CHAPTER 2 FIVE YEARS AGO
1632 Words
FIVE YEARS AGO
Seven years ago, Julian Blackwood had not yet become the man people lowered their voices around.
He was twenty-six, angry with his father, and sitting on the fire escape outside Claire Bennett’s apartment while she fought with a window that refused to close.
“It’s stuck,” she said, bracing one hand against the frame.
“Your landlord is a criminal.”
“My landlord is cheap. There’s a difference.”
She finally forced the window shut and turned toward him.
He was watching her instead of the skyline.
“You’re allowed to talk about it, you know.”
“About what?”
“Whatever your father said. You’ve had that face on since you got here.”
Julian looked away.
“He wants me in Geneva by spring. Permanently.”
Claire sat beside him on the narrow ledge.
“Do you want to go?”
The question stopped him.
No one had asked him that.
His father had asked what he would do. The board had asked what made sense. Everyone around him had spoken about obligation, reputation, inheritance.
Claire had asked what he wanted.
“No,” he said.
She nodded as though that answer mattered.
“Then don’t.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
“It could be.”
“You make everything sound simple.”
“No.” She slipped her hand into his. “I just think you get to want things too, Julian. Not only inherit them.”
He looked down at their joined hands.
He had loved her before he knew how to say it.
Maybe that was why the memory hurt so much now.
Because four years later, the same woman had vanished from his life without explanation.
And Julian had spent the years afterward believing that her silence had been a choice.
---
Present.
Claire watched him cross the room.
One step.
Then another.
The crowd seemed to open for Julian without anyone consciously deciding to move.
He had always possessed that kind of gravity.
But the man walking toward her now was not the man from the fire escape.
That Julian had been ambitious, impatient, sometimes reckless. He had laughed more easily. He had argued with his father and then come to Claire when he needed somewhere the Blackwood name could not follow him.
This Julian was harder.
Controlled.
Expensive.
A man who looked as though he had learned to turn every emotion into something useful.
Claire hated that she noticed.
She hated even more that some part of her still knew him.
He stopped in front of her.
For one second neither of them spoke.
“Claire.”
Her name sounded different in his voice than it had in her memory.
Older.
Lower.
Still dangerous.
“Julian.”
His eyes moved over her face.
She watched recognition settle into something more complicated.
“You’re here.”
“So are you.”
A faint, humorless curve touched his mouth.
“Apparently.”
Claire tightened her fingers around the stem of her glass.
“I came for the foundation.”
“I assumed you did.”
“Then there’s nothing to discuss.”
His eyes sharpened.
“You always did that.”
“Did what?”
“Decide the conversation was over before it started.”
Claire felt the old irritation rise.
“Five years ago, I learned not to wait for conversations that never happened.”
Something changed in his face.
There it was.
The wound.
Still there.
He hadn't forgotten either.
“I didn't expect to see you tonight,” he said.
“Neither did I.”
“You look well.”
It was such an ordinary thing to say that she almost laughed.
“You don't have to be polite.”
“I’m not being polite.”
Claire looked at him.
He held her gaze.
For a dangerous moment, she remembered exactly what it had felt like when he looked at her like that before.
Not as the world saw her.
As though she were the only person in the room.
She broke eye contact first.
His expression tightened.
“You still do that.”
“What?”
“Look away.”
“I’m looking at you now.”
“You weren't five seconds ago.”
Claire set her glass down.
“This is not a conversation I want to have here.”
“Why?”
“Because we're surrounded by people who would enjoy watching us become the evening's entertainment.”
His gaze moved briefly across the room.
“Let them wonder.”
“I don't care what they wonder.”
“I do.”
That surprised her.
“Why?”
His eyes returned to hers.
“Because I spent five years wondering.”
The words landed harder than she expected.
Claire swallowed.
She had spent five years doing exactly the same thing.
She just hadn't admitted it.
Julian stepped closer, lowering his voice.
“Why did you leave?”
There it was.
The question she had known would come.
The question she had rehearsed answering in a hundred different ways and never once found a version that didn't reopen something.
“I needed to go.”
“That isn't an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’m giving you tonight.”
“You disappeared.”
“I left.”
“You stopped answering.”
Claire's jaw tightened.
“You stopped calling.”
His expression changed.
“I called.”
“No.”
“I did.”
The certainty in his voice unsettled her.
She searched his face.
For five years, she had carried one version of that ending.
Julian had chosen his family.
He had chosen the Blackwoods.
He had chosen the life that came with his name.
She had believed that.
She had built everything afterward around believing it.
“I don't want to do this,” she said.
“You don't want to remember.”
“I remember enough.”
“Then tell me.”
Claire looked past him.
The room was too bright.
Too crowded.
Too full of the past.
“I came here because my gallery needs funding. That's it.”
“You work at a gallery?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to painting?”
Her breath caught.
Of all the things he could have remembered, he remembered that.
“I stopped.”
“Why?”
“Because life changed.”
He studied her.
“You changed.”
Claire gave a small smile.
“So did you.”
“I know.”
There was no arrogance in the answer.
That made it worse.
He looked at her as if trying to reconcile the woman in front of him with the woman he had lost.
“You seem different.”
“I am.”
“Happy?”
The question was too intimate.
Claire hesitated.
Then she said, “I have a good life.”
It was not quite an answer.
Julian seemed to understand that.
“A good life,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“Without me.”
She held his gaze.
“Yes.”
The word hurt both of them.
She saw it.
For the first time that evening, Julian looked less like the billionaire everyone in the room admired and more like the man she had once known.
The man who could still be hurt.
He looked down briefly, then back at her.
“Did you ever love me?”
Claire's heart gave one painful beat.
She should have said no.
It would have been easier.
Instead, she said, “That isn't the question you really want answered.”
His eyes narrowed.
“What question do I want answered?”
“Why I left.”
“Yes.”
“You've decided the answer has to be about you.”
“Wasn't it?”
Claire almost laughed.
“You always thought you could solve everything if you knew enough.”
“And you always thought you could survive everything by refusing to tell anyone what you needed.”
Silence.
He had struck too close.
Claire's fingers tightened around the edge of the table beside her.
“You don't know me anymore.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I don't.”
For some reason, that hurt more than anger would have.
A server passed between them.
Claire stepped back.
“I should go.”
“Claire.”
She stopped.
She didn't turn immediately.
“I’m not asking you to come back,” Julian said.
She finally looked at him.
“Good.”
“I’m asking for the truth.”
Her expression closed.
“The truth is that five years have passed.”
“That isn't the truth.”
“It’s enough of one.”
She picked up her coat.
Julian watched her.
He could have stopped her.
Claire knew that.
He could have used his influence, his authority, the force of his presence.
Instead, he stepped aside.
That small restraint unsettled her more than if he had tried to control the situation.
She moved toward the exit.
“Claire.”
She stopped again.
“When did you stop looking at me like that?”
She turned.
“Like what?”
“Like you knew me.”
For one suspended moment, neither of them moved.
Then Claire said, very softly,
“I knew you once.”
She walked away.
Julian remained where he was.
The room resumed around him-music, conversation, laughter, the soft clink of expensive glasses.
He barely heard any of it.
Because Claire Bennett had just walked out of his life for the second time.
And this time, he knew enough to understand one thing.
She had not looked at him like a woman who had stopped caring.
She had looked at him like a woman who was afraid of what caring still meant.
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