentence as payment for ten acts of cruelty.
The woman who apologized after catching him lying because my questions had supposedly made him feel controlled.
I had hated that woman.
I had also been her.
Now, sitting in my wedding gown with his mistress’s name still burning inside my skull, I finally understood something.
The opposite of love was not hatred.
It was clarity.
“Say something,” Preston demanded.
I lifted my eyes to him.
“Do you love her?”
He laughed once.
There was no humor in it.
“You really want to do this tonight?”
“You’re the one leaving.”
“Because she needs me.”
“And I don’t?”
His expression became almost contemptuous.
“You have everything.”
I felt the words land somewhere deep.
He gestured around the suite.
“Look at this place, Eleanor.”
The roses.
The chandelier.
The hand-painted ceiling.
The champagne.
The ocean beyond the glass.
“You have an entire family empire behind you,” he continued.
“You have staff, lawyers, accountants, security, houses in three states, a father who would move half the earth if you complained about the view.”
He shook his head.
“Brielle has no one.”
There it was.
