His Sons Girl

The Trip

Ethan proposed the anniversary trip over dinner, three weeks after Vivian’s warning, with the kind of earnest, hopeful excitement that made what I was about to do feel even worse than it already did.

“Eight months,” he said, sliding a folder across the table with the specific pride of a man who’d clearly planned this for weeks. “I know that’s not some huge milestone number, but it felt like it deserved something real. I booked us a week at the Sterling family place in the Hamptons. Just the two of us, no business, no family obligations. I want a whole week where it’s just us.”

I opened the folder, looked at the photos of a beautiful oceanfront property, and felt something cold and guilty settle low in my stomach, because the trip itself was generous and thoughtful and exactly the kind of gesture that should have made me feel nothing but grateful.

Instead, my first thought, unbidden and unwelcome, was whether Julian would be there too.

“This is amazing, Ethan,” I said, and meant it, even as guilt curdled underneath the words. “You didn’t have to do all this.”

“I wanted to.” He reached across the table for my hand, warm and certain in a way that made the last three weeks of careful, deliberate distance from his father feel even more like a betrayal I hadn’t fully committed and somehow already couldn’t undo. “Things have been good, Harper. Really good. I know the last few weeks you’ve seemed a little distracted, and I get it, work’s been intense, but I wanted us to have something that was just ours. No distractions. No family. Just you and me figuring out what comes next.”

The three weeks since Vivian’s warning had been, by any reasonable measure, a success. I hadn’t seen Julian alone once — had, in fact, gone out of my way to avoid any situation that might put us in a room together, skipping a company function I would normally have attended, keeping visits to the penthouse brief and carefully scheduled around his known meetings. I had told myself, repeatedly, that the ache of that avoidance was simply guilt working itself out of my system, nothing more complicated than that.

I had not, in three weeks, stopped thinking about him for more than a few hours at a stretch.

“I’d love to go,” I told Ethan, and watched his whole face light up in a way that made the guilt in my chest twist even harder, because I meant that too — I did want this, wanted the uncomplicated, easy love this man offered me, wanted desperately for a week alone with him to be exactly the reset I needed.

We left for the Hamptons that Friday, and for the first two days, it almost worked. Ethan was warm and attentive and funny in the specific, easy way that had made me fall for him in the first place, and I let myself sink into the simplicity of it — long walks on the beach, lazy mornings, a version of us that felt untouched by anything complicated happening back in the city.

Then, on the third evening, Julian arrived.

“Dad’s coming out for the weekend,” Ethan told me that morning, entirely unaware of the way my stomach dropped at the news. “Business call he has to take from somewhere quiet, apparently, and this place has better internet than the city townhouse for some reason. He’ll stay in the guest wing, we’ll barely see him. I promise this is still our trip.”

I spent the rest of that day in a low, constant hum of dread, and by the time Julian’s car pulled up the long gravel drive that evening, I had worked myself into a careful, controlled composure that lasted exactly as long as it took him to step out of the car and find me on the porch.

He stopped walking the moment he saw me. For one long, unguarded second, before either of us could fully arrange our expressions into something appropriate for the situation, I watched three weeks of careful distance collapse in his eyes as completely as it had in mine.

“Harper.” My name, careful, deliberate, exactly the way he’d said it every single time since that first dinner. “I didn’t realize you’d be here.”

“Ethan planned it. Anniversary trip.” My voice came out steadier than I expected, though nothing about my chest felt steady at all. “I didn’t know you were coming either.”

“I wouldn’t have, if I’d known.” He said it quietly, honestly, and something in the admission landed harder than any charm offensive could have. “Vivian’s going to be furious I’m here at all.”

“She warned you. About—”

“About exactly this. Yes.” He glanced once toward the house, checking, I understood, for Ethan, before his eyes came back to me with an intensity that made three weeks of careful avoidance feel suddenly, dangerously undone. “I told her it wasn’t necessary. I told her I had this handled, that whatever happened in that kitchen was an aberration, a moment of poor judgment I wouldn’t repeat.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m standing in front of you for the first time in three weeks,” he said, low, “and every single thing I told her turns out to have been a lie I needed to believe more than she did.”

Behind us, the porch door opened, and Ethan’s voice called out, warm and oblivious, announcing dinner was almost ready. Julian and I stepped apart at the same instant, the same practiced, guilty distance from the harvest festival overlook of a different family’s story, though this time there was no laughter to interrupt us, no convenient escape from the fact that we’d both just admitted, out loud, exactly how little either of us had actually resolved.

I walked into that house for dinner with Ethan’s hand finding mine at the table, warm and trusting and utterly unaware, and understood, watching Julian across that same table for the second time in this story, that whatever had been building since that first family dinner had just run out of room to keep pretending it was manageable.

Something was going to break before this week was over. I didn’t yet know which of us it would break first.