The second I hang up, Alex has me off the ground. He scoops me up behind my knees and spins me around in a circle. “I fucking knew it! I’m so proud of you, jagi.”
My body isn’t sure how to process this. Inside, all my tiny molecules are fusing together and fissuring apart. Again. Again. Again.
He puts me back on my feet, still holding me upright. The sturdiest, most solid thing I’ve ever felt. “How do you feel?” he asks gently.
Terrified. Thrilled. “I’m … confused,” I tell him, honest as I can get.
Alex’s eyes glaze with sadness, and he rests his forehead against mine. “There goes all my plotting.”
“What plotting?”
Alex swallows thickly and murmurs, “How to keep you.”
This is dating.
“Alex.” I grasp at his hair. “What the actual fuck are we doing?”
He shakes his head, forehead rocking against mine, his fingers bunching into my coat like the grip will hold me there forever. “I don’t know. Casey, I would … I would follow you there. I think I would follow you anywhere.”
The sentence calcifies into my own bones, his words becoming a physical part of me that I couldn’t get rid of unless it broke. “You would?”
“If you wanted me to, I would.” He tucks my hair behind my ear, sighs, and starts talking. Really talking.
“I’ve thought about this a lot. I started thinking about it the minute you left my place, the time you told me about moving to London with stars in your eyes after I’d spent the best minutes of my life inside your body. I’ve asked myself if I would ever move back to London if I’d never met you. I’ve asked myself if, had you’d been interested in someplace else, would I still have tried to follow you then?”
He tilts my chin up, his irises turning flinty. “Every day, Casey, every time I’d look at you, I would play out all those what-if scenarios in my head. They always ended the same, with me thinking, Yes. If you were existing near me, the answer was yes. And if you weren’t near me—funny enough, Case, the answer was still yes. That’s the best part. It doesn’t feel like a tether, it feels like a choice, because the stars in your eyes are fucking why I fell in love with you.”
He wipes a tear from the corner of my eye, thumb lingering on my cheek, and his voice softens even more as he continues. “So, to me, it pretty much came down to only that. Once I figured that part out, the rest wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t difficult. If you want me—if by some miracle this is a mutual feeling—then I go where you go. I am where you are. But I don’t want you to feel pressured, so if you don’t want me to be in London with you, I won’t, and I will completely understand. I mean, we made a deal when we started this whole thing, and I broke the rules—”
I put a finger to his lips. “Stop. Just stop right there. Alex, I do want you there. I want to keep you, too.”
Oddly, his expression falls even further. “Are you sure? It wouldn’t be for a while, what with the BTH board holdup. Maybe even six months, until they really let us launch.”
The cloud bursts.
The secret bursts.
It pours out of me, sentence after splintered sentence: Tracy approaching me, asking me to uncover the truth behind Robert and Dougie’s feud (during which I swear to Alex I never breathed a word to her about his relationship with his dad, which is the truth). The news of the acquisition, my being sworn to secrecy, learning the BTH presentation was just a red or green light to sell.
When I say that part, Alex’s eyes gutter, and his face goes cold. He stands there mutely through my apology, stiff and frozen. I want to touch him, but I’m scared he’ll flinch away. I’ve never seen him look like this. Not in the entire time I’ve known him have I seen him this … defeated.
I shift on my feet. The grass beneath my boots is still crunchy from frost. It’s all that breaks up the silence that follows.
“Alex,” I whisper. “I’m sorry. I really am so, so sorry. About all of it.”
He rubs at his face, eyes pointed listlessly toward the sky. When he doesn’t say anything for a few moments, I can’t take it.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“I am wondering,” he says, voice gravelly, “if I have any right to be mad at you for keeping a privileged secret from me that might have gotten you into serious trouble, had I not kept it to myself. And I think the answer is no. I don’t have that right.” His eyes drop to mine. “But I’m also wondering why you didn’t trust me enough to tell me that secret anyway. Because whether we admitted it to each other or not, we were dating a month ago. I was already telling you everything a month ago.” I can see his frustration visibly growing. “I spent weeks working on that presentation. You spent weeks. Now you’re telling me the whole time, Dougie Dawson was just waiting for the curtain to close?”
“It wasn’t like that. Tracy thought we had a chance—”
“I’m sure you can understand why Tracy’s thoughts don’t hold much weight for me right now, manipulative as she’s been toward both of us,” he mutters. “Fuck. That was supposed to be it.” Alex grabs at his hair, turning away from me.
That was supposed to be it.
Successfully launching a subsidiary company at his father’s old haunt was supposed to be the thing that would make Robert care.
I think of Mom in this moment, of her obsession with legacy. I still don’t know what mine is supposed to be. But Alex does. That was supposed to be it. Only now, it won’t be. It won’t be.
“Alex,” I whisper, and he turns back. “We did everything we could. We tried our hardest.”
For an instant, I deceive myself into thinking his eyes warm, but it’s so brief, and they go so cold after, that I must have only seen what I wanted.
“I know, Casey,” he says, his voice soft and low. “And I’ll come around to that, with time. That the acquisition was beyond either of our control.” His jaw flexes and he breaks hold of my gaze, looking back toward the car. “But you obviously never trusted me the way I trusted you. And that’s what’s really breaking my heart.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
My Subway Nemesis is holding two things: his usual homemade death trap granola bar and a computer bag with a vaguely familiar insignia stitched on the front. Through puffy, swollen eyes—I haven’t stopped crying all week, despite the excitement of planning my big move and Miriam’s constant attempts to cheer me up—I squint at it.
I’ve seen that before, I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it, where have I seen that before.
It’s woven with silver thread, a small spiral that braids in on itself. I stare for a few beats longer, and then, I realize—
It’s the same symbol I spotted on a document in Robert’s Harrison’s town house.
My forehead wrinkles, and hair falls into my eyes as I lower my head into my hand, thinking. The headache I haven’t been able to get rid of for days is drumming loudly, choking my thoughts the same way it’s been robbing me of sleep.