“She loved you.”
I couldn’t hold it in. I let out a deep, rumbling groan. I bent over, sharp stabbing pains shooting through my gut. She loved me? How was that possible? Violet was the most beautiful, charming, effervescent woman I’d ever met.
And for some inexplicable reason she’d loved me.
And I’d lost her.
“I’m sorry, but I thought you would want to know. Should I have kept quiet?” Darcy asked.
I straightened, grasping the work surface for support. I shook my head.
“She said she had to get out before she got hurt,” Darcy continued.
I nodded, breathless from the pain.
Violet had said as much on the phone.
“She’s heartbroken, Alex. And you look just . . . broken. Isn’t there anything that can be done?”
I cleared my throat and released my hands. “I’m afraid not. She was right to leave.” I needed to gather myself. I was hurting but it was bound to happen at some point. It was inevitable. “She knew I could never make her happy in the long run.” I should never have thought it could be any different. I wasn’t capable of making her happy. I was too selfish. “I’m just sorry that I hurt her.”
“Alex.” She grabbed my upper arm. “I wasn’t blaming you. You’re both hurting. All I’m saying is if you love her, don’t just give up. I’ve told her the same thing. You can’t just walk away from each other.”
“She said she wanted a clean break. I have to respect that.”
“No! No, you don’t. She upped and left without a discussion and you just let her go.” She blew out a puff of air. “Don’t you love her?”
“Of course I love her.” I’d not admitted it to myself, but it was obvious, wasn’t it? I’d never experienced anything like it—neither the joy nor the pain.
“She’s hurting and trying to protect herself.” Darcy gripped my arms. “You need to prove to her that even though you missed something really important to her, it was a mistake that you regret and won’t repeat. Show her it doesn’t mean she doesn’t matter.”
“She matters more than anyone ever has. She means more than I ever thought anyone could. I love her more than any man ever loved a woman.”
“Have you told her that?”
I hadn’t had a chance, had I? She’d come across as so decided in our telephone call. So resolute.
“Well it’s obvious . . .”
“I can tell you, Alex, it is not obvious. Certainly not to her. You gave her up without a fight—you, a man who fights for a living. A man who’s made it his mission in life to win just let her walk away.”
I ran through my rebuttal in my head: I couldn’t make Violet listen to me. She was three thousand miles away. She’d abandoned me.
And I didn’t know how to work less.
She’d done the right thing.
They sounded weak. They were arguments a loser would make.
Darcy was right. I hadn’t fought for Violet. I’d accepted defeat before I’d finished making my opening statement.
But some fights couldn’t be won. “I don’t know if I could ever be the man she deserved.”
“You love her and she loves you—it’s worth trying, isn’t it?”
“For me, maybe.” I glanced down at my feet. “But it’s too late. She’s gone.”
“She’s a plane ride away and it’s been a week. Don’t be a fool.”
It felt longer and further than that. Was I giving up too easily? If I thought there was a possibility that I could make her happy, that I could convince her to come back to me—that was all I wanted. I looked up. “You think I have a chance?”
“You won’t know unless you try. If she’s as important as you say she is, then fight for her like it’s the case of your career.”
Violet was more important than any legal case.
I knew the law but I didn’t know women. I didn’t understand relationships. I also had no clue how to prove I could change.
“I don’t know how,” I confessed. Words wouldn’t be enough. I needed something more.
“You have a simple choice. Find a way, or lose her.”
Losing her wasn’t an option if I had a choice. I had to find a way to demonstrate my love and I had no idea where to begin but one thing was for sure: I loved Violet King and I wasn’t giving up without a fight.
Thirty-Three
Violet
It was the most ridiculous thing in the world. I was sitting here, in my assigned seat, having completed my first week of my MBA, wishing I could tell Alexander all about it. I should be soaking it in, not thinking about a man. Even if I’d thought I was in love with him, which I wasn’t. Because that would be ridiculous.
Coming back to New York had been the right thing to do. I felt safer here. In the weeks since I’d left London I’d been busy with the holidays and then changing my start date and preparing for classes. It had helped keep my mind from wandering to Knightley. Mostly.
There were just under two hundred of us in the lecture hall—each in preassigned seats so the teaching assistants could tell who was in attendance and the lecturers could pick unsuspecting names from the chart on the desk to answer their impossibly hard questions. Two hundred complete strangers. I would have thought it was impossible to feel this lonely among so many people.
“Did you think it would be this much work?” Douglas asked from next to me.
I smiled and began to gather up my things. We had hours of prep work to complete for next week and had already been issued three assignments. “It’s good to be busy.”
The holidays had been exhausting. I’d wanted to spend them in bed, in a dark room with a bottle of vodka, but there was no chance of even a moment’s peace at my parents’ place. Dad was always up by six, crashing about in the garage just below my bedroom, and there was always some place to be—either at Scarlett and Ryder’s, Max and Harper’s, Grace and Sam’s. So I’d plastered on a smile and gone through the motions regardless of how empty I’d felt inside. Looking back, leaving in secret had been immature. I’d run away rather than having a discussion. At the time I’d not seen any other way. There was nothing he could have said that would have changed my mind, so I’d done what I’d thought had been the best for both of us. The fact that Alexander hadn’t told me what I’d wanted to hear as I’d said goodbye—that he loved me and couldn’t live without me, and that he promised to make more time for me—made the breakup easier. There were no false promises to be broken, just a clean break before things got too messy, before I fell too hard.
At least he hadn’t loved me. If he had told me he had, I wasn’t sure if I would have been strong enough to walk away. But he hadn’t and here I was, facing my future.
Being in college, even if it was under a mountain of work, was better than being surrounded by happy couples. At least here I was doing what I wanted to. School forced me to think about the future and not the past. I refused to think about what might have been.