The Runaway Heiress

Chapter 24: Run Toward

Elena packed her bag before dawn, the way she'd packed it the night she fled New York — but everything about it was different this time.

The bag was the same small canvas duffel. The clothes going into it were not silk and panic but jeans, sweaters, the marina jacket with the torn pocket that smelled faintly of boat fuel. She folded each thing slowly, deliberately, because she had learned something in Port Delmar: running looked the same whether you were fleeing or fighting, and the difference was entirely in the direction of your eyes. Last time she hadn't looked back. This time she was looking straight ahead, all the way to Manhattan.

Her throat was still bare. She touched the hollow where the necklace used to sit, the way her tongue found the gap of a lost tooth. Rhys had it. Rhys Callahan had her mother's sea glass in his fist, somewhere across this sleeping town, and she had told herself all night that she didn't care — that it was just a thing, that things could be replaced.

It wasn't a thing. It was the one promise she'd ever kept to herself. And she was going to take it back herself, with her own hands, the way he'd said. Just not yet. First she had a wedding to kill.

Gus's diner smelled like coffee and salt when she pushed through the door at six. Gus looked up from the grill, took one look at her face and the duffel on her shoulder, and turned the bacon down.

"You're leaving," he said. It wasn't a question. Sixty-four years of feeding people had given Gus Ferreira a kind of sonar for goodbyes.

"I'm going back to New York," Elena said. "To end it. The arrangement, the merger, all of it — myself, on my terms. No more hiding."

Gus wiped his hands on his apron and came around the counter. He hugged her hard enough to crack something, and Elena — who had not cried at the lighthouse, who had not cried when she threw the necklace — cried into his flannel shoulder for exactly ten seconds.

"Sunday chowder," Gus said gruffly, when she pulled back. "You come back for Sunday chowder or I send the health inspector after you."

"It's a promise," she said, and meant it the way she'd never meant a promise to her father. "First Sunday I'm free. I'll be in that booth." She pointed. The corner booth, where Rhys had once slid the chowder toward her and told her she ate like she was angry at the spoon.

Gus followed her pointing, and his face did something complicated. "That boy," he said. "He paid his tab yesterday. Tipped forty percent. Looked like somebody died."

"Something did," Elena said. "But I'm not running from him either. That's the thing, Gus. I'm done running from everything."

"Damn right," Gus said, and packed her a thermos of coffee "for the road, don't argue," and she didn't argue.

Tessa picked up on the second ring. "Tell me you're not calling to say you're engaged to the mechanic," she said, and then, hearing Elena's breathing: "Oh. Oh no. What happened?"

Elena told her. The photo. The lighthouse. The confession — came to drag her back, stayed because he fell for her. The necklace, thrown, unbroken, kept.

"Jesus," Tessa breathed. "The sea glass didn't break."

"I know."

"That's the most on-the-nose metaphor I've ever heard and I'm still crying."

"Don't cry, I need you functional. I'm coming back to New York. I'm going to walk into my father's office and end the Voss-Calahan arrangement myself. I need you to be there — not in the room, just... in the city. Somewhere I can call after."

"I'm already putting on real pants," Tessa said. "Elena. Are you sure? About going back?"

Elena looked out the diner window at the harbor, at the gray morning water she'd learned to love. "I spent two months running away from a wedding," she said. "And the whole time, the motto was right there. Run toward, not away. I just had the direction wrong. I'm not running from the fight anymore, Tess. I'm running toward it."

"Then run," Tessa said softly. "And when you get here, we're getting the good dumplings."

The bus to the city left at seven-forty. Elena took the window seat, the duffel at her feet, the thermos warm between her hands. Port Delmar slid past — the marina, the boardwalk, the lighthouse standing white against the brightening sky — and she let herself look at all of it, really look, instead of looking away the way she had when she arrived. She wasn't fleeing this place. She was carrying it with her.

Her phone buzzed once, halfway through Connecticut. Unknown number. She almost didn't answer.

"Elena." Her father's voice, clipped. "Marcus Voss's office called you three times—"

"This is Elena," she said. "I'm coming home, Father. And when I get there, we're going to talk about the Callahan arrangement. My terms this time."

Silence. Then: "You've made your point, running off. Come home and we'll discuss—"

"No," she said, and the word felt like the necklace cord snapping — clean, final, hers. "We're done discussing. I'm telling you how it ends."

She hung up before he could answer, and her hands were shaking, and she laughed — actually laughed — because shaking hands had packed this same bag in terror two months ago, and now they were shaking with something that felt almost like power.

She thought about Rhys, then — couldn't help it. Somewhere behind her, in the town shrinking in the rearview of her memory, he was holding her mother's sea glass in his closed fist. He had refused to give it back, and at the lighthouse she had hated him for it, but on the bus, with Manhattan rising ahead of her, she understood what he'd really done. He hadn't stolen it. He'd refused to accept it as a weapon. He was holding it for the woman she was becoming — the one who would take it back with her own hands, on her own terms, when she was done running.

She would take it back. That was a promise, too — quieter than the chowder promise, and far more dangerous. But first: the Voss building. First: her father. First: the end of the arrangement, spoken aloud by her, in her own voice, in a room where no one had ever let her finish a sentence.

Manhattan rose out of the afternoon haze, all glass and nerve. The bus crossed the bridge, and Elena pressed her forehead to the window and watched the city get closer and closer, the city she'd fled in a panic, the city she was entering now like a woman walking into a room she owned.

The Voss building stood at the center of it all, dark glass, sixty floors of her father's kingdom. She stood on the sidewalk across the street with her duffel on her shoulder and her throat bare and looked up at it — all the way up, to where the light caught the top floors.

"Run toward," she whispered.

And she crossed the street.