My Twin Took My Husband. I Kept the Billions. novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Twenty-One Months

The night before the topping-out, twenty-one months after the wedding, Giles took me up to the roof.

The last beam had gone in that afternoon.

Forty floors of steel and concrete stood over Harbor Street, and the construction lift was still running on the east face.

I was twenty-six, and I had not set foot on a roof since the one.

"We don't have to," Giles said in the lift, with his hand loose around mine.

"I want to."

"You're shaking."

"I know."

"Say the word and I take you down."

"I know that too," I said. "That's why I can do it."

The doors opened on the top slab.

There was no wall yet around the edge, only a cable rail at waist height and the whole dark harbor beyond it.

The wind came up cold off the water.

I stood still with my feet on the concrete and my eyes shut.

Giles did not say anything.

He stood next to me, not behind me, with his shoulder against mine.

"Open your eyes," he said at last.

I opened them.

The city lay spread out below in strings of light, and the bridge went across the black water.

It was exactly the view I had seen from the other side of the rail.

It looked beautiful, and it did not look like death.

"Forty floors," I said.

"Yes."

"I built it."

"You did."

"And I'm still standing on it."

"Hallie," he said.

His voice was rough, and when I looked at him his eyes were wet in the glare of the work lights.

I put both hands in his jacket and pulled him down to me.

The kiss was long and slow.

He tasted of coffee and cold air, and when he lifted me off my feet and set me down on the folded tarpaulin behind the elevator housing, out of the wind, I wrapped my legs around him and did not let go.

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