Waverly's POV
The spreadsheet has been open for forty-seven minutes and I have entered exactly zero numbers.
The cursor blinks at me from cell A1 like a metronome keeping time over a song nobody's playing. Outside Sloan's apartment window, the city does what cities do on Friday nights — moves, breathes, wastes no time being alive.
I am on a couch under a blanket I didn't ask for and cannot bring myself to remove, watching the cursor blink, thinking about a dinner table across the city that is set for people whose last names I have no business knowing.
And yet I know it. I looked it up.
Eleanora Duval.
I found her Instagram in under four seconds and the worst part isn't that she's beautiful — I was prepared for beautiful.
The worst part is that she seems cool. Not performed-cool, not PR-managed-cool, but genuinely, effortlessly interesting in the way that some people just are and the rest of us spend decades pretending not to be envious of.
Her captions are funny. She volunteers somewhere that isn't photogenic. She has opinions about architecture that appear to be her own. She is, by every available metric, a person I would probably like at a dinner party, which makes the whole thing significantly worse.
I close the laptop but her face stays anyway, imprinted behind my eyes.
I know what I'm feeling. I have known since the moment I walked out of Beckett's hallway with my grey suitcase and told myself I was fine.
The word for it is ‘jealousy’, and the reason I won't say it aloud is that jealousy implies I wanted something I didn't secure. I told him myself — clearly, sincerely, with my spine straight and my voice level — that he was free to do whatever he wants.
I meant it. I also didn't mean it at all.
Sitting with both truths simultaneously is doing things to my stomach that have nothing to do with the pregnancy.
"How's the staring contest with your laptop going?" Sloan appears in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the frame with a glass of wine she's been nursing for an hour.
She's in her emerald silk pajama set and her natural curls are piled on her head in the particular way that means she's been home long enough to stop performing.
"I'm working."
"You've been 'working' since seven. It's nine-thirty. The spreadsheet hasn't moved."
"I'm thinking."
"About work?"
"About financial projections." I open the laptop again to demonstrate.
"Waverly." Her voice is gentle enough that I immediately know she's about to say something I won't enjoy. "Is this about him?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
She crosses to the couch and sits at the other end, tucking her feet beneath her. Her earrings catch the lamp light — gold hoops she bought herself last year. She gave me a matching pair some time ago and I left them at Gary's because I'm an idiot.
"Is it Beckett or is it the fact that Beckett is currently at dinner with someone else?"
"Neither."
She gives me the look she's been perfecting since we were kids. Patient, undeceived, and faintly maternal in a way she would find deeply offensive if I said it aloud.
"Okay," she says, pulling the blanket off my feet and stands, setting her wine glass on the coffee table. "Get dressed. We're going out."
"Absolutely not."
"Yes. I am not letting Eleanora Duval's Instagram ruin your Friday, and I'm going to put on the red dress that Ridley has absolutely not texted me about, and we're going out."
"I need to work."
"You need to be somewhere with noise and strangers and at least one person who doesn't know your name." She's already moving toward her bedroom, calling back over her shoulder. "Wear something that doesn't have an elastic waist. I'll be ready in twenty minutes."
***
The club is everything the estate is not — dense and dark and relentlessly loud, bass rolling through the floor and up through the soles of my shoes and into my teeth.
Colored light sweeps across dozens of strangers who are all, as far as I can tell, having more fun than I deserve to be having.
Sloan lasts eleven minutes before someone she recognizes materializes out of the crowd and reels her onto the dance floor with a grin she throws over her shoulder at me that translates clearly to ‘don't wait up.’
I watch her go and drift toward the bar because it's the only stationary object in the room and I need something to hold.
The bartender sets sparkling water in front of me and I wrap my hands around the cold glass, watching strangers cycle through colored light.
There's a particular comfort in crowds when you're trying not to think. All the noise and movement create the sensation of existing inside the present moment. Even when your brain is six miles away watching a woman set her hand on someone else's arm.
I stop that thought where it starts when the warmth arrives before the words do — breath at the back of my neck, close enough to register as presence rather than air.
I go still. Then a voice, low and unhurried, comes just above my right ear. "The last time I saw you at a bar, you were holding a champagne glass you weren't drinking."
I turn to Beckett leaning against the bar beside me. He is wearing a dark jacket that he's either loosened or never properly buttoned, collar open, his black hair pushed back from his forehead.
He looks like someone who left a very formal dinner before dessert. The realization moves through me before I can classify it
He left. He actually left.
I hold his gaze for a beat too long. The colored light sweeps across his jaw, his collarbone, the clean line of his shoulder, and I take exactly one full second to be furious with myself before I arrange my face into something that resembles composure.
"You're not at your estate," I say.
"Obviously." The corner of his mouth lifts as his eyes stay on mine, steady and giving nothing away.
It takes me a beat to place it — and then I do. My word, from his living room, the night of the storm. I threw it at him like a small weapon when he was being insufferable. I smile despite myself.
"The dinner ended early," he says.
He leans into the bar, unhurried, like the information is incidental and the effect on me is inevitable. There's a half-smile sitting at the corner of his mouth that has absolutely clocked my reaction and is very pleased about it.
Don't, I tell myself. Do not give him the satisfaction of asking.
Ten full seconds pass in which the noise of the club shrinks to a low, distant hum, and I am acutely, inconveniently aware that I am about to ask. "How early?"
Shit..
"So." His smile completes itself and he shifts against the bar, angling toward me but ignoring my question. "What are we celebrating?"
The question throws me for exactly half a second. "Sorry?"
"You're out on a Friday." His eyes move over me once — brief but deliberate, not subtle. "Either something good happened or you're performing like it did. Either way, it's a celebration."
He left a dinner with two families and a woman his father selected and he is standing here asking me what I'm celebrating?
What a…
"My freedom," I say, lifting my sparkling water and touching the rim of it briefly in his direction. "Newly unfrozen accounts, a lawyer who thinks we can win, and the first Friday in years where nobody expects me home at a specific time."
"That's a lot to carry in one glass."
"I'm an efficient celebrator."
He watches me for a moment like he's looking for the line between what I'm saying and what I mean. "And Eleanora Duval has nothing to do with the fact that you're out celebrating your freedom tonight.?"
I keep my expression perfectly, serenely neutral. It costs me something. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Obviously," he says again, and has the audacity to look entertained.