[Lottie’s POV]
Three days of obsessive internet stalking, and I've become a professional Victoria Ashworth investigator. My browser history looks like evidence for a restraining order hearing.
Society pages. Charity galas. A divorce settlement worth approximately the GDP of a small European nation. Photographed beside politicians, celebrities, and people whose bone structure suggests generations of selective breeding.
Wealthy. Bored. Dangerous.
The trifecta of terrible.
I scroll through images of her at fundraisers, tennis clubs, gallery openings. Always positioned strategically. Always smiling that particular smile that suggests she knows something you desperately want kept secret.
She looks like the kind of woman who collects leverage the way other people collect vintage wine. Carefully. Patiently. With full appreciation for how it improves with age.
Wednesday evening finds me standing outside Oliver's building with no plan and approximately seven hundred reasons to turn around immediately.
I don't turn around.
The intercom crackles. His voice emerges, surprised and wary.
"Lottie?"
"Can I come up?"
A pause. Then the door buzzes open.
He opens his flat looking like someone who wasn't expecting company. Rumpled shirt. Bare feet. Hair suggesting fingers have been raked through it repeatedly. The disheveled appearance of a man drinking whiskey alone and thinking too hard about things he can't control.
"That's... rare." he says. Not accusingly. Just observing.
"I need to say something." I step inside without waiting for invitation. "And you need to listen without interrupting. Think you can manage that for five minutes?"
His eyebrows rise. But he closes the door and gestures toward the living room with exaggerated courtesy. The consummate host, even when ambushed.
I don't sit. Sitting suggests comfort I don't feel. Instead, I pace his expensive floors while he watches from the doorway with growing concern.
"My father kept secrets from my mother for years." The words emerge more easily than expected. Perhaps rehearsing them during three sleepless nights helped. "Small lies at first. Late nights at work that weren't actually work. Money disappearing into accounts she didn't know existed."
Oliver's expression shifts. Careful attention replacing surprised curiosity.
"The lies grew. Compounded. Built into chasms neither of them could cross anymore. By the time everything collapsed, there was nothing left to salvage. Just wreckage and a six-year-old girl watching her mother shatter into pieces she couldn't reassemble."
My voice catches slightly. I push through it with characteristic stubbornness.
"Mum rebuilt herself. Eventually. But I remember what it cost her. The years of crying into wine glasses. The failed relationships with men she couldn't trust because trust had become a foreign language. The slow, painful reconstruction of someone demolished by deception."
I stop pacing. Face him directly.
"I will not repeat that pattern. I refuse to build something on foundations that could crumble because someone looked too closely at what's underneath."
Oliver opens his mouth. I raise one hand like a traffic warden stopping oncoming disaster.
"Not finished."
He closes his mouth. Points for following instructions. First time for everything, apparently.
"Here's the harder thing to say." I take a breath that feels insufficient for the weight it carries. "I should hate you. By every logical metric, I should absolutely hate you completely."
Something flickers across his features. I continue before it can become a response I'm not ready for.
"You were cruel to me as a child. Genuinely, memorably cruel. Cupboards and tears and years of therapy I probably still need. You're smug and infuriating as an adult. You represent every complication I should be running from at maximum speed while screaming."
The silence between us thickens like fog. My pulse pounds against my ribs with increasing urgency.
"But I cannot stop thinking about you."
The admission costs something vital. I pay it anyway because apparently I've developed a masochistic streak.
"At work, when I should be reconciling accounts. At home, when I should be doing literally anything else productive. In the moments before sleep, when my brain should be shutting down instead of replaying every conversation we've ever had like some obsessive highlight reel."
Oliver's expression has become unreadable. That practiced neutrality he deploys when feeling too much to risk showing any of it.
"Whatever this is between us—and I genuinely don't know what to call it—I am not capable of walking away from it." My voice drops to something barely above a whisper. "I have tried. Repeatedly. Spectacularly. I cannot."
The words hang in his expensive air. True and terrible and completely unavoidable.
"But I also cannot build something real with someone who is permanently hiding."
His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly. Recognition, maybe. Or defense mechanisms activating.
"Victoria is a symptom." I continue with relentless precision. "The disease is your belief that you're only acceptable when performing a version of yourself that doesn't actually exist. The charming son. The reformed professional. The appropriate stepbrother who definitely never did anything scandalous."
Each word lands like a controlled detonation in his carefully constructed fortress.
"You've spent so long pretending to be what everyone expects that I'm not sure you remember who you actually are underneath all the performance."
Oliver's hands have curled into fists at his sides. Not anger, I think. Something closer to recognition of a truth he's been avoiding longer than he's known me.
"I'm not asking you to tell Richard tomorrow." I soften slightly. "I understand that conversation requires preparation. Courage. The right moment, if such a thing exists."
My eyes find his. Hold steady despite every instinct screaming retreat.
"But I need to know you're capable of choosing authenticity eventually. That there's a future—any future—where we don't have to hide. Where this thing between us can exist in daylight instead of shadows and borrowed closets."
The silence stretches unbearably. His green eyes search my face for something I cannot identify. Answers, maybe. Or permission to finally stop running.
"Otherwise, I need to protect myself." The final truth emerges quiet and devastating. "I need to end this now, before I'm in too deep to survive losing you."
The confession sits between us like a grenade with the pin pulled. Everything exposed. Everything vulnerable. Everything I've been refusing to acknowledge finally spoken aloud in his minimalist living room.
I wait for his response.
He opens his mouth. Closes it. The words he's searching for apparently exist in a language neither of us speaks fluently yet.
I don't wait for them to arrive.
"Think about it." I cross toward the door before my resolve crumbles entirely. "Really think. Not the charming deflection you're probably composing right now. The actual truth about what you want and whether you're capable of fighting for it."
The door handle is cold beneath my palm. Grounding. Real.
"Goodnight, Oliver."
I leave without looking back.
The hallway swallows me. The elevator carries me downward in mechanical indifference. The street receives me into cold evening air that cuts through my inadequate coat like judgment.
I walk home because public transport requires composure I don't possess. The streets blur past—shops closing, pubs opening, London continuing its eternal rhythm completely indifferent to my personal catastrophe.
Did I just save us?
Or end us?
The question echoes with every step. No answers arrive. Just cold air and city sounds and the terrible uncertainty of having finally said everything honest.
I exposed myself completely. Admitted wanting him despite every reason not to. Gave him the power to destroy me by simply choosing silence.
My flat greets me with empty rooms and the lingering awareness that everything has changed irrevocably.
I made my position clear. Drew my line in his expensive carpet.
Now I wait.
The night stretches endlessly ahead. Sleep refuses to cooperate despite my exhaustion. I stare at my ceiling and wonder if honesty was the bravest thing I've ever done.
Or the most catastrophic mistake of my entire disastrous life.