Chapter 2

Blair's POV

I turned my back on the first-class cabin and walked straight down the airstair.

Behind me, the whole cabin sank into a stunned silence.

Then Dotty clicked her tongue in irritation, and Arianna's carefully rehearsed innocence floated after me: "It's all my fault. I shouldn't have brought work onto the plane..."

Suddenly, heavy, hurried footsteps slammed across the cabin carpet.

Easton came stumbling around the aisle after me, his silk tie knocked askew, his chest heaving as though he had just run a marathon. He seized my wrist in a grip that could have crushed bone, his fingers digging into my pulse.

"Let go of me, Easton." I did not even look at him.

His grip tightened until my skin burned. Behind his eyes a storm was breaking—arrogant fury tangled with a blind, animal terror.

【Don't go. If you walk down those stairs, I will suffocate. I will tear this plane apart with my bare hands. Tell me you're only going to the terminal. Tell me that if I apologize, you'll come back. Blair, I'm begging you, you are my oxygen. I cannot go back to living in the dark.】

Those words churned through my mind, dense and suffocating, soaked in pain. My heart quivered; some faint ghost of us at twenty surfaced—the boy who used to wake screaming from nightmares in a cold basement, who buried his tear-streaked face in my neck while I sang to him until morning.

I looked at his bloodshot eyes. For half a second, that familiar pity almost dragged me under again.

Then Easton opened his mouth.

"You think you can walk off this plane wearing things I paid for?" He spat the words, his voice gone hoarse and ugly with mockery. "You came to me with one cheap suitcase full of knockoffs, Blair. Look at your wrist. Take that bracelet off."

Every last degree of warmth left in my blood froze solid.

I looked down at my left wrist. A tennis bracelet set with thirty-seven perfectly cut diamonds, its platinum chain fine and delicate; I had barely taken it off in six years, not even to shower.

Six years ago, on the morning we signed the register at City Hall, Easton had fastened it around my wrist himself. His hands had shaken so badly that it took him three tries to close the clasp. That morning, over and over, he had prayed inside his head: Let it lie against her skin the way I lie against her. She chose me. God, let me keep her forever.

And now he stood in the doorway of a private jet, using that same bracelet—the one that carried all of it—to strip away the last shred of my dignity.

"Easton, that's enough," Dotty's voice came from the main cabin. She was standing in the aisle, twisting a napkin between her hands. "If she wants to go, let her go. I'd like to see where she thinks she's going without us."

Easton did not even glance at his mother. His eyes were locked on my face—challenging me, certain I would not dare defy him, and sick with longing to see me beg.

"Take it off," he repeated, his voice hard as stone. "You're not taking a single gift of mine with you."

【Refuse me, Blair. Slap me. Tell me it's yours because I gave it to you with my whole heart. Remind me of our wedding day. Please—whatever you do, don't give it back.】

I said nothing. I raised my left hand, and my thumb found the clasp with the ease of long habit—a motion I had made for six years, and never once like this.

The bracelet slid from my wrist, the platinum still warm from my skin. I laid it gently in his open palm.

"Here," I said calmly.

Easton stared down at the chain in his hand. His face went utterly rigid; the arrogant mask shattered, twisting into something grotesque—grief and horror in the same expression. The other hand, hanging at his side, twitched and twitched, and would not close.

"Take it, Easton," I said again, my voice without a ripple. "Isn't that what you asked for?"

His fingers snapped shut around the bracelet; his knuckles went white.

"You think I care about this junk?" He forced out a hoarse shout, his face contorted into an ugly sneer as he fought to hide the tears spilling from the corners of his eyes. He whipped around, grabbed Arianna's wrist as she came out after him, and snapped the bracelet onto it. "You never valued it anyway. Arianna, you wear it—the things she doesn't deserve, you wear them for her."

Arianna lowered her head and stroked the diamonds with elaborately feigned astonishment. They threw off a hard, cold glare under the cabin lights.

"There," Easton said, turning back to me with a dead man's smile, "now you don't have a single thing left from our wedding. Go on! Get off the plane! I'd like to see how far you get in a New Jersey November without me!"

【Look what I've done. My God, what have I done? I gave her bracelet away. I gave our wedding to another woman with my own hands. Blair, please hit me. Scream at me. Don't look at me with those dead eyes. Tomorrow I'll buy you a thousand of them, I'll buy out the whole jewelry store. Please, just come back...】

The wind poured through the open cabin door and snapped the hem of his coat like a flag.

I looked at the only warm memory I had kept from six years of shared life, worn on that woman's wrist like a trophy.

A strange, crystalline calm came over me. The last taut string finally snapped. Once the diamonds are taken, no amount of money can buy back the warmth of them against your skin; once your love is fed to someone else, no number of replacements will ever warm a heart gone cold.

"Goodbye, Easton," I said quietly.

I went down the airstair. The bitter late-November wind of Teterboro came howling across the tarmac, carrying a thin, icy sleet.

Without a moment's hesitation I set foot on the asphalt. I pulled my collar tight, crossed the wide taxiway, passed through the service gate, and walked straight toward the terminal.

Behind me, no engine ever caught. At the gate I looked back once: the cabin door of the G650 still stood open, and two ground crew were hauling the suitcases out of the hold one by one, stacking them at the foot of the airstair.

Dotty stood in the open doorway with her mink coat over her arm, a phone pressed to her ear, her face set like a slab of iron. The Aspen holiday had come apart before the engines ever turned over.

I did not break stride. I pulled my coat tighter.

He had no idea that three weeks earlier, my regional director had offered me a posting at the Seattle headquarters as an executive. He had no idea that the transfer papers were already signed, and that I had already signed a lease on an apartment three thousand miles away.