Seven days. I've been counting them like you count calories when you're already hungry — obsessively, pointlessly, fully aware that the number changes nothing.
The hospital room has a window that faces a parking lot. Not a garden, not a skyline — a parking lot, six floors of cement and exhaust fumes that I stare at every morning.
Beckett didn't come the next day. Or the one after.
No texts. No calls through Nadia, through Ridley, through any channel I can trace back to him. Seven days of a borrowed phone on a hospital nightstand and not a single message. I stopped checking after day four. I started again on day six.
I'm aware of what that says about me and I'm choosing not to examine it.
Sloan comes every evening. She brings food in paper bags — always from somewhere different, always better than the hospital's idea of dinner — clean clothes, and the particular brand of company that doesn't require me to be fine.
She sits in the chair by the window and talks about her clients, about the man she's seeing who is objectively terrible for her, about a restaurant she found that does a pasta so good she almost cried in public.
She doesn't ask about Beckett. For five days, she doesn't ask.
Tonight, she sits on the edge of the bed.
I notice it the moment she does it. The chair is right there. She always takes the chair. The bed means she's not staying long or she's saying something she expects me to argue with. Possibly both.
"Go ahead," I say. "I can see you building up to it."
She pulls at a loose thread on the blanket's edge. "You know I love you."
"That's never a good opening, Sloan."
"Beckett got what he wanted." She says it with the careful evenness of someone who has practiced the sentence. "And then he disappeared. That's the pattern, that's who he is."
I don't answer to that.
"His reputation didn't build itself, Wave. A different woman at every event. Charm that he turns on and off like a faucet. Nobody lasts longer than a morning." She stops pulling at the thread. "You were a spectacular night, I believe that. But I think it was still just a night."
"You're wrong." The words come out before I decide to say them.
"I'm not asking you to agree with me. I'm asking you to sit with the possibility."
The kitchen. The candle between us. His thumb moving slow across my lower back like he had all night and no intention of rushing any of it.
"He stepped in front of a knife for me," I say.
"Yes."
"He told me things about his mother that I don't think he tells anyone."
"I know."
"He left his own dinner, Sloan. He left the Duval dinner."
She looks at me. Her expression doesn't waver, which is somehow worse than if she argued. "I know all of that. And I'm still asking you to sit with the possibility."
Can someone fabricate that sincerity?
I pick up my phone. I don't know why I do it — muscle memory, maybe, the same reflex that makes me check the baby monitor every time the beeping changes even a fraction.
I've been avoiding the tabloids. I know what's out there. I saw the photos when this whole thing detonated.
I type Beckett's name into a search bar anyway.
The results come up fast. Society columns, speculation, a photo from three days ago — Eleanora Duval at a charity event, dark-haired and flawlessly dressed in something ivory, her smile the kind that only exists in women who've never had to manage the aftermath of someone else's anger.
A caption beneath it: Duval heiress seen at Meridian gala as merger speculation continues — no signs of Morrow-Duval engagement cancellation.
I read it twice. Then a third time.
No signs of cancellation.
The engagement is still standing.
He told me the marriage was arranged. He told me he left the dinner. He told me he wouldn't go through with it if I gave him a reason not to.
I gave him several reasons. In Sloan's kitchen, against the counter, in the bedroom after, in every honest and terrifying thing I let him see of me over the weeks he kept showing up.
And the engagement is still standing.
The self-disgust arrives with the particular velocity of something that has been there all along, waiting to be confirmed. I know this feeling. I've lived inside it. It's the feeling of handing someone the precise instrument to hurt you most and then acting surprised when they use it.
Gary promised to protect the company I built. Beckett confessed his way into my bed.
Different men, different scripts. Same ending — me holding something that used to be trust and trying to figure out how much of the damage is theirs and how much I did to myself.
Is this who I am now? The woman who falls for the same trick twice?
"I need to see him." My voice comes out flat and final, like a door closing.
Sloan blinks. "Waverly…"
"I need to look him in the face when I ask him if it was real." I push the monitor wire to the side and reach for the discharge forms the doctor left this morning that I haven't signed yet. "I need to see the answer before he decides what to give me."
"You're not supposed to be discharged until tomorrow."
"Then I'll discharge myself tonight." I swing my legs over the side of the bed. "Take me to the estate."
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks at my face long enough to understand that this particular argument is one she's not going to win.
"Fine." She stands, picks up her bag. "But I'm coming in with you."
"You're parking the car and waiting."
"I'm parking the car and coming in."
"Sloan."
"Waverly." She hands me my shoes. "Don't push it."