Chapter Seventeen
The Airport
I booked the flight two days later. Paris Fashion Week — I had a legitimate reason, a real one, four scheduled meetings and a runway appearance I'd been confirmed for three months ago.
I packed everything this time. The studio would handle the rest remotely.
Lucas didn't stop me. He said nothing about the suitcase in the hall, nothing about the car I'd booked, nothing when I came to say — whatever I was going to say.
He was in the study. He looked up when I knocked.
"I'm going to Paris." Unnecessary. He knew. "For Fashion Week."
"I know." He looked at me steadily. "Have a good trip."
I stood in the doorway for a moment. Looked at him. Looked at all of him — the composed surface, the careful hands, the way he'd rearranged himself into something untouchable again.
Then I left.
* * *
I was at the gate when I heard it.
Not a sound — a shift in the ambient noise of the terminal. Heads turning. Phones going up. The particular stir that happens when someone unexpected walks into a space.
I turned.
Lucas Lancaster was walking through the terminal.
No luggage. Still in his suit. The same suit he'd been wearing when I'd knocked on his study door an hour ago. He was moving with the singular focus of a man who had decided to do something that terrified him.
He stopped in front of me.
Around us, the gate area was very still.
"I don't do feelings," he said. His voice was low, controlled — but barely. "I made that rule before I understood that some rules exist to protect you from things you haven't faced yet." He looked at me. "My father loved with everything he had and destroyed my mother. I watched it happen. I decided I would never be that — I would never lose myself to something I couldn't control."
"Lucas—"
"I'm not finished."
I closed my mouth.
"I have been methodical my entire life," he said. "I have controlled everything I could control. I signed a contract that said I wouldn't feel anything — and for eight months I have been failing that contract in every possible way." His jaw tightened. "When you packed your bag, I couldn't breathe. I sat in my study for two days and told myself it was rational. That you had every right. That I'd known from the beginning this was temporary."
The gate agent called final boarding.
Neither of us moved.
"I don't know how to love someone the right way," he said. "I have never tried. I don't have a model for it that doesn't end in damage." Something cracked in the composure — just the edge of it. "But I know that I have been watching you for eight months and finding excuses to stay in whatever room you're in. I know that I memorized how you take your tea without deciding to. I know that the night you had a fever, I canceled a thirty million dollar meeting because the thought of being somewhere you weren't seemed"—he paused—"impossible."
The gate agent called final boarding again.
I was crying. I didn't remember deciding to.
"Say something," he said quietly.
I looked at him. At the man who'd structured his entire life around not needing anyone, standing in the middle of a public terminal, dismantling that structure word by word.
I turned. Picked up my carry-on.
Walked down the jetway.
He didn't call after me.
He understood — I thought he understood — that some things need to be felt in private before they can be answered out loud.
But at the end of the jetway, before I turned the corner, I looked back through the window.
He was still standing there.
Watching.
Waiting, for the first time in his life, for something he couldn't control.
