Too Late To Learn How To Love You

Chapter Three

Ethan's POV

The house was silent the next morning in a way it had never once been silent in five years of marriage. No breakfast. No voice telling him he'd be late. Ethan stood in the doorway of a closet half emptied of her clothes and understood, for the first time with real weight behind it, that he had actually lost her. A single dress still hung there, one she'd forgotten or left on purpose; he couldn't tell which. He didn't touch it.

He arrived at his office quite late and sat at his desk doing nothing, a lot running through his mind.

Cole Imports had been bleeding for almost a year. Lost shipments, canceled contracts, suppliers who no longer trusted his signature enough to extend him credit. He'd gone to every bank that had ever done business with him and been turned away by all of them. Investors who'd once fought for a seat at his table stopped returning calls entirely. He remembered, with a bitterness that surprised him, exactly how easily those same investors had once found time for him. Success made a man popular. The reverse, apparently, worked just as quickly.

There had only ever been one door left to knock on, and Ethan had spent years refusing to knock on it.

He sat across from Julian Hale, Vanessa's father, some months ago anyway. The older man's office smelled like cigars neither of them were smoking. He didn't stand when Ethan walked in, just gestured at the chair across from his desk.

"You said no to me twice before," the older man said, not unkindly. "What's different now?"

"I'm out of banks," Ethan said. "That's what's different."

"And my daughter?"

"I'll take care of her."

"That's not what I asked." The old man studied him for a long moment. "Will you actually try, Ethan? Or will this simply be a signature to you, the same way it was every time before?"

Ethan didn't answer that honestly, because the honest answer would have cost him the deal.

"Good," the old man said, as though Ethan's silence had been an answer enough either way. "The paperwork will be ready Thursday."

He married Vanessa quietly, four witnesses total, nobody crying, nobody expected to. Vanessa wore a plain grey dress, not white. Neither of them commented on the choice. Her father signed as a witness and left before the paperwork was even fully processed, already back on his phone with his own board. He rented her a separate apartment across town and told himself, every time he visited it, that this was simply the price of keeping three hundred people employed.

Now she was pregnant.

Ethan had known, somewhere in the back of his mind for weeks, that this exact conversation was coming the moment she told him. He had simply hoped, uselessly, that it would arrive on a day he felt more prepared for it.

And her father, flush with the news and the leverage that came with it, had one new condition. Divorce his current wife. Publicly. Immediately. Acknowledge, in front of everyone who mattered to the deal, that he was now married to his daughter instead.

The papers had been sitting in Ethan's drawer for weeks, waiting for a night he could produce them without having to explain any of it out loud.

James found him at his desk, looking like a man who hadn't slept. He set two coffees down before he said anything, sliding one across the desk like a man bracing his friend for bad news.

"You need to see this," James said, turning his laptop around.

Ethan read it twice before he trusted his own eyes. The company's own page. His name. Vanessa's photograph.

"I didn't post this," Ethan said. "Who has access to that account?"

"That's what I came in here to ask you," James said.

Vanessa walked in before either of them could say anything else, entirely unhurried, as though she'd been waiting just outside the door for her cue.

"I posted it," she said.

"Why?" Ethan said.

"Since you were taking so long delivering your end of the deal," Vanessa said, "I helped you along."

"You had no right," Ethan said. "This was mine to handle."

"You've had weeks," Vanessa said. "I'm seven months from delivering my father's grandchild into a family he can actually acknowledge in public. I wasn't going to wait for you to find your nerve."

He stood up so fast his chair rolled back into the wall behind him. "Take it down. Now."

"Take it down," Vanessa said, entirely unbothered, "and my father's investment disappears with it."

James, still standing by Ethan’s desk, cleared his throat. "I'll just—" he started, already backing toward the exit. Nobody stopped him.

He had no leverage left to argue with. He knew it, and from the look on her face, so did she.

Vanessa smoothed her dress and turned to leave, pausing once at the door.

"For what it's worth," she said, not turning around, "I don't feel bad about any of this. You knew what you were buying when you signed that contract."

She left before he could answer that, which was probably for the best, since he didn't have one.

His phone rang before he'd fully finished swallowing that particular defeat. The investigator.

"Mr. Cole. She boarded a flight this morning. I don't have a destination yet, but she has left Ossara. Do you want me to keep looking?"

"Yes," Ethan said. "Keep looking." He said it before he'd decided what he actually intended to do with whatever the man found. He only knew he could not stand the specific, hollow feeling of not knowing where she'd gone, on top of everything else this particular week had already cost him.