The grey hard-shell suitcase is by the door, packed exactly the way it was when I brought it here — except I know the contents differently now. Folded next to the gala dress is the cotton shirt I wore on the patio, arguing hotel strategy with a man whose guest wing I was never supposed to stay in this long.
Final pass. That's what I'm doing.
I walk through the guest wing one last time — not because I've forgotten anything but because my feet need to make peace with where I've been.
Morning light comes in low through the east-facing window, laying a warm stripe across the floorboards I've crossed a hundred times in bare feet. The bed is made. The nightstand is clear. The bathroom counter where I balanced a borrowed phone and his spare toothpaste holds no trace of me.
Good. That's how this should end.
I'm in the hallway, rolling the suitcase toward the front door when I hear it. Two voices carry from the living room — staff, from the rhythm of it. The shorthand of people whose job is to make a room look like no one was ever there.
"...the white linen or the ivory for Friday? Mr. Morrow said the Duvals prefer formal settings..."
I slow without deciding to.
"Wine selections are confirmed, and Eleanora specifically asked for the good burgundy, so we'll need to pull from the reserve..."
Right, the fiancée.
I stand with my hand around the suitcase handle and conduct a brief, damning inventory of myself.
I didn't sleep for two nights after Beckett told me I needed to be gone by Friday and I went upstairs and opened my phone and found a society column that had already written the ending for me.
Morrow and Duval, merger, the word ‘alliance’ used four times in six paragraphs like if they said it enough it would stop meaning what it meant.
I lay in the guest room of this house, in the bed I've been pretending is not temporary, and I stared at the ceiling and told myself it was the pregnancy keeping me up. I am aware, standing here, that I have no standing to feel whatever this is.
The rational part of my brain would like to register this observation formally.
The rational part of my brain can go fuck itself.
"What are you doing?"
The voice comes from directly behind me, low and unhurried.
I startle anyway, my grip tightening on the suitcase handle hard enough that the ridged plastic bites into my palm. I hate that my body still does this: catalogs unexpected voices as threats before my brain has finished processing the syllables.
When I turn, Beckett is leaning in the doorway to the sitting room. Jacket in hand, expression is blank like he already knows the answer to the question he just asked.
His shirt collar is open at the throat and there's still the smell of outside air on him — early morning and coffee. Nothing like Gary's sandalwood-and-performance.
"Leaving," I say. "Which is what I told you I was doing this morning."
"You're standing in the middle of the hallway."
"I stopped to adjust my grip." I reach for the suitcase handle and demonstrate.
He doesn't move toward me or away. Just watches, and the watching is the problem — his attention always makes me feel like I'm naked. He sets the jacket on the side table and I watch him do it. The motion is easy and unhurried.
Why would he hurry?
This is his house, and everyone who enters it is temporary by design. Except Eleanora Duval, apparently, who prefers the good burgundy and formal linen.
I have been here for weeks and no one offered me ‘the good burgundy.’
I am aware, distantly, that this thought is not my finest hour. I catalog it alongside the tightness sitting just below my sternum — not grief, which I know the precise shape of, but something smaller and more irritating.
Like biting the inside of your cheek and doing it again before the first one heals.
"Congratulations, by the way." I keep my voice level. "I hope the Duvals are everything you want."
"You don't sound sincere," he says.
"Sincerity isn't part of our arrangement, Morrow."
He glances toward the living room doorway — one deliberate look, just long enough to tell me he knows exactly how long I was standing in this hallway before I said a word. "How much did you hear?"
"Enough."
"Enough." He tilts his head like he's cataloging what I'm not saying. "Did you practice the congratulations, or did it come naturally?"
"I wasn't eavesdropping if that is what you mean. I was leaving, and your staff should learn to whisper."
"My staff whisper fine." He takes one step closer, unhurried. "You were listening because you wanted to hear it."
The living room voices have gone quiet. The house settles around us — no distant footsteps, no hum from the kitchen.
"Predictable," I say. The word comes out sharper than I intend, which means it came out exactly right. "You keep women in rotation and call it spontaneity. There is a tabloid archive with photographic evidence going back five years."
His chin drops a fraction and the easy charm sharpens into something more specific.
"That's rich from someone who kissed me several nights ago and is now performing indifference to my entire romantic future."
"That kiss was a mistake."
"Which part?"
He asks it with his chin tilted down and one corner of his mouth doing that thing. That infuriating, precise, fully intentional thing where it isn't quite a smile but carries all the confidence of one.
Like he already knows the answer and is simply giving me the courtesy of watching me decide whether to say it.
The part where I meant it, you absolute moron.
I don't say that aloud, of course.
He moves toward me and stops close enough that I have to tilt my chin to hold his eyes, and the words drain out of the air between us like heat leaving a room. He's warm — I can feel it without touching him, and I am acutely aware of how much of my own body is cold.
"I won't marry Eleanora Duval," he says, "if you give me at least one reason not to."
I look at him, and that's the problem. Because as I look at him… I want to give him that reason.
That's the word for it, the honest one I've been routing around for weeks: want.
My body, which has not been consulted on a single decision I have made in the last several weeks and is frankly owed an apology, takes this admission as permission.
My grip on the suitcase handle goes slack. The rigid set of my shoulders drops a fraction. The distance between us suddenly feels less like a rule and more like a choice, which is a much more dangerous thing to have it feel like.
My chin tilts up involuntarily. My eyes find the line of his jaw, the open collar of his shirt, the warmth I can still feel radiating off him from two feet away.
I am furious at every single part of myself involved in this.
But here is what I know: Gary looked at me like this once.
Steady and certain and stripped of performance. In the early years when I still believed that a man who seemed sure of you was a man you could be sure of.
I built an entire life on that look. I signed documents because of that look. I stayed through things that should have ended me because somewhere underneath all of it. I kept waiting for that look to mean what I thought it meant the first time.
I search Beckett's face for the rehearsed intensity men keep in reserve for when a woman needs to believe him just long enough for the terms to change in his favor.
I can't find it.
And that's another problem.
"You're free to do whatever you want," I say finally.