Chapter 6

And none of it had been what he was told.

The assistant set the tablet down.

"Mr. Calloway. I also retrieved the medical records from that evening." A pause. "Miss Wyndham was eight weeks pregnant."

The sound Nicholas made was not entirely human.

He sank to the floor.

The image of Peyton's face as he had walked out of that room — reaching, eyes gone completely dark — it had been there every time he closed his eyes, and he hadn't understood why.

Now he did.

Bianca was found shortly after, inside. She was on the floor already, hand wrapped around his ankle, face ruined with mascara.

"I know I was wrong. I know it. But I love you. And she's gone — you can't change that. Just let me stay. Let me be what she was. We can start over and pretend none of this—"

Nicholas looked down at her.

He thought of Peyton on the ground. The way she'd reached for him with her last strength. The way he'd removed her hand from his leg. Finger by finger. And told her she'd disappointed him.

He stepped back.

"You shouldn't have touched her."

He turned to his security team. "Remove her."

Bianca's screaming filled the hallway as she was dragged out.

At the doorway, when she realized no one was coming for her, her voice went raw and vicious.

"Nicholas. She's dead. That much blood — her and that baby — they're both gone. You did that. You walked out on her. You deserve to spend the rest of your life with nothing — no heir, no company, no one."

The doors closed.

He stood alone in the empty manor.

The silence had the quality of something permanent.

The truth of who I was had nothing to do with Nicholas Calloway.

I was the daughter of Edmund and Catherine Wyndham of Edinburgh. Taken from them as a child by a nanny who had been paid to do it — and who had lost her nerve halfway, abandoned me at the door of a group home, and disappeared.

I had spent a winter there sick with fever. When I recovered, the earliest years were behind a fog I couldn't push through.

Six months ago, the fog had lifted. I remembered.

I had planned to tell Nicholas everything on the wedding day. My name. My family. The pregnancy. All of it at once, on the best morning of my life.

My parents had prepared a trust fund — hundreds of millions — as a homecoming gift.

Nicholas's betrayal had erased all of it before it could happen.

By the time my parents reached the lounge, I had lost consciousness from blood loss. I was transferred to hospital. I spent two weeks in intensive care. The baby didn't survive.

I came back.

Nicholas did not stay gone.

He appeared at my homecoming gala like a man who had lost his mind — unwashed, barely upright, forcing his way through the entrance until security stopped him. My father had him thrown out and beaten until he vomited blood.

The next day he came back with the injuries still fresh. Security broke his leg.

The day after that, he came back again, standing in the rain with a crutch, refusing to leave.

My father slammed his hand on the table. "Throw him in the river."

"It's all right." I stood up. "I'll go."

Some accounts need to be settled in person.

I went out under an umbrella. Rain fell hard enough to make the pavement disappear.

Nicholas saw me.

Every line of him — gaunt, soaked, one leg in a brace — straightened for just a moment. The life came back into his face.

He moved toward me, too fast for his injury. He fell before he reached me.

He stayed where he was on the wet ground.

"Peyton."

He looked up at me with his hand extended, then pulled it back when he saw my expression.

"I've divorced Bianca. I know I was wrong. I was so sure you'd always be there — and then you weren't, and I finally understood. You were the one who couldn't leave. Not me."

His eyes were ruined. Tears and rain, indistinguishable.

"The company is gone. I have nothing. It's like the beginning again. Will you let me start over? This time I will give you everything. I swear it."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"Why would I take back something that's been used?"

"Your cheap, disgusting love and your promises — save them for Bianca."

I took one step back.

My expression was not unkind. It was simply finished.

"If there's any justice in the world, you're already suffering enough."

"This is the last thing I will ever say to you. Stay away from me. I don't want to waste a single thought on you."

Nicholas's mouth moved.

He wanted to argue. I could see it.

But there was nothing in my face that he recognized anymore. The woman who would have forgiven him anything, who had been the center of his gravity for a decade — she was not there.

He understood it, finally, in the way you understand something only after it's completely gone.

He broke.

He wept in the rain, openly, without any attempt at composure.

I turned and walked back into the house.

I closed the door behind me.

His voice was on the other side for a long time. Then it wasn't.

Six months later, I took over my father's London office.

On the way in from the airport, we passed through an intersection.

A delivery bike had tipped over in the road, soup containers scattered across the tarmac. A few men stood around the rider. Nicholas was there — limping, back curved, talking fast in a low voice while someone shoved him.

I shifted my gaze to the window on the other side of the car.

The driver turned off down a different road.

We moved toward something larger, and I didn't look back.