Beckett's POV
The gym has no mirrors because I don't need to watch myself do things I already know I'm doing wrong.
I converted this back room years ago. Stripped the carpet, laid rubber flooring, bolted a heavy bag to a ceiling beam that has never once complained about the weight. The free weights are arranged by size along the far wall.
No clock. No music. No reflective surface to catch me in whatever this is.
I wrap my hands in the dark at something-before-five and start hitting.
The bag swings back and I follow it. Weight shifting through my hips, knuckles finding the canvas in a rhythm that isn't a rhythm yet because I'm still thinking instead of moving.
I drive harder and the chain overhead groans and the bag jolts back, returning like it's waiting for me to be more honest about what I'm actually doing.
I had eleven years to find her and two weeks to tell her.
I used neither.
That's the part I can't get past. She sat in my kitchen and handed me the worst thing she carries. And I sat there and received it like a man being confessed to instead of a man who should have been confessing.
And then I let her walk back to the guest room and close the door.
There is no clean angle from which I look like someone who did right by her.
But guilt without direction is just self-pity with better posture, and I am not interested in feeling terrible about this. I am interested in fixing it.
The question is whether fixing it is something she'd let me attempt. Or whether I've burned through every version of her trust that ever existed.
The bag swings back and I follow it.
The car ride from the garage. First clean opportunity. Her cheek was swelling, and I told myself: not yet, she needs to feel safe first.
The kitchen, first night. She ate, and the whole time I was thinking: she'll leave if I tell her. So I held a door open and called it patience.
The patio. She looked across the table and told me she'd spent eight years with a man who never gave her a straight answer. I gave her the charm. I gave her the joke. I gave her every calibrated version of myself except the true one.
Every night the same calculation: if I tell her, I lose her. If I don't, I keep her close.
I stop hitting. The bag swings once, twice, and settles. I press my forearms against the canvas and breathe through the burn spreading up my shoulders.
That math is Collier's math.
My father built his empire by understanding that information is leverage, and leverage is how you love people without the inconvenience of trusting them. He made decisions for my mother and called it protection.
He withheld and managed and arranged, and she sat at the far end of a dinner table every night and cut her steak into pieces she never ate. Neither of them said the word ‘alone’ because by the time it applied, there was nothing left to say.
I told myself for thirty-three years I was nothing like him.
Then Waverly walked into my house and I held back the one piece of information that was hers to begin with. Because giving it back meant she might leave — and the decision arrived fast and felt natural — and that is the part that makes me want to hit the bag until I can't lift my arms.
I hear footsteps in the doorway before Ridley walks in without announcing himself. He reads the situation the way only someone who has known you for ten years can, and crosses to the bag. He takes it in both hands with no greeting or questions.
He knows to wait me out.
We've done this before — different reasons, same room. After Collier pulled his backing the first time. After Singapore fell apart. After the night I drove to the airport and didn't board the plane and couldn't explain why, and Ridley showed up at seven in the morning and held the bag without asking.
He holds it now, and I start again. Several minutes pass, his voice cuts through the rhythm. "How long have you been down here?"
"Didn't check the clock."
"Based on your knuckles, I'd say long enough." He adjusts his grip on the bag as I hit. "You look like you're trying to punish something that didn't actually do anything wrong."
I stop and the bag stills under his hands. I lean my forearms against the canvas and let the burn spread.
Say it out loud. It doesn't get smaller by staying in your head.
"Waverly's pregnancy history," I say. "There's a connection… to me."
Ridley doesn't react. That's worse than if he had.
I tell him all of it — the party eleven years ago, the girl who left before I woke up, the months I spent trying to find her, the industry event where I saw her and never approached because I noticed the ring on her finger.
The birthmark. What she told me last night about the clinic and the complications and the three pregnancies she lost before I ever knew they were connected to me.
Ridley listens without interrupting, which is how I know it's bad. He only goes quiet like that when the information is too large to react to in real time. When I finish, he doesn't ask questions. He just looks at me across the bag and delivers the verdict.
"So the woman you've been circling for years just found out you've been lying to her for longer than her husband has."
The words land without ceremony. That's the Ridley specialty — delivering the exact sentence you've been avoiding in your own head, out loud, in a room with no exits.
"It's not the same," I say.
"I didn't say it was the same." His voice stays flat. "I said she just found out. The distinction is yours to make. She doesn't have enough information yet to make it."
I don't answer that.
He's not wrong, and we both know I don't have a rebuttal, only a defense, and defenses are for men who think they're innocent.
"But ask yourself," he continues, "if she can tell the difference right now."
I hold his gaze for a long moment. His arms don't move. His expression doesn't shift. Ridley has always been better at stillness than I am, which is one of the more inconvenient things about having him around.
Then I push off the bag and reach for the wraps.
I know the answer, which is why I'm in a gym at five in the morning instead of asleep. The difference between me and Gary is intent. The experience, from where Waverly is standing, is the same: another man who decided what she got to know.
I finish unwrapping the left hand. I've been down here longer than I thought considering that the wraps are damp all the way through. When I start on the right, Ridley watches me with arms crossed now, shoulder against the wall.
His posture tells me he has somewhere to be but he isn't leaving yet.
"She told me the personal part of the arrangement is over," I say. "Business only until the acquisition closes."
"Smart of her."
I look at him and he looks back. Neither of us reframes the silence.
The thing about Ridley is that he doesn't editorialize. He doesn't call me an idiot; he just arranges the facts until the conclusion is unavoidable. This is the most efficient form of cruelty I've ever encountered, and I hired him, which probably says something about me.
"I'm not going to tell you she's wrong. I'm also not going to tell you to let it sit. Those are two different things. But is that what you want?" he adds, after a beat. "Business only."
I drop both wraps on the weight bench. "No."
Ridley nods once, like the answer confirms something he already had filed away. He doesn't push. He doesn't offer anything that sounds like hope, which is the correct move — false hope from Ridley would be way out of character.
He lets the silence sit for a moment, then reaches into the back pocket of his trousers.
"Collier called." He holds out his phone. The call log is visible on the screen — my father's name, 5:04 a.m. "He wants to see you today."
I look at the screen. The timestamp means my father was awake before I was. Collier is always awake before everyone else. He considers it an advantage.
"Not a request," Ridley adds.