Chapter 6

He said it with complete conviction. His eyes were glassy and red-rimmed.

Chloe went still. Something in her chest cracked. Tears slid down her cheeks. She stared up at him.

"Then what am I?"

"What am I to you?"

She'd never understand what I was to him.

It was true. I'd been his secretary first and become his wife. His bedroom was full of socialites and actresses back then, women with more money and better names than I had. I was not the obvious choice.

But proximity has its own kind of advantage. As his secretary, I learned what was really wrong with him. Depression. Dissociative episodes. Xanax in his desk drawer.

It took me a long time to piece it together. When he was eighteen, he'd gone to Malibu with his first love. The ocean took her. He tried to hold on. Their hands slipped apart. He watched her disappear into the water, and the guilt never left him.

Every woman he'd ever chased had some ghost of her in their face.

His coping mechanism was volume. If there were enough new women, there wouldn't be room for the old one.

It didn't work. He'd be in the middle of a meeting and suddenly he couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. Night after night, he stood at the windows of his penthouse and thought about how easy it would be to stop standing.

I talked him down more times than I can count.

I shared his bed when nothing else helped.

Back then I wasn't just his assistant. I was his caretaker. I was the body that held him together at three in the morning.

I bought books on depression. I read them until I could recite them.

And then one day, on a Malibu weekend, I engineered my moment.

I let myself be caught in the surf. Pretended to go under. I saw his pupils blow wide. The memory he'd been running from for a decade resurfaced right there on the sand.

He dove in and pulled me out.

On the beach, he held on to me with shaking arms and sobbed like a child.

"I got you. I got you this time. I got you."

From that day on, the ghost receded.

I'd stepped into her place. I'd pulled him out of the dark.

He came off the medication. The thoughts stopped.

More than once, he looked at me across the breakfast table and said:

"Finding you was the best thing that ever happened to me. I only know the world is beautiful because of you."

I knew, then, that the Sterling name was mine.

He married me, over every objection his family had.

The one thing I didn't plan for was that I fell in love with him.

Love makes you petty. Love makes you stupid.

That's why, when he started cheating, I fought him. For a little while.

He counted on the love to keep me in place. And it did, for years. He'd come home late, curl up next to me, and confide in me. No sex. Just pillow talk.

I was still his anchor.

Of course he didn't say any of that to Chloe.

He was too cornered now, and he lashed out.

"If you know what's good for you, don't push me into a choice. I have money. I can find another way to have a child."

"I love you, and I love Mira, both. If you can't handle it, get out."

Chloe froze. Actually froze. She couldn't believe he'd said that to her. She got scared enough to shut up.

That was the moment she stopped using the baby against him.

Seven months later, she gave birth to a boy.

She was thrilled. The heir to the Sterling empire. Her position was all but locked in.

And with the child's arrival, Julian's obsessive search for me cooled off. Not gone. Just quieter.

I became, on Instagram, a travel influencer with five hundred thousand followers. I posted from whatever country I was in that week.

Julian followed my trail more than once. He was never more than a few blocks behind me. He never turned around at the right moment to see me.

I suppose it meant we were never meant to find each other again.

Or he'd finally given up.

Every country I visited, I took photos with beautiful men. The boyfriends I dated now were much, much younger than him. Pretty, doting, sweet.

He sent me DMs, on and off.

"Isn't this enough? Are you trying to kill me?"

Long strings of questions and pleading. I never replied.

Two years later, I came back to New York.

I was at a lounge in SoHo with my new boyfriend when I bumped into Julian. He was half-drunk, in a booth with a bottle girl.

When he saw me, it was like someone turned a light on inside him.

"Mira?"

"You're back. Mira."

He grabbed my hand like he was grabbing the last piece of driftwood in open water. He didn't even register that I was holding someone else's hand.

Old Julian would have already started a fight.

I pulled my hand back calmly. "Mr. Sterling. Please."

He still smiled that giddy smile and leaned closer.

My boyfriend didn't care for that.

"Excuse me," Ethan said, shoving Julian backward. "You've got my girl's hand. Did you think I was a hologram?"

Julian bristled and swung.

"Mira is mine. She will always be mine."

At thirty-eight, he was no match for a twenty-six-year-old. Ethan dropped him with one punch.