Downgrade My Ride? I'll Upgrade My Groom! novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: The Dock

He didn't come in.

He stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame.

A month ago he'd never waited for anything.

"The girl at the desk let me up," he said. "I still own forty-one percent. Apparently that gets you to the ninth floor."

"It gets you a seat at the board," I said. "Not a seat in here."

He looked around the empty office.

At the pale squares on the carpet where his desk had been.

At my mother's portrait against the wall.

"You moved fast."

"I had a ride."

He almost smiled.

He looked thinner than he had on Monday. His suit was the same gray, but there was no tan left on his face.

"The police came to my building yesterday," he said. "Two detectives. In the lobby, in front of the doorman. They wanted to talk about a van."

"I heard."

"Your father gave them my name."

"He gave them everybody's name. Including his own."

Niles rubbed his jaw where he'd cut himself shaving.

"I'm selling," he said. "The forty-one. My lawyers say I need the money for lawyers." He laughed, short and ugly. "The investors offered me half what it's worth. They said you'd tell them not to go higher."

"I did."

"Liv." He came one step over the threshold. "Listen to me. Just once. I made a mistake. I made a bad deal with a bad man, and I was angry that you wouldn't sign, and I let it get out of hand. But we were good. Four years. You know we were good."

"I know you were good at parties."

"I could fix this. If you came back, the board would..."

"Niles."

He stopped.

"There's nothing to come back to," I said. "I've got the hotels. I've got my name back. I've got a husband who took your fingers off my wrist one at a time and didn't break a single one. What exactly would I be coming back for?"

He didn't have an answer.

He'd never needed one before.

His eyes went to the window, where you could see the street below the Grand.

"They're selling the fleet," he said. "The doorman told me. The Bentleys, the town cars. The Rolls."

"Every car," I said. "Our guests can take an SUV. I hear it builds character."

He flinched.

There was a box by the door, the last of his things.

His framed magazine cover was on top, face up. KENWARD: THE MAN WHO BUILT A BRAND.

I picked it up and handed it to him.

"You forgot this," I said.

He took it.

He stood there holding his own face.

"Goodbye, Niles."

He looked at me one more time.

She didn't.

He walked to the elevator alone, and I didn't watch the numbers go down.

That evening Clay drove me up to Lake Forest in the green Land Rover with the windows open.

He didn't say where we were going.

He didn't have to.

He parked on Gran's side of the hedge.

The Atwood house was dark.

A SOLD sign stood at the end of the drive.

The moving vans had come and gone, and the windows were bare, and my father was living in an apartment downtown now with nothing on the walls.

We walked across the lawn in the dusk.

Down the slope.

Down the old gray boards of the dock, all the way to the end.

The lake was flat and dark blue.

Far out over the water, lightning flickered inside a cloud with no sound at all.

"Closing's on Friday," Clay said. "I asked the buyers for one more night. They said yes. I may have overpaid for the yes."

"How much?"

"I'm not telling you. You're a board chair now. You'd judge me."

I laughed.

He sat down on the end of the dock with his feet over the edge, the way he'd sat that night.

I sat down beside him.

He was in his old field jacket, and he took it off and put it around my shoulders without asking.

"This is where it was," he said.

"I know."

"You were asleep right here." He touched the boards between us. "And I sat with my arm going numb and thought, it's her. And then I didn't say a word for six years."

"You said one at my engagement party."

"One stupid true thing." He reached into the pocket of his jeans. "I'm going to say another one now. Properly."

He turned to face me on the dock.

He had a small box in his hand.

He didn't kneel. There wasn't room, and he'd have fallen in, and we both knew it.

"Liv Atwood," he said. "Eastman. Whichever you like. You married me in fifty-two minutes because you needed someone who'd come. I came. I'd come again. But I'd like to be asked for the next fifty years by somebody who's had more than an hour to think about it."

His voice wasn't steady.

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