The gate is open.
That's the first thing I notice when Sloan's car turns into the drive — the wrought iron hanging wide, unhurried, like an invitation nobody sent me.
When I lived here, it was always closed. Always. Beckett's estate didn't announce itself to the road; it waited behind old trees and a locked gate and the particular silence of a man who didn't need the world to find him.
Something is different. Something has been decided without me.
I'm still processing that when the front door opens, and Eleanora Duval steps out.
She is exactly what the magazines promised — tall, dark-haired, wrapped in a camel coat that fits like it was cut for her specifically and no one else on earth.
Her posture is effortless in the way that only comes from decades of being watched and knowing it. She descends the front steps without hurrying, and her eyes find me through the windshield before I've opened the door.
She doesn't look surprised.
I get out of the car because staying inside would mean letting her win a contest she's already pretending isn't happening.
"You must be Waverly," she says, warmth layered over assessment, her accent a faint European underline beneath flawless American inflection. Her gaze takes a brief tour of the property before settling back on my face. "It's a beautiful house, isn't it? I keep telling Beckett the west terrace needs wisteria or a pergola. He says he likes it open."
She says Beckett like you say the name of a place you already own the deed to.
"It's a lovely property," I agree, and my voice sounds perfectly reasonable.
"Are you here to pick something up?" She asks it with genuine curiosity, which is somehow worse than hostility.
"I need to speak with Beckett." I hold her gaze. "Is he home?"
"He's in the office with Ridley." She reaches into her coat pocket and retrieves a pair of gloves — caramel leather, unhurried — and begins pulling one on. "I was just heading out." A pause, a half-smile, arranged to look candid. "If you want to make sure of anything, I'd ask Beckett directly. He's always been very clear about where he stands."
She means it to land. It does.
A black town car idles at the foot of the drive — it must have been waiting behind the tree line, patient, because of course Eleanora Duval doesn't wait on a curb. She gets into the back seat without looking at me again. The door closes. The car moves.
I turn back to Sloan.
She's still in the driver's seat with both hands on the wheel and an expression that suggests she is actively composing a list of felonies she'd be willing to commit, ranked by satisfaction.
"Don't," I say.
"I haven't said a word."
"You were about to."
She exhales through her nose. "Go find out what's happening. I'll be here."
***
The house smells exactly the same.
Cedar and clean linen and the faint ghost of coffee from somewhere deeper in the building. I stand in the hallway for three seconds and let my lungs remember it — the quiet of a place built for one person who liked the quiet — and then I move.
The hallway to the office is familiar in the way that makes distance irrelevant. I know which floorboard creaks. I know where the light falls wrong in the afternoon. I've walked this hall a hundred times in two weeks that feel like longer.
I hear them before I reach the door.
The door is cracked open — a strip of warm lamplight cuts across the hallway floor. Ridley's voice is the sharpest I've ever heard it, the dry precision he usually keeps calibrated to polite contempt now stripped back to something rawer.
I stop. Four feet from the door. Far enough that the light doesn't reach me.
Is it okay to walk in?
I stay where I am.
"You need to end this," Ridley says. "Before it collapses on all of us."
"I'm handling it." Beckett's voice is flat in the way it goes when he's managing someone he'd rather not be managing.
"Handling it." Ridley repeats the phrase back like it has developed a structural fault. "Handling it would have meant not leaking the photos in the first place."
The hallway goes very still around me.
Leaking the photos.
My hand finds the wall before I ask it to. The plaster is smooth and cool under my palm, and I press into it and let it hold me because my legs are making a case for the floor and I am not giving them the satisfaction.
The tabloid photos. Me and Beckett outside the club. The headline that shredded Nadia's carefully built custody position, the images that handed Gary's lawyers the affair narrative they'd been circling for weeks. The story that sent me to a hospital room, and then sent Beckett — apparently — nowhere.
He leaked them.
The thought is complete and orderly and absolutely devastating.
Inside the office, something shifts. A chair moving, or Beckett's weight, the small sound of a man who is losing an argument he chose to have.
"I couldn't let the engagement stand," Beckett says. "The Duval deal would have—"
"The Duval deal is the least of your problems right now," Ridley cuts back, and his voice is tight with the particular exhaustion of a man who has been right too many times to find any satisfaction in it. "Waverly is out of the hospital and she will put the pieces together. You know she will."
Silence.
"So end it," Ridley says again. "Call off the engagement publicly, take the hit with your father, and get ahead of this before she hears it from someone who isn't you."
Beckett is quiet for long enough that I count my own heartbeats. Four. Five.
"I can't end the engagement," he says. "Not yet."
"Why."
It isn't a question in Ridley's mouth. It's a blade, and he holds it flat.
"Because Collier told me—" Beckett stops. Starts again, and his voice has gone careful in the way it goes when he's choosing each word before he lets it out. "If I break off the Duval arrangement, my father will tell Waverly about the photos. He'll make sure she knows I'm the one who leaked them."
The hallway doesn't move. The light doesn't change. The cedar-and-linen smell stays exactly where it was.
And I stand there, four feet from the door, with Beckett's voice settling through me like water finding the lowest point in a room — slow, inevitable, and already too far down to reach.
He leaked the photos. And he's been letting me believe someone else did it.
He's been letting me believe a lot of things.
To be continued…
P.S. Author’s Note
Wow, what a ride! The next chapters are coming soon, and before I write them, I want to hear from you! Drop your reactions below, tell me what you think happens next, and what you need to see. Your comments genuinely shape where this story goes, I read every single one! See you in the next chapters!