Chapter 17

Lily's door opened.

A black umbrella went up over her head, a member of Marcus's team holding it. The rain hit everything else, the road, the cars, the man on the wet asphalt, but not her.

She walked toward Julian, unhurried, and stopped three steps away.

She looked at him — soaked, barely holding himself together, his face a ruin of rain and desperation. The man who had once been the most important thing in her world. The most dangerous.

"Julian." Her voice was even. Quiet enough that it should have been swallowed by the storm, but it wasn't. It went straight through everything. "Dying won't fix anything. Your life is your own. What happens to it has nothing to do with me anymore. Your regret, your pain — none of that is mine to carry."

He stared up at her.

Whatever last fragment of hope he'd been holding disintegrated.

All his effort. All the fight. Everything — every desperate gesture, every declaration — and she'd deflected it in two sentences without even raising her voice.

He folded.

Sat back on the wet road in the middle of the bridge as if he had nowhere left to fall to, and let the rain come in everywhere, and howled — a sound with no words in it, just the raw interior of someone who had destroyed the only thing that mattered and now had to live with that without the mercy of being forgiven.

"Why…" He could barely form the syllables. "Why can't even dying… bring you back…"

Lily didn't answer.

She turned and walked back to the car. The door closed behind her.

The interior was dry. Marcus was there.

He reached across and took her hand. Her fingers were cold. He held them.

"Are you alright?" he asked, voice low.

She shook her head — slightly. Then leaned back against his shoulder and closed her eyes.

"Drive," she said. "Please."

The convoy moved.

In the rearview mirror, Julian knelt on the bridge in the downpour — a figure growing smaller, dissolving, something the storm was already beginning to erase.

The rain grew heavier, and his outline blurred, and then there was only grey.

One month later, a grey dawn.

Julian's house was cold. The curtains had not been opened in days.

He was standing at the window. He had lost enough weight that his collarbones showed through his shirt — a shirt that was old now, soft from too many washes, the collar beginning to fray. He was looking at dead leaves moving across the lawn.

His assistant set down a silver security case in the entrance hall, careful, as if it were fragile.

"Mr. Sterling. Everything's arranged, as instructed. This is… the final transfer."

Inside the case:

The deed of transfer for the remaining shares of Sterling Group. Beneficiary: Lily Ashford. Unconditional.

And other things. Items that had been in a locked drawer for years, moved from flat to office to hotel and back, never opened, because opening them meant admitting something he hadn't been ready to admit.

A hairclip — strawberry-shaped, plastic, the kind a teenager would wear. It had fallen out of her bag in his rucksack during their second month together, and he'd kept it.

A scarf. Grey cashmere, the weave slightly uneven. She'd knitted it for him one winter in the university library, staying late, working through the nights. She'd given it to him on the first cold morning and said nothing, just pulled it around his neck with careful hands.

Two cinema ticket stubs. Their first date. Titanic, in a small multiplex near campus, seats 14B and 14C.

A charcoal portrait. Him, laughing at something. He was maybe twenty. She'd drawn it on a slow afternoon in their first flat, sitting across from him on the floor with her sketchbook while he read, and she'd worked in silence, and when he finally looked up she turned the book around and showed him.

An ultrasound printout. Yellowed. A small blurred shape that had lived for four weeks.

With the case, a note. The handwriting was erratic — forced through a hand that had been shaking badly, the ink bleeding where it had been dropped on.

Lily — I'm sorry. This is the last thing I can give you. I'm going now, and I won't bother you again. I wish you…

I wish you everything.

Lily received the case at the Calloway townhouse, on a Tuesday afternoon, in the conservatory where she'd been pruning roses.

She stood still with it for a long time.

Then she set it down on the garden table and turned to Marcus, who had been watching from the doorway.

"The shares — convert them to cash and donate everything to the Women and Children's Relief Foundation." Her voice was neutral. Settled. "As for the case itself and whatever's inside — get rid of it. Charity auction, recycling, whatever seems right. I don't want to see it again."

She picked up her pruning shears and went back to the roses.